IBM’s Second Life

By Aditya Mhatre at 4 February, 2008, 1:15 pm

I accept that I am fascinated by technology, an early adopter and all those things that are used as euphemism for geeks. Yet there are a few things that I fail to understand. Second life is one of those things.

I just fail to understand why would you want to have a character that resembles you in a virtual world and interact with other people that way? But that may be because I am in India and don�t have a fast enough Internet connection and also cannot afford to throw my previous bandwidth away.

But apparently IBM is taking second life pretty seriously. IBM has announced that it is expanding its business center for India in second life. They also announced that the business centre is also adding staff in India, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea on the virtual site. This virtual business center will offer sales support across the world and will allow customers to visit IBM virtually and se products in 3D. The announcement further goes on to say that �it will be a place for IBM sales people, clients, and partners to meet, learn, collaborate, and conduct business together, virtually, without the time and cost of travel.�

According to IBM.com vice-president of India/South Asia Sanjiv R Pande, �Clients are increasingly looking for convenient ways of interacting with their suppliers. I beg to differ with Mr. Sanjiv. Clients already hate the IVR system and the ineeficiency of the customer service executive. Does IBM expect their clients to create a second Life avatar for themselves? Have they taken into account the learning curve of such a system? If you ask me this looks like a project that a US college kid on an internship in India might have proposed and executed.

Just get back to the basic, use the good old way of good human based client servicing model please.

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