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(UPDATE: eightbar, a division of IBM group blog maintained by employees of IBM, is claiming that they're actually the first Fortune 500 company to do an exclusive press conference within Second Life. See their blog for more, as well as this entry's comments.)

So in a year dominated with "firsts," yet another one can be added to the history of Second Life; today marked the first occasion when a Fortune 500 company held a press conference through the grid, before making the information discussed at the conference available in any other medium. And the company in this case was Sun Microsystems, the open-standards-embracing supercomputer maker, as well as the brains behind Java, Solaris and more. And given the grand scheme of things, it makes sense that Sun would be the first major corporate entity to throw an exclusive press conference within Second Life; Sun's entire fortune, after all, has been made on embracing the cutting-edge, and in creative online collaboration through a shared open-source platform.

In fact, it was John Gage, Chief Researcher of Sun and one of the company's founders, who first coined the phrase "the network is the computer" (back in 1984, no less, when most others simply laughed and laughed); and so it's no surprise that Gage was the main speaker of this virtual press conference as well, and the main champion at Sun behind the company creating an island there in the first place. Joining him was Chris Melissinos, Sun's Chief Gaming Officer (and don't you wish you had a senior-management title like that?); also contributing to the live audio stream was Philip Rosedale (Philip Linden in the grid), CEO of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life.

"Oh no!" I can already hear some of you saying. "Invasion of the Suits!" And in a way that assumption is correct; there's no denying all the things that come with a Fortune 500 company establishing a presence in the grid, nor the implications of what this might hold for SL in the future. But then again, it's also special circumstances we're talking about; a veteran tech company that has been pushing the envelope for decades, often within the same realm as SL and for the same aims, headed up by a bunch of former radicals from the Vietnam era, supplemented by a series of hackers and geniuses from the cyberpunk generation. I mean, come on, Gage was literally on Richard Nixon's actual "Enemies List" in 1971! Their current president still has a ponytail, and gets into flame wars with rival executives at his personal blog!

The avant-garde, counter-culture spirit of Sun showed throughout today's press conference, in fact: whether that was Gage schooling an audience member about how virtual reality experiments actually started back in the '60s, not with Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash; or Melissinos driving a Toyota all over the stage of the conference center, accidentally running over his boss; or the Sun team inviting the journalists to "bum rush" the stage at the end of the conference for an intimate question-and-answer session. When a vice president of one of the most powerful companies in the world is arguing over why their space should not be called "Sun Pavilion" but rather "Fantasy Island," you know you're not dealing with your usual Fortune 500 company.

For their part, the Sun team basically had two points to argue during their get-together today: that the company can tremendously add to both the back-end architecture and front-end interface of the emerging MMO community, and that they plan on heavily doing so, or at least as much as their departments can convince the rest of the company to support it. Although perhaps a little more grandiose than the eventual project, Gage for example talked about the concept of replacing Linden's entire SL infrastructure, running the entire thing instead through a custom-made combination of Linux and Java, making the system not only work a lot smoother but immediately tie the environment into two of the largest developer communities on the planet. Gage also hypothetically suggested combining a few of Sun's powerful supercomputers with the trillions of bytes of language data at Google, an online translation program like Babelfish, and the chat/3D environment of Second Life; so that in the near future, for example, anytime you "talk" (type) in the grid, your thoughts are immediately translated into whatever other language your companion wishes.

Yeah, some pretty bold statements; then again, this is the company who was arguing in the '80s that eventually every telephone would have Java built into it, something that sounded equally ludicrous at the time. Now don't forget, at the same time they were also predicting that every refrigerator and milk carton would have Java in them as well, so that a central computer in your kitchen could automatically track freshness; and I'm still waiting for my smart soda bottles, damnit! That's the nature of Sun, after all -- to win a few, lose a few, but to always outguess and outsmart their competitors, which is what has kept them at the top of their industry for so long now. Much like the Associated Press is for journalism, so too is Sun a benchmark of sorts for the rest of the tech industry; that when the company majorly embraces a new platform, as they very publicly did today with Second Life, a lot of others stand up and seriously notice that platform for the first time too.

So yes, the Fortune 500 is now here with us in the grid, probably for good; but don't forget that 499 of the companies on that list aren't here yet, and that the only one that is* is being headed by a huge fan of OK GO who admits to owning over 27 different gaming consoles at home. Sun is in a unique position at this moment, in these times when denials of service are now happening at SL every single day; if Gage was serious, they really could come in and provide the resources for a radically better infrastructure, as well as tie things like the scripting process into a language that's been around for decades, that millions of devices can already understand, and for which thousands of scripts and scripters already exist. With the exponential rise in interest in SL in the last nine months, many are starting to worry about whether Linden can actually keep up with demand; the company itself, after all, admits that they barely make a profit right now off of running the grid. It could be very exciting indeed to have a place like Sun step in, and to help provide the resources needed to smoothly operate a million-person virtual world, a population threshold that most predict will be broken next month; if done the right way, it could profoundly transform the gameplay experience there, and let the infrastructure gently grow into the megaplayer World-Of-Warcraft level towards which SL seems to be heading. As always, you'll know the latest when I do.

*Giff Constable of the Electric Sheep Co. wrote in today, to let me know that there is in fact a number of other Fortune 500 companies with presences in the grid; just that Sun was the first to hold an exclusive press conference there. Thanks for the info, Giff!