An interview on Hypergrid Business reveals the pricing of the new IBM virtual meeting solution based on OpenSim. It's worth a read, and I'm fairly convinced of the usefulness of the product. I haven't yet seen anything describing content integration though - how are the presentations, videos, task lists integrated with Notes (or heaven forbid another 2D knowledge and organisation tool)? We think this is crucial, and we're working hard with Roobaab to bring about good integration with the 2D web.
One minor point - IBM say they chose OpenSim in order to allow writing on a prim - we've done that in SecondLife to create a notecard board, one prim per notecard. Video coming soon :-)
|
||||||||
Who, What, Why?
Enterprise uses of Immersive Environments and Virtual World technology for collaboration. As CTO of vComm Solutions and co-founder of Flying Island I'm particularly interested in the ways that collaborative 3D immersive environments might help bring dispersed teams together
Neil Canham Recent Entries
Month Archive
Login
|
IBM Lotus SameTime 3D - 4 Regions of OpenSim for $50k
Comments
Re: IBM Lotus SameTime 3D - 4 Regions of OpenSim for $50k
by
Jany
on Sat 18 Jul 2009 00:31 BST | Permanent Link
I fail to see how a server with 4 simulators can be worth 50000 USD. They are running a stock Opensim which is free with some scripted prim applications that can be made by script kiddies. There isn't anything special about this yet they try to charge 50000 USD for this. They didn't even bother to change the default textures of the land. One should really expect to see such a large company coming up with something more advanced after having several developers coding for years now on the Opensim project.
Also worth to note is that Opensim still has tons of bugs in it, yet IBM tries to sell this for 50000 USD to their clients at this stage. This would make you think twice about buying anything from IBM doesn't it? They put 3 kid coders (yes not programmers with years of experience but young staff that still needs to learn a lot) to experiment and test with the other coders of the Opensim project (many volunteer non profit programmers) for a period of 2 years. Now that Opensim is kinda getting stable, KINDA = Link 3 prims, attach them to your head, teleport and get stuck at 128,128,128 in the next place with both simulator and viewer crash as result. But suddenly this has become a product worth charging 50000 USD towards customers for it? Opensim is still years away from being software that is stable enough to even think about selling services with it. It isn't robust in any way and can be exploited in an easy way as well. Heard about the IM messaging bridge between Opensim and Second Life? With the software being open source it is very easy for hackers to exploit it and retrieve conversations which take place in these so called "behind firewall solutions". This seems a bit lame, taking a free product, plastering your company logo on it and charging 50000 USD for it. If you wish to charge so much money for a product then you can start from scratch and develop your own thing. It makes you look like a hussler. It's a bit like BMW would take a Ferrari apart, have their engineers decode the electronics for the engine, take molds from the model, put together a brand new car with an extra spoiler and sell it for the same price as a brand new Ferrari. People would laugh and find them cheap and think twice before buying a BMW. Some of these IBM programmers even blog about their work on Opensim and have had massive critiques on Linden or on the easter egg some of the programmers of Opensim put in the code back in april. Today their employer wants to rake in 50000 USD for unstable code by slamming on their label on the software. Who deserves critiques now? Opensim is made by the efforts of 1000's of people, many companies work on it including IBM, Microsoft, Intel many smaller companies and individuals. 1000's of people have installed Opensim, provided feedback and helped to improve the code over the past years. Charging 50000 USD for an unfinished product equals asking for feedback. Re: Re: IBM Lotus SameTime 3D - 4 Regions of OpenSim for $50k
by
neilC
on Sat 18 Jul 2009 13:27 BST | Profile | Permanent Link
That is an interesting perspective. I would suggest that what IBM are doing is exactly how the BSD open source license is intended to work. Let the market decide if the additions that have been made to the raw open source code are worth the money being charged. There are several bits of added value in the IBM proposition. Firstly they have added a reasonable amount of back end integration and some nice scripted tools. I know the work involved in producing this kind of thing having worked on similar things - a rough estimate of the development costs for the work I've done would be £30k, and another £20k would be needed to get something approaching a packaged product - that takes a lot of effort. So if I could sell an installation at £50k I'd recoup my costs. But I don't have the IBM brand, so maybe I'd have to sell 5 installations. Just to recoup the dev costs. Then there's ongoing support, patching, new releases, time spent prospecting for new customers. All the stuff it takes to turn a piece of code and an idea into a business.
Look at it from another angle - if a enterprise with no relevant skills wants to explore virtual worlds as a route to cutting costs, how much do you think it would cost them to take raw OpenSim out of the box, starting from circle island and build a usable, stable meeting facility integrated with some existing intranet? If it's anywhere close to $50k then they are better off going to IBM. If you could do it for substantially less you should - you'd clean up. In terms of the calibre of people working on this inside IBM I think your characterisation is wrong. There are very talented and committed people working on this stuff, and releasing the results of their efforts back to the open source community (for example - see this recent post regarding Vivox Spatial voice integration in OpenSim, taken directly from the SameTIme 3D work) The bottom line is that if the price is wrong, the product won't sell. And if the price is right and that cheeses people off, then there's nothing stopping them doing the same. That's what we're doing :-) Re: Re: IBM Lotus SameTime 3D - 4 Regions of OpenSim for $50k
by
dirk husemann aka dr scofield
on Thu 03 Sep 2009 14:25 BST | Permanent Link
woo... thanks for the compliment, wouldn't have imagined being called "young staff" and "kid coders" after 20 years in computer science!
Re: Re: Re: IBM Lotus SameTime 3D - 4 Regions of OpenSim for $50k
by
neilC
on Thu 03 Sep 2009 14:40 BST | Profile | Permanent Link
well dirk, the previous poster has an 'interesting' perspective. I'm sure you could have done a better job of countering it than I did.
Trackbacks
TrackBack URL: |
Favourite Blogs
Recent Visitors
antojames - Tue 13 Mar 2012 10:04 GMT
Ascetshoisilt - Thu 08 Mar 2012 06:23 GMT
keithferrer - Wed 15 Feb 2012 04:12 GMT
june - Thu 09 Feb 2012 06:46 GMT
Rite - Tue 07 Feb 2012 06:36 GMT
|