Gartner Adds to 2007 Forecast

Gartner quoted in Virtual Worlds News has updated its 2007 forecast about virtual worlds take-up. On the up side Gartner forecast that 70% of "organisations" will have private virtual worlds by 2012 - reinforcing our belief that we are entering an era of Intraworlds (see our Dec 07 newsletter). The down-side is that they reckon 90% of corporate virtual worlds experiments "fail" within 18 months. Of course if its an experiment you will always learn, and these are early days, and as Gartner points out these experiments are averaging only $50,000, so for a big corporate there's a lot that's being learnt for minimal outlay. As we've widely commented most of the early corporate presences were far too information centric, and had no avatar presence, and so its no suprise that they didn't return more conventional benefits.