Christian Renaud's Weblog

"The Future Will Be Better Tomorrow"

(Title quote courtesy of ex-Vice President Dan Quayle)

For the last few months, I've been ranging the virtual landscape far and wide, talking with end-users, venture firms, analysts, startups and large technology companies trying to get a bead on where the virtual world industry as a whole is going.  It'd be fair to say that everyone has a different perspective depending on where they entered the industry from (MMOGs, browsers, social networking, enterprise collaboration, training & education, etc.)

Given those conversations, I have drawn a few conclusions, not all of which will be popular.  Also, when you have so many moving parts and players, such as is currently the case in the virtual worlds industry, then you are bound to miss some major market or technology transition.  One of my favorite 'futurecasting' quotes is from the excellent paper "Tackling Tomorrow Today, Alternative Futures and Convergent Technologies of 2020" by the United States National Security Agency. The quote is attributed to Robert Hutchings, the NIC chairman from 2003 to 2005, in his introduction: "As I used to say to my students at Princeton, linear analysis will give you a much-changed caterpillar, but it wont give you a butterfly."  So, with that said, here are some some chrysaline predictions for the future of the next 3-5 years of virtual worlds:

1) Social Networks will go 3D.  This is rather obvious low-hanging fruit, as some existing social networks have already announced either their own 3D environments to talk with friends and groups, and others are busy working on integration with existing virtual worlds.  I think that we'll see the major social networking sites begin with experimenting with existing virtual world platforms, albeit different ones in order to differentiate from one another (sadly for consumers) and eventually migrate to walled self-contained environments once virtual world technology becomes mature enough.

The reason this is so powerful is that you already have millions of people actively using friend finder features as well as other communities of interest in these environments.  You don't/won't need to rebuild these again from scratch in a virtual world.  If they can give you a synchronous way of doing what you have been doing asynchronously (writing on your friend's wall perhaps), it will be a frictionless transition.  Look how easy it was for Facebook to add live chat to that little bar in the lower right corner of your window.

So, 3D worlds (or visualization) becomes a feature or view option on existing 2D social graph platforms.

2) 3D becomes a standard training and education platform by 2012.  This is also a low-hanging fruit sort of prediction, since the majority of initial proof points of this nascent industry emerge from the educational vanguard and people like Tony O'Driscoll at NC State.  The higher-ed market are trying to reach a wider demographic than the local student population, and this technology gives them the best option so far to 'go global' with their programs, especially if you use something vanilla like the MBA Cohort example where the students can talk vertically (teacher to student) as well as horizontally (student to student).

The enterprise training and onboarding people, perpetually under-appreciated but well-funded, will look at what is being done in academia and take the technology by the horns for enterprise training applications.  Fuel costs being what they are......

Who benefits?  Companies like Forterra, Proton Media, Qwaq

3) Rich Visualization for Commerce starts now, hits mainstream by 2010.  There are some websites that already play with QuicktimeVR and other technologies to complement their existing 2D representations of products and similar.  There are obvious benefits to the ability to walk through a hotel room or home for sale (and not just for potential thieves) as part of the selection process, just as there is  for walking into a virtual showroom or browsing the virtual shelves at Amazon (the  previously referenced 'adjacency problem' in bookselling).  We are programmed as a species to look at 3D objects in 3D spaces, so it plays into our biological programming better to not have to translate text into mental images.

Good for Transmutable Ogoglio and similar open web-standards-based platforms.  Bad for walled gardens.  I hope (albeit faintly) that this doesn't result in a plethora of new '3D visualization' plugins into my browser, but we all know that is exactly what is going to happen.  Damn.

4) Enterprise Collaboration stutters along.  Peter Christy and John Katsaros at the Internet Research Group (excellent analyst firm, btw) pinned me against a wall on a concall once upon a time and asked me to elaborate on the differences between WebEx and Notes+SameTime and a 3D immersive office.  Each time I referenced an attribute of the 'virtual office', they  had counter examples of existing technologies (video conferencing, webex, etc.) doing the same job easier and faster.  Well, there is much truth in what they said when you exclude the persistent virtual space use case such as the 'war room' for tiger teams.

