He faced a crowd of digital, animated dolls dressed in the business attire of the day: black heels, pencil-line shirts, Windsor-knotted ties. Palmisano’s trim avatar wore tortoiseshell-frame glasses and a tailored pinstripe suit. Palmisano’s physical body was in Beijing at the time, but he addressed most of his audience inside Second Life, the online social world that had launched three years earlier. They had come to hear IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano, deliver a speech. On 14 November 2006, 5,000 IBM employees assembled in a digital recreation of the 15th-century Chinese imperial palace known as the Forbidden City.
