vBusiness Expo: Gartner's Steve Prentice - It's About Demographics, Not Numbers

At the vBusiness Expo, Steve Prentice, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, said that the company's much-touted prediction that 80 percent of active Internet users will be involved in virtual worlds by 2011 was never meant to be a quantitative prediction. It was put out to wake up Gartner's clients and potential clients to an important change that was taking place. Now, says Prentice, "The numbers don't actually really matter unless you're putting together a business plan to put in front of a venture capital. It's not so important how many users are out there, but who they are." 

That was the theme of Prentice's speech: Virtual worlds are not about technology or allowing people to create content or anything else; they're about people.

It's the failure to understand the demographics that are behind the failures of many forays into the space, said Prentice. Virtual worlds are clearly dominated by youth, but the older users are usually dominating them in activity and engagement. 

"'Build a great environment, and they will come' has been the attitude of technologists, who think everything runs on physics," said Gartner. Instead brands and developers should think, "Build a great community and they will come."

Looking at the worlds that have been successful, it's not the worlds that offer incredibly rich and flexible content creation tools that are incredibly successful, it's those that are looking for very specific targets and groups.

Those rich tools are important for enterprise environments, explained Prentice, but they'll remain a niche segment.

"In the real world, most of us are going to go out and buy it from an expert," said Prentice. "We need to provide the ability to customize our world, somethign which the room-based environments do very well."

You need two other things. First, it has to be fun. That's part of the reason kids worlds have taken off. They know how to fun, but adults? Not so much. Second, they need to be simple. [Ed: As Linden Lab itself has admitted, some of the more immersive virtual worlds are just too hard to use for most people. That's part of the reason The Electric Sheep gave for creating Webflock. Trying to get users into Second Life and then teach them how to use it, even with the custom client, just proved to be too difficult.]

Gartner's focus, though, is business applications, not kids playing on their own. Most of those haven't taken off, according to Gartner.

Prentice has spent the recent months asking those companies why their efforts didn't take off. Overall, the problem was a combining of overambitious efforts with a lack of planning and resources that were eventually overtaken by more pressing intiatives.

"The few that were successful were generally focused on internal deployment," said Prentice. That's something many developers, like Rivers Run Red, and platforms, like Forterra's OLIVE, which served as the host for the Expo, have taken note of.

Others have tried more public efforts, like Viacom's massive portfolio to support its television properties. With those, a built-in fanbase came in right along. It's successes like those that led Prentice to call virtual worlds the equivalent of the fanzine of the 80s and 90s.

"I suspect we'll move in the coming years to a point where the virtual environment is the product, and the TV show is just a means of advertising," said Prentice.

For other organizations looking for more business-like use, the biggest application is training.

"It's the controlled nature of deployment and the ability to measure the outcome that enables a realistic project," said Prentice. "Yeah it's boring and not exciting, but these are essential requirements in todays organizational environment."

The options are greater, though. With more and more remote workers, virtual worlds an build onto our collaboration suite.

"You have to be careful, though," said Prentice," because virtual worlds are not always the number."

Gartner has seen an increasing number of organizations deploy private virtual worlds or environments for meetings, but they should work in a system of tools like WebEx, VoIP, cameras, and more.

Again, the solution might not always be exciting, but keeping it simple is the rule. And we might not see enterprises going back into Second Life soon. They'll be cautious, explained Prentice, for the next 18 months to 2 years. As they experiment more and the user base grows, many will likely come back. Some already have.

"The thing I think we'll see in the next year is the growth of managed virtual spaces around brands," said Prentice.

He specifically highlighted Lively, which is less rich than Second Life, but offers potentially more control.  Across virtual worlds, though, it's not unusual to see engagement time in the 15-minute range. And for brand-based businesses, said Prentices, that's incredibly important.

On Lively: "My belief, at the moment, is that it's not targeted as a virtual world. It's a social network play. In the long-term, as I've said, I think it's purpose will be as a branded space environment. Google is very good at finding ways to commercialize a community. That's ultimately what this is going to be about."

Comments

[IYan Writer]

How silly of us to think that a percentage was a quantitative prediction!

[Andrew Mallon]

Our foundation came to this conclusion almost two years ago and created First Opinions Panel of 10,000 Second Life residents. They are studied by 33 demographic attributes in their "real" and Second Life. Clients include F500, market research firms and Linden Lab, owner of SL.