In cases where you know all the participants ahead of time, and have a particular task like doing a presentation, then I'd use WebEx or something similar for time + energy expended vs. benefit reasons.  It's a pain in the ass to do a preso in Second Life, which was obviously an afterthought hack into that platform, and seems counter intuitive for business meetings.  I'd rather see the speaker's face to build trust, have the ability to make it an interactive whiteboarding session in addition to the preso, etc. (Strike One)  Ditto for 1:1 events, I'd rather see the other persons non-verbal microfacial cues than marvel at their avatar animation overrides. Non-verbal behavior is a considerable quantity of the signal being communicated at you when you speak with someone, and you lose all of it with an Avatar, even with explicit marionetting. (Strike Two).   Finally, for todays choices, anonymity and role-playing seem like evolutionary genetic detritus from the roots of many serious/social virtual worlds in the MMOG space.  For serious collaboration you need trust, which entails a combination of identity and presence. (Strike three)

Good for non-VW collaborative tool vendors, or anyone who is clever enough to integrate the two together.  I really resonate with the concept of a virtual office for geographically disparate colleagues to socialize and collaborate together in, however until we have a compelling example to show the traditional early adopters of Financial services and academia, this application of VWs will continue to stay in first gear.  We'll see what Qwaq and Intel's joint efforts will do to prove me wrong.

5) Kids worlds and advertising verses are inevitable and already here.  There was an old quote attributed to Jean-Louis Gasse from Apple that went something to the effect of "You can always determine the success of a technology in the degree in which people prostitute it."  Having sat through countless kids/pet world presentations, and the countless versions of how brands will utilize immersive environments to create 'experiences' and create 'vibrant social communities' around something as banal as soft drinks or music labels, it makes me mourn the level that society has sunk to if this is the best we can come up with for such a powerful tool.  Then again, there is an apocryphal quote about Vladimir Zworykin (the Russian inventor of the television who ultimately lost the patent fight with Philo Farnsworth) responding to Pres. Kennedy when commended about his invention, "Really Mr. President, have you watched television lately?"

6) Simulators will heavily leverage VWs for scenario training and other simulations in the next 3-4 years. Look at the work that Leroy Heinrichs and Parvati Dev have done at Stanford SUMMIT using Forterra.  Nuff said, its a gimme.

7) Second Life and it's walled/closed ilk will fade into the sunset in the next 24-36 months.  Sorry folks, and Prok can go ahead and flame me for this, but I don't see the concept of a MMOG sans G being a keeper against integrated-Internet 3D environments like Ogoglio, 3D interfaces on existing or emerging social tools like a Facebook 3D, or custom simulators once datasets are standardized.  Look at the rapid progress towards standards with OpenSim and Sun's Wonderland, and you can tell that walled garden virtual social worlds, even with all the great diversity of experience and creation, are one evolutionary step behind.  Not that they will entirely die, as all MMOGs still live in some form or another (there is still a vibrant community around Ultima Online, which I beta tested around the same time I started at Cisco in 1996) with a hardcore group of citi/denizens  who have so much time invested in that world that the switching costs are insurmountable for them.

My advice to the new Linden CEO?  Make deals with MySpace, Facebook and Beebo to be their 3D environment.

 

8) Virtual economies in non-MMOG virtual worlds will become untenable and go away in 24-36 months as well.  I had a nice interview with a futurist analyst firm working on a government contract this week and I told them that I didn't think that virtual currencies posed a threat for the intelligence community's standard antagonists as the quantities of currency exchanged was so low, and the transactional costs of repatriating the funds so high, it'd be easier to use other mechanisms to launder or exchange money for antisocial activities.  As Reagan said it so succinctly "If it moves, tax it.  If it keeps moving, regulate it.  If it stops moving, subsidize it." If RMT (Real Money Trade) got sizeable enough for anyone to derive any money-laundering value from it, the government would step in and tax the hell out of it.  This has already been threatened by Australia and the UK, and the US has made overtures that it is considering it, which has had the intended effect of chilling any venture money flow to serious/social VW startups whose business models depended on virtual economy float revenue.

