Yankee Group is At It again
/me sighs
It looks like the Yankee Group is trying to make Second Life out to be a bunch of hype, again. I tried to leave left a comment on this story at Linux Insider, but maybe my mad emotions were a little too much, and kept them from publishing it. Maybe they just haven’t got around to moderating them, yet… we’ll see. Updated: It took them a while, but it’s there.
Within the story, and also used as the caption at the top of the page, it says:
“The ‘barrier to entry’ to use Second Life — meaning the amount of time, energy and patience required to set up your avatar and start leading a virtual life — is still quite high,” Christopher Collins, senior analyst with Yankee Group, told LinuxInsider. “So, not surprisingly, its user base skews toward younger and more technologically savvy consumers.”
I agree that there’s a barrier to entry for SL, but most people (as long as their viewer doesn’t crash) can manage to learn all of the basics needed, rather quickly. Christopher Collins must subscribe to the “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” way of thinking, however, because it’s clear that without any kind of fact-checking, he thinks that older people don’t have time, energy, patience, and can’t be “technologically savvy” enough to figure out how to use Second Life.
If he had actually checked his facts, he would know that the user base actually skews toward “older” people. The latest key metrics available from Linden Lab that shows the age bands was the metrics from November. Here’s the Google Doc, the Excel spreadsheet, and the OpenDocument that contains the numbers. I’m not sure how old Christopher is, but maybe 35-44 is “younger” compared to him.
If you look at the percentages for avatar count and total hours, it’s easy to see where the age range is “skewing”.
Once again, Yankee Group looks like they’re trying to make Second Life look like it sucks. Once again, the problem is that they don’t need to make shit up. They can actually do just a little bit of learning and fact-checking and tell the truth about it. When they start making things up about it that in the end, get proven wrong, they are only making themselves look bad, and making SL look better, somehow.
If Yankee Group wants to really be anti-Second Life, there’s plenty of honest things that they can say. If you want a list, Christopher, contact me!
Malignant Narcissist @ January 17, 2008