The Microsoft entry into the field is on the Xbox360 and titled, cleverly, New Xbox Experience. Microsoft’s John Schappert said, “Our goal is to make the Xbox experience more visual, easier to use, more fun to use and more social…We focused a lot on friends and other experiences outside just playing games.” Which is Microsoft-speak for we don’t know what the fuck this is all about but we’re going to throw money at it until it’s obvious we can’t do it right and then we’ll buy Linden Labs and pretend we invented VWs.

What neither of them appear to understand is that the failure of all the VWs before SL IMO was the result of a lack of user created content. What makes SL unique and special is that anybody– free users or premium users– can come into SL and start building as soon as they find a sandbox. And they can keep it up forever that way if they want to. I’m sure that there is a segment of the populace that doesn’t want to do that…. they play WoW and it’s not a dynamic VW. My guess is that neither Sony nor MS really want to get into the VW arena anyway because that’s not how they normally roll.