There's more, as there always is.  There are some excellent examples of people doing visual aggregation of dispersed functions like IBM's VNOC and Eolus One by Implenia, which also seems like a no-brainer despite the complexity of the platforms they have worked with.  The government uses of this technology for training and simulations of different kinds (what happens if New York City rioted all at once?) that are unfeasible to simulate in any other way are what already supports a rather sizable but quiet community of startups.

Ultimately, I think we'll see 3D virtual worlds become a feature of existing platforms and environments, be it for collaboration, training, simulation, or just socializing.  This will be a good thing in that we'll all be able to reap the benefits of this pervasiveness, and I hope that this assimilation of what is currently a standalone industry into the mainstream will coincide with widespread common identities so we have a unified virtual persona for all of these different applications.

The Maturing of the Virtual Worlds Industry

2007 was unquestionably a significant year in the development of the Virtual Worlds industry. It went from a mocking human interest story at the end of the nightly news to the covers of prominent business magazines. As the proverb says however, 'Be careful what you wish for....'

There have been prior attempts at a 3D Internet, particularly around the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (or VRML). There were a number of market reasons that VRML never reached widespread adoption that were independent of VRMLs technical merits. In contrast 2007 featured the ramp of Second Life for public social collaboration and visibility for companies such as Forterra Systems for intraverse simulation and training.

The questions that we were asked during the 'New Ways of Working' panel at the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference last week in New York all seemed to be searching for the elusive initial proof-points to justify and quantify the benefit of virtual worlds in the enterprise. This is not unique to virtual worlds, and is a recurring theme in all of the emerging technology trends I have participated in. Early adopters attempting new projects within their organizations fortify themselves with metrics and other case-studies of successful deployments to demonstrate to their management the benefits of the technology in question, and virtual worlds are certainly no exception.

The current proof-pillars of this industry, however, are still scarce, with elaborate simulations being performed by the U.S. Government within Forterra Olive, as well as the Stanford SUMMIT medical simulations on the same platform. In the consumer area, there have been numerous examples of training and education within Second Life (including my employer) and isolated non-self-referential instances of collaborative design projects (most notably Wikitecture). What has not happened yet are the secondary ripples of these initial 'It can be done' proofs-of-concept, which will begin the snowball effect of more examples feeding more deployments which become examples for subsequent projects. It will take some sobriety on the part of marketing departments throughout industry, making sure to identify real value and not hand-waving, and it will take more time for the existing trials being conducted to bear fruit.

Two negative side effects of the excess of positive press in 2007 were that (1) each vendor in the 3D simulation area became an overnight sensation while many of their platforms were not ready for mainstream deployments, and (2) the peripheral/adjacent markets in this space (3D rendering engines, virtual economies, etc.) stampeded over to participate in the virtual gold rush, which made it harder for non-industry customers to get a bead on what this space actually is and how it benefits their organizations.

What this market pressure has exerted is a degree of speciation, in that companies are beginning to polarize into platform providers (intraverse or metaverse?), and component technology providers. An impacting externality to this is the emergence of the 'software as a service' business model within companies, who are evaluating these new virtual worlds not only from a 'should we/shouldn't we' decision, but also from a 'hosted/service' decision as well. One more barrier to adoption.

Speaking of barriers, if you ask most virtual world platform vendors what their top five barriers to adoption are, inevitably one of them will be the issue of 'corporate firewalls'. Given the immaturity of the technology, the non-standardization of ports and protocols used across vendors (which, admittedly, will be the case for some time as is the case in each new technology cycle), and the absence of overwhelming-demand on the part of major corporate clients, the corporate information-security technology departments will be in no hurry to poke holes in the corporate firewalls for a currently unproven application. It will happen over time, or the protocols used may render the discussion moot by leveraging lessons learned by companies like Skype in the VoIP space.

