Microsoft to Close Second Life™ Island

by Sigmund Leominster | September 27, 2009 | No comments

On October 31^st, 2009, Microsoft® will officially close its Second Life® presence on Microsoft Island. The island opened on May 10^th, 2007, with the purpose of providing a platform for the promotion and development of their Visual Studio software. In April 2008, the island was used to launch Visual Studio 2008, and has been a location for virtual meetings of the SL .NET User Group and the IT Pros in SL Group, as well as other Microsoft User groups.

But after almost two years, the island is closing down and its residents are being encouraged to join their colleagues on the Florida-based ReactionGrid, an OpenSim alternative. Like the Second Life experience, ReactionGrid offers a 3-D, virtual environment where residents can create their own worlds. The platform is also used by educational facilities and businesses, the latter being a group that the owners are keen to encourage. The cofounders are Kyle and Robin Gomboy, and Chris Hart, all of whom started with Second Life but became disillusioned by their experiences. In a Microsoft white paper from May 2009, Kyle said that while trying to host a business event, “Second Life decided to perform maintenance on the servers hosting our event, and we ran into significant problems at the last minute. The lack of control over servers and sims in Second Life frustrated us greatly, so we began to look for other options.”

The ReactionGrid developers opted to use an Intel-based hardware servers and a host of Microsoft applications: Microsoft SQL Server 2008; Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V; Windows Server 2008 Datacenter; and Windows Powershell. Their perspective was that virtual worlds are essentially huge databases, essential for handling digital assets such as avatars, personal inventories, and prim-based objects that are the foundation of a world. The combination of the Microsoft products with Intel servers was, for them, an ideal solution. So much so that ReactionGrid is used as a Case Study by Microsoft.

The move to ReactionGrid from Second Life is, in hindsight, not unusual. Being able to have more control over the ReactionGrid servers rather than be beholden to Linden Lab hardware certainly makes sense. It’s also not unexpected that at some point, Microsoft would want to have its own virtual world server platform rather than depend on a 3^rd-party solution.

So how much impact will this move have on Linden Lab and the Second Life virtual world? In truth, it may turn out to be very little. First, the income from Microsoft Island is likely to be small change compared to the total income generated by Second Life. And second, this was not a “partnership” or “collaboration” between Microsoft and LL but appears to have been a much more informal situation with the island being something like an online hangout for Microsoft tekkies.