Kento's Blog

To save my precious bandwidth, I went down to the computer lab to explore Second Life for all it was worth while completing the assignment for today. I began by heading over to Sun Microsystems. Their island was very interesting, sorted by into buildings of different parts of the company. One building even had a section for employee gatherings or spots to interview prospective hires! They offered a guided tour, so I rode the machine around the island to see what all they had to offer. I almost got all the way through when the computer decided to freeze and throw a blue screen of death at me. Changing computers, I revisited the island and stocked up on the best things there: freebies. Just like the group in person, they had out nice freebies. The organization from what I could gather has been constantly working to make the island work better and keep it updated with the most current information. The calendar was up to date with information, and keeps getting posted with each press release. Overall, it was a great island to get familiar with Sun Microsystems as a company.

The freebie shop.

The tour chair

I then jumped over to Microsoft Island. This place was a bit more visitor unfriendly. It had some buildings, but it was pretty empty and had nothing of importance to give to visitors about what Microsoft really is. There were really neat structures, but mostly the only significant places were lounges and lecture halls for people to hold meetings in. Most likely, Microsoft gears second life more for employee use while Sun interests outsiders. Microsoft could improve by building things to interest general users.

A large lecture area inside a class sphere

A cool sphere shaped structure

Both islands had eloquent design in order to make it look neat and interesting. Though Microsoft reserved more space than Sun for it, each island also had places to sit and meet either with staff members or scouts from the company. Each has its purpose, but I think Sun’s Island is more important because it is outreaching instead of a more cliquish place. This means I would recommend someone else to visit Sun’s Island to learn about them and not Microsoft’s.