You see the initial furtive steps of companies to offer both a SaaS or Hosted model of their collaboration environments (such as the IBM/Linden Lab announcement) as well as overtures in that direction by companies like Qwaq. That will remove one barrier to adoption.

There have been the overtures towards data standardization with Multiverse and Google embracing COLLADA (and Intel hiring COLLADA people as part of their strategy) and the Virtual Worlds Interoperability Forum (of which I am a member). These efforts will initially focus on interoperability between virtual worlds and Internet data sources (like COLLADA files) rather than avatar portability. In contrast to my prior post about the future of virtual worlds, this degree of interoperability will be sufficient for some time as the broader Internet identity problem is resolved, as a choice of 'presentation layers' (in the form of virtual worlds) of a common dataset will be functional enough to limp along. The difficulty in that scenario will be in cross platform meetings.

The next post will posit some paths that the industry can take at this juncture, and if it will continue to be rather boutique, or will move into mainstream deployments.

Virtual Worlds 2008- Day Two roundup

Belatedly but as promised, here is a roundup of day two of the Virtual Worlds 2008 show in New York.

As with the prior day, there were multiple tracks (five, to be exact) focusing on the different questions around Kids and Teens, Marketing and Entertainment, Technology and Results, the Virtual Worlds Conference, and a un-conference around the enterprise opportunity for virtual worlds. They keynotes kicking off day two of the conference were a returning Jeff Yapp from MTV, and Kyra Reppen from NeoPets.

The individual sessions were standing-room only, however the real action at the show was in the hallway deals being struck as well as the pre-show deals cut to create buzz and relevance for the various companies there.

Overall, the conference had more activity but less energy than the 2007 New York conference, possibly due to the larger venue and the hangover from the negative press this technology has been receiving of late. Second Life bashing was de rigueur on the panel I participated on, causing even yours truly to exclaim surprise when people attempted to prevent Gene Yoon from responding to the explicit and implicit accusations.

I am compiling a 'direction of the virtual worlds industry' snapshot to accompany a follow up to my June 2007 'crystal ball' post of future projections. I will be posting that in the next 48-72 hours.

Is General Grievous riding 'It'?

In 2001, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of SouthPark wrote an episode entitled 'The Entity', in which one of the major characters became so frustrated with air travel that they created a new gyroscopic transport device (an obvious parody on the Segway), entitled 'It', to replace air travel. Unfortunately, 'It' required you to perform sexually inappropriate acts to operate the device.

In 2005, George Lucas released Episode III in the Star Wars series, featuring a cyborg named "General Grievous" as one of the antagonists. During a battle with Obi Wan Kenobi, he escapes their duel on a gyroscopic device that is remarkably similar to "It" above. Given the release dates, one can only assume this was a nested joke from George Lucas, but you can decide for yourself. Here is a video link with "It" featured at about 1:50.

Virtual Worlds 2008- New York

Once again, I 'embraced the ironic' and physically flew to a virtual worlds conference.  It always seems so amusing to do so.

The first day of the event was today (if you do not count the meet/greet at the bar last night) and it was excellent as usual.  Chris Sherman and his team have done an phenomenal job in setting up great content for the entertainment/advertising crowd that typically populates his NYC show (versus the more enterprise-centric left-coast show).  Each session appeared to be standing-room-only, and there was considerable hallway networking going on amongst the nearly 1200 participants.  According to Chris, there was nearly no overlap between the attendees of October's show (or for that matter, last year's NYC show) and this year's show, which leads one to believe that interest in this space is expanding at a rapid rate.

Hidden behind the stairs in room 4 is a small but militant enterprise contingent, which delved deeply into extracting social networks from within VW communities, as well as virtual datacenters.  I understand that the demonstrations there were mind-blowing.

