Brad Oberwager appeared on the special SL18B episode of Lab Gab along with the Leadership Team on Monday 21st June 2021. This was the first time that Brad Oberwager (Oberwolf Linden) talked directly the the Second Life community. I thought it was a great show generally speaking and it was nice to hear about Brad’s plans for the future of Second Life. It was good to hear that Brad has gone in-world with his Oberwolf Linden account at least a few times and he does have alt accounts. Brad alt accounts were not revealed during this episode.
Brad is the Executive Chairman at Linden Lab and is one of the three investors (J. Randy Waterfield and Raj Date) who acquired Linden Lab during mid 2020. Brad is taking basically a “four pillars” approach in terms of decision making from what is going to bring in new users?, what is going to make existing uses happier?, what will lead to more engagement? and what is going to offer Linden employees to be happier?. This is a interesting road to go down and hopefully will lead to Second Life becoming even more popular in the months and years ahead. Brad mentioned during the show that the long term success of Second Life will be through feedback like in the new user experience and growing the Second Life user base.
Patch Linden, Grumpity Linden and Brett Linden deal with the product decisions at the lab which are supported by the senior management team including Brad and his team. Apparently Linden Research is now owned by LLC company formed by Brad Oberwager and Randy Waterfield. He mentioned that Tilia was not in competition with Second Life and still has a future.
Brad did mention that he doesn’t expect to see change for change sake for Second Life in the short term however change will come over time. I just hope these future changes will be good ones for the Second Life community.
I hope that Brad and the leadership team will continue to invest in the Second Life platform and carry on the success that Ebbe Altberg managed to achieve over recent years. If the Second Life user base grows larger and the overall user experience improves within the next year or so that would be nice. I do think Second Life needs to be more in the press more along with more improvements being made. The Second Life economy is still going strong and hopefully that will continue.
This is a good start I think and it’s nice to hear Brad passion/energy for Second Life. He wants everyone moving towards a sense of joy and not fear.
- Stay Safe – Stay Virtual
Daniel Voyager 