There are much more little details that blatantly point to the fact that LL currently lost connection to their user base - and so I think a wakeup call _is_ in order. Whether Christianos open letter is the right way to do it - no idea (the fact that he doesn’t check entries in any way makes it quite easily gamed and so I guess rather worthless on the technical side). But it is there.

This repeated “LL knows about the issues” - I am not that sure any more. Far too many details speak a different language. Sure, some of them scramble for time to get back into contact - I don’t say they do it deliberately. But it’s a fact that even as a concierge customer you don’t get to see a linden comment on problems you have. And I’m a private island owner - friends with lots of mainland tier are totally lost, since they don’t even have the estate tools to for example restart the sim.

@baba - i agree with most of your argument ;P

How are the Lindens supposed to be aware of the problems, if no-one tells them? Or aware of what’s important to us residents.

One of the things that’s severely broken at LL is the notion of customer relations. Things have moved on from when you were a newbie helping to develop this new environment, old-timer. Not only have new people joined since your day — not unreasonably expecting simple things like IMing and friends lists to work reliably in a virtuality that’s been around for so many years — but there are also a lot of us. You guys may have had an easy feedback with the lindens back when, say, ghosting was a problem, but the sheer mass of residents these days has caused a bottleneck (or maybe a logjam, I’m not sure) in communications that should have been anticipated. Scaling problems don’t only affect databases.

From where I’m sitting, it looks like the Lindens have recently choked the input so much that it is now very difficult to contact them with regular problems, never mind more abstract issues. And even worse, they’ve choked their output to nearly nothing. There is now hardly any lindenresident feedback at all, certainly not enough to dignify with calling a loop. The fact of the Town Meeting seemed indicative of the surprise the lindens felt that so many people were so upset with the present situation. And the anodyne responses were indicative of a defensive posture typical of a management that had lost contact with its customers.

LL really needs to take stock, and realise that its relations with its customers need to be taken as seriously as its software problems.