Also concurrent with the VW show is the Virtual Legal track, with a number of distinguished speakers walking attendees through the finer points of virtual property, currencies, and so forth.  This track in particular has been well populated.

Tomorrow is more of the same, plus my participation in a panel discussion on virtual worlds in the enterprise.  Look for an update tomorrow evening on day 2 of the show.

The Workplace/Workspace Shift

Last week I had the honor of keynoting the Friday session at the CMP Metaverse Life 2.0 conference.  During the presentation, I mentioned the multiple points of evidence that I had encountered of the evolution underway from traditional workplaces to geographically-independent workspaces.  The summary of the argument is:

We have been gradually migrating from a traditional industrial-age workplace metaphor of individual work tasks performed in a shared setting (think of a cubicle-farm of either call-center representatives or engineers occupying three floors of a building) to a Knowledge-age metaphor of more collaborative, integrated tasks that are performed by virtual, geographically dispersed teams.  So, instead of doing autonomous work in a collaborative setting, we are doing collaborative work in more and more autonomous (or at least geographically distinct) settings. This is the Shift.

As far as proof points for the arguments, consider the trends towards globalization of industry (and therefore a more distance-collaboration-sensitive market) that are an inevitability of the flattening effect of world commerce, outsourcing and off-shoring of labor and other tasks, and an increasing trend towards telecommuting, flexible work arrangements and work-at-home roles. JetBlue stay-at-home call center agents come immediately to mind.

A factor (that I hadn’t really considered until recently reading more about the major impact on the global workforce composition by the retirement of the baby-boomer generation) is that there will be a shortage of skilled labor in many areas that will mandate new tools to allow retired boomers to selectively participate in the workforce.  If these gainfully-unemployed retirees are to be courted in this soon to be ‘sellers market’, the successful ‘buyers’ will be those that provide the tools for frictionless distance collaboration from their balmy retirement locations.

Having recently ‘pitched’ a room full of senior citizens on new technology trends, I can assure you that they are disinclined to buy a computer (if they do not already have one), much less create an avatar.  They are comfortable with the traditional workplace metaphor described above, with autonomous-work/shared-environment, so any tools that are developed for them must be painfully easy-to-use and consistent with their ingrained habits.

(addendum- Some people have mis-interpreted this prior paragraph to imply that I am making some ageist comments about the technical abilities of people older than my 40-year-old-self.  Before everyone gets more fired up than they already are, let me assure you that I have worked for/with/managed young and old alike who are technophilic or technophobic, and that age has little to do with it.  I will say, and gladly stand by, that my six and three year old daughters are more inclined to go-to-work as avatars than nearly all people I work with regularly in Silicon Valley.  The point being, we need easier to use tools that leverage workplace metaphors we are all familiar with, not something orthogonal and disruptive. Unless you are three or six years old, at which point, 'disrupt away')

To return to the Shift, what tools will we need to develop to enable technophobic retirees to participate in a Hollywood-style of work?  Is it easy video-conferencing, shared whiteboarding, avatars?

Suggestions welcome and encouraged.

Open Innovation Revisited

I've been spending a fair bit of time considering the ramifications of the Open Innovation model lately.  Henry Chesbrough's 2003 book of the same name hinted at what changes would be required to move from an isolationist, walled garden model of innovation and ideation to an open, best-of-breed successor.  The executive summary of his book combined with my stochastic wanderings is essentially:

In the Industrial age, competitive advantage came from the physical possessions of an organization, and their own explicit now-how in best utilizing those possessions.  In the Knowledge age, the rate of change is too rapid a single company, and change and innovation are happening everywhere in the world.  The industrial age walled-garden paradigm of corporate labs and research will be quickly outpaced by organizations who can leverage the best thinkers and innovation from around academia and industry to their competitive advantage by out-executing the garden-dwellers.

