Changes

Yay! We have an official announcement from the Lab. See: Ebbe Altberg Joins Linden Lab as CEO.

Quote:

SAN FRANCISCO — February 5, 2014 — Linden Lab®, the makers of Second Life®, BlocksworldTM, DesuraTM, and more, today announced that Ebbe Altberg will lead the company as its new Chief Executive Officer.

Most recently prior to joining Linden Lab, Altberg was COO of BranchOut. Prior to that, he was part of the executive team at Yahoo!, most recently as SVP of Media Products. His more than 25 years of experience managing teams that create world-class products and services also includes leadership roles at Ingenio (acquired by at&t Interactive) and Microsoft.

“We remain committed to world-changing innovation from Linden Lab,” said Jed Smith of the company’s Board of Directors. “We’re keenly focused on providing incredible experiences for all of our customers, and Ebbe is the perfect person to help lead our team as we continue to serve and grow our global audience of active users.”

“Linden Lab has long been at the forefront of building experiences that entertain people while empowering them to express themselves and profit from their creations,” said Altberg. “Our customers’ creativity is unparalleled, and I’m proud to join the talented team that serves them. Second Life is now in its eleventh year, and every day, users continue to create more and more amazing experiences to enjoy. Though much younger, Blocksworld has already seen hundreds of thousands of unique user-created worlds shared for everyone to play with. I’m absolutely committed to supporting our customers and helping them become even more successful. There are significant opportunities ahead, and I look forward to leading us into the next phase of growth.”

About Linden Lab

Founded in 1999 and headquartered in San Francisco, Linden Lab makes shared creative spaces that inspire and empower users to explore and share their creativity with others.

For more about Linden Lab, its products, and career opportunities please visit LindenLab.com.

The About Linden Lab page now lists Ebbe Altberg as the CEO. He has a profile on LinkedIn.

Over on SLUniverse Ashur Constantine posted: New Linden Lab CEO, Ebbe Altberg. Quoating:

Ebbe Altberg comes to Linden Lab with more than 25 years of experience leading teams and creating software used by hundreds of millions of users. After graduating from Middlebury College he went on to work at Microsoft, where he spent most of his 12 years leading teams that created the world’s most popular productivity products such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Office.

In 2000, Ebbe moved to Ingenio, Inc., where he headed up product and had a stint as interim CEO. As Chief Product Officer, he lead Ingenio to become an innovative telephony and marketplace company, which was ultimately acquired by at&t Interactive in 2007.

Ebbe then joined Yahoo! in Europe as VP Head of Audience, with responsibility for all consumer-facing products and affairs. After a couple of years he was promoted to SVP Media Products, a group of about 800 engineering and product people that created the Yahoo! homepage, news, sports, finance, and entertainment products and platforms.

Most recently, Ebbe went back to a small startup, BranchOut, where he was the COO and managed the teams building products for professionals such as BranchOut and Talk.co.

Opinion

Mr. Altberg sounds like a corporate executive manager. I don’t see where he plays any games or has any experience with managing software used by gamers. To me this is not a good sign.

The things important to those using office software and the demographic are going to be very different. I am suspecting we will have an account-type running SL. But, I certainly could be wrong and hope I am.

Let’s see how long it takes to find him in world.

Considering his credentials, I suspect he IS the Rod Humble replacement.

The Linden page showing corporate managers now has Ebbe Altberg listed as CEO. There is no way to know if this is a perminant replacement or an interim replacement.

Linden Management

Thanks to: Ashur Constantine 🙂