I was reading Dusan Writer’s interview with Rod Humble / Rodvik Linden (Link Here) which made me realize that he wants to do something special with SL. I think Philip had the vision but I don’t think he continued it, M Linden had the Cash-in skills but no real vision and maybe Rod has them both, he understands the magic of live content creation, physics, events with people from all over the world and so on.

He is aware of the issues that “take the magic away” like lag and the current limitations of SL, and he probably wants to re-think Philip’s “Fast, Fun and Easy” strategy that didn’t really do lot of what he promised.
However, I feel he is understating “lag” as a thing he could fix by Q2 2012, and by that I mean (Mainstream mesh, perfectly working sim crossings, a more stable Region platform that could also support more avatars, long dead viewer 1.23 and a Viewer 2/3 that most of the people love to use) That is probably everyone’s wishlist, he needs to take away the “beta” feeling of SL that has been here since it came out of the beta in 2003.
I think Rod is the best person that could do this because he has an extensive background in Video Games where Lag is unacceptable, and I wish him good luck and I can’t wait to see the difference he will make here.