This challenges a few current structures and value systems.  First is the idea of 'corporate as sovereign' where an employer owns all thought and labor of an individual while in their employ.  Second is the 'publish or perish' mentality of much of the academic community, where the New York Times non-fiction book market is held up as some sort of yardstick by which professors can determine how their ideas resonate outside of campus.

I keep returning to the concept of the Library from Snowcrash by Stephenson.  For those who have not read the book, the Library was the privatized remnant of the CIA, after the United States Government imploded on itself. Stringers would check-in intelligence and analysis into the Library, and a dynamic market-based pricing scheme would determine the price of those who would want to access that analysis.  There have been smart contracting mechanisms in the past, as well as the resurrection of 'task, not time' systems and EBay-esque market-based auction schemes.  The Library seems to have had a combination of the three of them, which was the ability of people to check in data 'on spec' to a potential customer base, demand-based pricing to determine market rate, as well as a mechanism for more freelance or contract consulting and follow up.

As we move to a more Hollywood-style of work, I wonder how the open innovation model and the Library will turn the traditional R&D function into more of a 'gourmet chef' role of selecting the choicest ingredients from the world-at-large to create the best end product.

Hunters and Farmers (or Creators vs. Looters)

Do you create, or do you loot?  Are you a hunter of opportunities, or a farmer of someone else's find?

When I was in my 20s, I was for a short while in sales. I noticed over time that there were two kinds of sales people.....the sales reps who had 'hustle' (in a non-pejorative way)...went out and hunted new customers, and were all-around hungry.  The yang to their yin were the wizened 'Account Managers' who did just that...manage accounts.  They would sit back and wait for the young guns to come in and land new accounts, flame out, and leave, at which point these account managers would swoop in and take over the accounts and farm them until they dried up, then move on to the next carrion.

This is true all over industry.  I've run into people who came to my current employer to make the company great, and other people who came to ride the wave of the great people in the hopes of getting rich.  I've worked with people who hunt up new businesses and customers, and people who are content farming big parts of the business ('crop rotation', to put it nicely).  In this example, the company needs both....people who start businesses and the differently-skilled people who are able to grow them from $1B to $2B and on.

In the broader industry sense, however, this is not true. There are those who create, or try to create.  There are those who destroy, tax, or loot.

Who are the creators?  They are the ones that have the idea, execute and build on it.  They take satisfaction in creating new technologies, products, services and industries. The world is an abundance, and they add to it by their creations.

Who are the looters?  Those that leech the energy from the creators.  To them, the world is about scarcity, and there are a finite amount of scraps to fight over. They are the 'organizational antibodies' that attack any new ideas.  They are the 'iguanas' that sun themselves on the rocks of the company, destroying anyone or anything that comes within tongue's reach, but otherwise doing nothing.  They are the people who anticipate the paths of the creators, and attempt to extort a toll during execution (think patent and domain squatters).  They are the venture capitalists who are the modern day carpet-baggers and strip-miners of startups. They are not people creating value, they are remora eating the scraps from the shark's mouth.

There was an old Henry Ford quote that I have temporarily misplaced that went something to the effect that great organizations are rarely killed from outside competition.  They are killed from the people who got into a company, had early successes, rose to a position of responsibility, and then proceeded to destroy any threats to their legacy...rendering the company inert from the inside out. 

It is tempting to scheme like Ayn Rand's character Francisco d'Anconia and create something deliberately bad just to sabotage the looting remoras that inevitably attach themselves to any new venture.

Ask yourself...are you creating something, or are you extorting value from someone else's creation?  Are you producing, or are you a tax?  Have you become inert, as with Henry Ford's  quote....have you become an organizational iguana?  Do you view the world as abundance that you can add to, or scarcity that you need to fight over?  Are you a hunter or a farmer?

Postscripts: (1) this is most-assuredly not a spontaneous rant about some issue I am having with my employer, just a general observation I had this AM that I've seen all over industry.  (2) the 'iguana' phrase comes from Neal Stephenson's book Cobweb, which is hilarious. (3) In the future, entirely-contract virtual workforce, with dynamic team creation based on a job to be done, there will be no tolerance for the ballast of looters.  Bring on the future, I'm ready.

