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Dusan Writer promised us an extended interview regarding Immersive Workspaces with Justin Bovington, CEO of Rivers Run Red, and delivers. Subjects are Rivers Run Red, Immersive Workspaces, and their ???bet??? on Linden Lab.

The most interesting discussion is likely to follow from this blogpost on - until now, largely unspoken about - Immersive Workspaces, as commenter Keystone Bouchard remarks: “We can already do all and offer all that. We just don’t get the tools from Linden Lab to offer our clients what they really want, a private, behind the firewall solution.” That and the certainty that if you lock up your staff on it’s own private grid, behind virtual borders, they’ll miss out on, yeah, the sex, but also on all the good things Second Life has to offer. So go read, including the comments!

Also from those comments, two remarks by Dusan Writer that make more-than-sense:

Why is it that I feel like I always have to try to GUESS where the Lab is going? If, as they say, they are not in the content business, and the Grid needs content, and we???re content developers - why does it feel like you need to be a Kremlinologist to try to understand what???s next for Second Life and the Grid so that I can actually coordinate my investments with my strategic plan (something that looks out beyond the next month or the next viewer deploy) with the efforts of the Lab? Can???t they publish a fricking newsletter, an update, keep ???The Grid??? Web site up-to-date, hold solution-oriented information sessions, or ANSWER MY E-MAILS???????????

My second comment is related to the broader idea of the benefits of virtual worlds for business. And frankly I think RRR has it right if you think of it as an adoption path for businesses: the primary investment they???ve made is on the Web side. The ???build??? doesn???t have anything particularly special about it: it uses PowerPoint feeds, calendars, a bit of data visualization, etc???.all things that we???ve seen before, which isn???t to say there isn???t more hidden behind the firewall when they do custom deploys for clients. So their strategy seems to be build a step-by-step adoption curve: convince customers on ROI, use it for meetings, add a bit of data visualization, and maybe some day you can get people to rez prims and participate in richer experiences.

Yolto test.