I'll have an SL Lite please

If you click on help and about inworld you find a whole array of people who are to blame credited for making this the best version ever. Including Prokofy Neva and Ann O'Toole. I don't mind Prok so much, I'll agree and disagree with him at times, Ann O'Toole scares the living daylights out of me, but they're both successful and good at their main jobs here so it's good to see them both credited.

Now, moving on to second base, the great acceleration machine of the viewer has come to light again with people a little bit unhappy at the rate of change. One thing about change that should be abundantly clear is that people don't like it.

However, I don't find it helpful when people say you can buy a new graphics card for this price or a new PC for that price. "Stop living in the dark ages" is the cry, but people do not change their PC's every 18 months and people won't do so until prices drop a lot lower and even then, who wants to keep shifting data around and setting up again?

The lifespan of a PC is open to debate, generally around three years and I'll accept that things are starting to get a bit strained, I won't be buying the latest games and all bells and whistles applications. However I don't buy top of the range equipment anyway because I feel it's overpriced. If I did buy top of the range hardware, I'd expect to get more than three years out of it.

Of course during those three years I might make a tweak here and there, upgrade the graphics card, upgrade the RAM. However Linden Lab are in danger of going too fast on this platform and that's not good for all.

Recently I purchased a new PC. I'm more than capable of building my own PC, but these days the gap between building your own and buying off the shelf has reduced dramatically. I noticed that a lot of off the shelf PC's come with graphics cards that won't make your Second Life experience as enjoyable as it could be, and that's quite an issue because someone with a brand spanking new PC will pop into Second Life and think "Sod that for a game of soldiers".

I've just been inworld doing a little bit of very basic scripting. I do not need fancy graphics to do this. I'd be more than happy to script using a lightweight viewer and communicate via a lightweight viewer most of the time.

When I socialise I don't mind a bit of eye candy, it's horses for courses. However there comes a time when you have to ask what is the target audience? Second Life has attracted the older crowd, those of us over 30 are not considered hip and money magnets. The under 25 crowd is where that's at, but do under 25's want to arrive in Second Life and play? Will they be wowed by shadows? I doubt it, they're far more likely to want to play GTA and that experience isn't happening in Second Life. One day maybe, but that's in a galaxy far far away.

From the point of view of those who simply want to socialise, have a bit of fun, music and love and romance, when it comes to upgrading, will they face the music and dance?

Back in the midst of time, when I was a lad, getting over the shock of how my parents dressed me in the seventies with flares and flowery shirts, I discovered the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Now this wasn't the best computer around, however it was bloody popular and that's where Second Life and Linden Lab need to take note. On the back of that popularity came software houses, a thriving trade at school of swapping tapes of pirated software that our teachers shook their heads at and exposure.

If Second Life leaves too many people behind by racing ahead of the benchmark of acceptable use, people will drift to inferior worlds. The content creators who, many of whom are wonderfully visionary, will be left riding on the back of a white elephant.

To this end, many people don't need or require an all singing all dancing Second Life, but they do require usability. A lightweight client would meet the needs of the disenfranchised. If you want top notch performance, you buy top notch hardware, but the low end of Second Life, usabilitly is poor. That will disenfranchise people and then they're lost, quite possibly forever and they will find another home.

Ah but if progress was never made, then we'd still have graphics like we had on the Spectrum right? Well the Spectrum wasn't out of date in eighteen months, you didn't buy a Spectrum and find you couldn't run programs anymore, the lifecycle is crucial to the overall experience of a product.

Progress is all fine and dandy, but there needs to be a recognition that this product wasn't built on eye candy, that's not what attracts people to Second Life in the main, whether it ever will be depends upon the direction the future takes, and as we have already seen, the rise in laptops and wireless internet connections means that the future hasn't gone in the direction that Linden Lab anticipated. Laptops don't generally do funky graphics well, but a hell of a lot of people want to use laptops.

There needs to be pause for thought, because with RL economic factors starting to bite, people aren't going to react kindly to being told that their eighteen month old PC can be replaced with one that only costs USD$500 and can be beefed up with a better graphics card, for a start some companies will see replacing the graphics card as voiding the warranty.

Different versions of the client could help greatly here, the Nicholaz client has been popular for a reason, and still remains popular now, Linden Lab should take note of that too.