A Conspiracy Theory I Like

image: the lovely Olivia Hotshot ponders

Thank you, Pappy Enoch, for sharing this comment from The Alphaville Herald's story on the Royal Screwing of educators by Linden Lab. Comment by Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia, who obviously knows how screwed "customer service" can be if you must grapple with the bureaucracy of a university or try to push a reform through a faculty meeting.

I have a crazy conspiracy theory about this:

Linden Labs knows it’s going bankrupt. In fact, it knew it was going bankrupt back in 2007. Back then somebody looked at the books and said “we’re going out of business somewhere in Q2 of 2011 and there is nothing we can do to fix it.”

So Linden Labs just wants to go bankrupt quietly, without getting sued by well funded legal departments like large corporations and educational institutions tend to have, so they needed to get rid of them.

First they drove out the corporations using horrible customer service. They hoped this would send the academics running for the hills as well, but they underestimated the lousy customer service experience that is the modern educational system. Academics give each other worse customer service than Linden Labs gives it’s customers, so that didn’t work at all (seriously, you ever talk to a bursar or financial aid department, or god forbid, a professor? They’re all sadists!).

Then they tried targeting the academics by killing the academic SL wiki and booting Woodbury over dirty politics while continuing to increase pressure with horrible customer service while claiming the JIRA and knowledge base are being “upgraded” periodically. That got at least half of them out, but academics are a tenacious lot.

Then SL took out the big guns. They decided to kill the teen grid, which should kill at least some of the academics, right? That didn’t get rid of enough of them. They still have some large schools with scary legal departments in SL, and they need to leave quick before SL files chapter 11.

In desperation, LL decided to double the price of academic sims in 3 months. Now they’ll be rid of almost all of them, they hope. Now they can go bankrupt in peace.

Want a shirt? Drop me a line in world and it's all yours! Get 'em and hack it into OpenSim! Hell, ask me and Iggy Strangeland will send you one to your grid of choice.

Show your Linden Love. They sure showed it to us.