Linden Lab have now formalised the announcement on staff cuts – not that there’s any detail and plenty of corporate-speak. The whole claim that layoffs improves company focus is tenuous at best, and borders on insulting to those departing. The press release states:
Today’s announcement about our reorganization will help us make Second Life® even simpler, more enjoyable, relevant and engaging.
So does this mean that those employees laid off were making SL complex, frustrating, irrelevant and non-engaging? A lot of those words can apply to the Second Life experience at times – but in the context of this announcement it’s pretty much fluff.
The real reason is cited as well: strengthening profitability to invest in a browser-based SL viewer. That’s a significant (and overdue) announcement on its own – and given the stasis in the userbase and the US financial situation it’s understandable cost cuts need to fund part of that. The issue for me is that tying the old user experience to the departure of any staff caught up in the restructure, looks plain tacky.
What say you? Are you surprised by the way this has been done or is it a business-as-usual approach by Linden Lab to issues like this?
It is LL doing what it does best sense M. Linden took over the company and that is failing at there product and making users happy. So many people are going to OS grid these days or just simply finding another game to play due to the issues of Content Theft, High Prices for sims witch even at that price you still get stuck on the same CPU as 3 or more other sims, Asset server being unstable, and failing to create a better new UUID for the client. I know for my sake as soon as OS grid gets coding and physics worked out I will have my own sim on OS grid that I run from my home server…
M Linden is is wrecking that place. Sure, it needed to be corporatized a bit and given some focus but that duplicitous, weasley little douchebag hired a ton of useless VP's and a lot of his old cronies to break the culture of that company down so he could destroy it and rebuild it. The problem is that he had no clue what he wanted to build. So now, after striking out on almost all fronts, he lays off his bloated hires with large severances and goes back to building what they should've been focused on 4 years ago….viewing SL in a browser. M Linden is a visionless, politics playing little twerp. It's a tough call, but the board should get rid of him. I imagine this SL in the browser project will be his last at Linden. If it fails, the company will fail. Actually, the company is no longer viable in many ways so it's probably going to fail anyway…but still…M didn't need to hasten it's eventual demise.