I loved this quote from a Forbes article talking about how dubious the value proposition is for outside businesses in Second Life.  It’s from the creative director of Wells Fargo’s digital marketing agency.

“Going into Second Life now is the equivalent of running a field marketing program in Iraq.”

Wells Fargo, of course, dipped its toe into SL, much to the delight of clueless tech reporters everywhere in 2005, and beat a hasty exit 4 months later after presumably discovering that there’s no value to be had. Shame the American government can’t act with that kind of cut-your-losses sensibility….

Of course, you’d probably have a much better chance of actually getting your message to potential customers in Iraq than SL. Remember how breathless the press was when American Apparel set up its retail location in SL last summer? Yep, failed miserably to attract customers. Their web director says they saw “insignificant” sales from it, and they’re all-but-shuttering the property according to Forbes.

How about Starwood Hotels? Handing over their in-game property to another user since there’s no compelling reason for people to visit their property and it is, thus, useless.

Another fun quote, from the VP of Web Marketing of Lenovo (the company that bought IBM’s Thinkpad laptop business) reads, “There is nothing to do in Second Life except, pardon my bluntness, try to get laid.”

I’ll admit it: I love watching Second Life and Linden get some comeuppance. Linden’s history of exaggerating and outright lying to the press had them asking for it and I’m glad people other than long-time users/developers of virtual worlds are finally seeing SL for what it is: Entertainment (in this case largely of the prurient variety, but I’ve got no beef with that) and really, essentially nothing more aside from a few extreme outliers like Ansche Chung (in the same way that WoW, in which players are making way more real money than players in SL are, has some outliers who have done very very well via goldfarming and gold trading).