Philip is Back at the Helm

In a surprisingly swift chain of events has Mark Kingdon(M Linden) stepped down and Philip Rosedale has returned as interim CEO. CFO Bob Komin will take the extra responsibility of COO.

The COO traditionally is responsible for managing the day-to-day activities of the corporation and for operations management. Philip mentions that Bob and He will be working side by side with each other, at least suggestion that Philip will be deeply involved in the day to day stuff for some time.

What I find interesting is that Philip will step in as interim CEO. Suggesting that he will leave and be replaced once Linden Lab and Second Life reaches a positive upward swing again and/or a new CEO has been found.

Mark leaving the Lab happened surprisingly quick, he was announced to speak yesterday on the Second Life 7th birthday, but Philip stepped in at the last minute because of a 'emergency'. Philip mostly repeated his speech from last Monday. On that same Monday Mark was reportedly seen enjoying SL7B, apparently unaware that he was going to 'step down' on Wednesday.

There where jokes on the blogs and twitter yesterday morning that Philip would come back and take over from Mark, after Philip gave the second speech instead of M. When rumours appeared last night that the joke was becoming reality, I and some others where quite surprised and unwilling yet to believe it could be true. Hat tip to Hamlet at NWN for reporting on it last night first.

The community has taking this news with overwhelmingly joy and optimism in the first hours, which hopefully will have some lasting quality. In Mark's tenure at the Lab as CEO he got a lot criticism from the community that never seemed to turn to the positive. Eventually the upward movement that SL was in when Philip left halted and at best reached a plateau. The SL blogoshpere and Main stream media that once was mostly optimistic about Second Life turned to the critical and pessimistic of Mark's decisions and Second Life's viability as a platform.

The recently downward trend of Second Life resulted that the once stable currency exchange Lindex had started to slowly rise, and had last week a day where a short panic had broken out. The new positivism has already resulted in a increase of buy orders at the Lindex at this time, which helps stabilize the market. The following days/weeks will tell if this is lasting or just opportunistic behaviour.

Philip is a visionary, but more importantly he is a visionary who has the ability to make you believe in his vision, and that is what Second Life needs most. People have started to doubt the prospect of Second Life and lost the vision, if Philip can do one thing is bring that back. He won't be the only visionary working on that, Mitch Kapor, famous technology entrepreneur and investor in Linden Lab has announced that he will be working closely with Philip as he returns as CEO.

Philip's two speeches from last week will now come under scrutiny, trying to find clues of what is to come. One of the Philip's repeating statements in those speeches has been: "We were doing to much, we actually have to do less then two thirds with two thirds of the people". The two thirds is referring to the massive 30% lays off from earlier this month.

Links:
Press Release
Sl Blog Post
NWN Post
Linden Lab Laid off 30 percent of Staff