ONE ADDITIONAL POSTSCRIPT: I've received emails from people who were asking if I was referring to ALL Venture firms as looters, and this is certainly not the case.  As with all areas, there are great VC's out there who are valuable, and help naive startups achieve success.  There are also firms who provide capital to companies in crisis with business practices that would put Tony Soprano to shame.  Not all VCs are nasty, just as all sales people are not nasty.  Be sure you team with a creator, and not a looter.

 

 

Today's bit of wisdom

"Experience is the name we give our mistakes."- Oscar Wilde

P.S.  You've all seen that classic picture of Oscar Wilde (which is momentarily elusive on the Internet for me to include, darn it) with him draped over a chair sloppily.  One of my favorite historical quotes is from one of his friends who saw the photo and said 'Anyone who sits like that could only have gone to private school.'

The Human Touch

I received a nice note from John Jainschigg over at CMP Metaverse this morning about last week's Future of Work blogpost.  He had resonated (as had I) with the idea of 're-intermediation' that was put forward by one of my colleagues (who at this juncture should feel free to chime in on the comment roll and remind me, pretty please with sugar on it) at the MetaverseU a few weeks ago.

Someone once said that every challenge is also an opportunity, and the converse is true as well.  The workforce is being rapidly globalized, and roles you would have never envisioned being outsourced are migrating to Bangalore or Beijing at a breakneck pace.  I was personally shopping prices on personal assistants from three different shops in India earlier this week, something which would have seemed insane half-a-decade ago.

At the same time, you have the demographic mass of baby-boomers who are frustrated with the first generation of outsourced service, and are demanding a higher-touch model of customer care.  This is going to have two effects if it 'gets legs', which isn't such a BIG IF:

1) Operational Expenses (OpEx) of the firms switching to providing 'domestic' customer care  is going to go up in most cases.  Despite the vaunted examples of JetBlue and others in having stay-at-home-moms-in-Utah provide call center support, US labor is inherently more expensive than other parts of the world can currently provide.  The rising cost of living in India and China combined with the falling value of the dollar are driving those forces towards some equilibria, however it's not going to resolve for another decade or more.

2) A gray-dawn contract workforce. The boomers aren't ready to sit back and accept a uni-directional money flow.  They want to work, and wouldn't mind if you offered some health care while you're at it.  There are some amazingly well-trained people in the boomer generation just now retiring, like 12 percent of the engineers and 21 percent of the scientists at NASA for starters, who are ready to tackle whatever technological marvels you throw at them.

If you don't think that the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) isn't already the strongest lobby in Washington D.C. already, wait until their numbers swell with the boomer bolus.  They will be in a position to not only harangue your CEO for making them wait an hour for a call center representative, they will also exert pressure in the form of regulatory measures and tax laws to drive macro-level patterns of business.  Think of how large of a group of people this represents, how well-educated, and how much free time they will have on their hands to do nothing but what fix the aspects of their life that annoy them most.  Pretty much the customers from hell.

So the latte-slurping freelance workforce I posited in the last post, while agreeing with all of Prokofy's comments that delivering babies, pizzas and taxis will always exist in meatspace and are immune to the transition from manufacturing to knowledge workers, will be both servicing the baby boomer generation, and will also be comprised of a number of those boomers who will work-at-leisure to finance their vacations and second-home-property taxes. 

And for those that are concerned that boomers and seniors will be discriminated against directly or indirectly because of their age,  how about their avatar?  Their Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie looking one.

A metaverse outpost would allow them to provide value to the workforce from their snow-bird homes in the desert or on the Gulf coast.  In the Metaverse, no one knows that they are a retired engineer sitting on his/her back deck enjoying a margarita while resolving your customer service problem.

More later, the treadmill beckons.