In response to my Friday posting on August 3rd about reliability and voice in Second Life (SL), Joe Miller, Linden Lab’s VP for product and platform development, called me on the phone the following Monday. If you look at Joe's bio you'll see that he's "responsible for extending the Second Life platform to reliably support very large member communities." Joe is also personally interested in getting voi If you look at Joe’s bio you’ll see that he’s “responsible for extending the Second Life platform to reliably support very large member communities.” Joe is also personally interested in getting voice working in SL.We discussed the problems I had encountered with voice in Second Life, batted around a few possible scenarios that might explain what happened, and nailed down the time, region, and local conditions so that Joe could have someone check the logs. Maybe some good will come of my venting after all.We also discussed how Second Life goes about trying to achieve the balance between reliability and features that I was talking about in my blog post. Joe said that he agrees that reliability is a big question for users, but he made the point that they’ve been making a lot of progress. The majority of in-house Second Life developers — Joe said 68% of them — work on reliability, stability, and performance; major new features are usually either acquired or contracted out. Voice was contracted out, if I understood Joe correctly. WindLight, which “simulates the ways that sunlight is scattered by the atmosphere under different climatic conditions, such as fog or haze”, and Nimble, a cloud simulator, were both acquired from WindwardMark Interactive. (The five founders of WindwardMark now work for Linden Lab in Boston, but WindwardMark still exists.)Developers at Linden Lab are organized into studios, and a couple of the studios concentrate on fixing bugs. The Blacklight studio is where all new developers at Linden work, and Blacklight has the job of fixing the top bugs each week. According to Joe, the bug closure statistics are moving in the right direction.It certainly sounds like Linden Lab is doing the right things. Nevertheless, there have been several operational problems at SL this week, which affected the availability of the servers: these are disclosed on the Official Linden Blog. SL probably isn’t at one nine reliability yet, as far as I can tell, but I hope it gets there, and soon. Software Development