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Aldon Huffhines responded to a previous post with his own commentary, Philip Linden is ‘sad’. He writes:

“People have commented to me about Linden Lab’s method of dealing with conflict as ‘passive aggressive’. The ranks of people who are getting fed up with the way Linden Lab handles conflict seems to be growing, and the only thing preventing a large exodus is that alternative grids are still in alpha testing. Linden Lab has a little bit of time to repair the damage they’ve caused over the past year, but that time is running out.”

I’d have to agree that there is a level of discontent and disappointment that Linden Lab must address if they wish to keep a large contingent of the current userbase, because it seems like many folks are all too ready to jump ship and the only thing stopping them is that there is no viable alternative. For those who can see past the technical challenges and glitches into what virtual worlds have the potential to be, there is a great impatience for the future to arrive already and it can’t get here soon enough.

If 2007 was the Year of Restrictions, I hope 2008 will be the Year of Good Service, even if all of our desperately wished for improvements (stability, HTML on a prim, more than 25 groups, easy document importing) don’t arrive. For years I supported a thoroughly crappy software product and I know how much goodwill you can buy with truly excellent customer service. Fast, timely, personal responses; acknowledging what’s broken without glossing over the inconvenience it causes; providing work-arounds and alternate solutions – these things can make your customers love you even if the software you’re supporting is total crap. Be in the trenches with them, don’t pretend you care, _actually_ care, and show it.

And that’s where, I think, Linden Lab has failed. Aldon goes on to say:

“This ‘passive aggressive’ nature seems to reflect on a CEO who is ‘sad’ about what is happening and incapable of making any substantive changes to improve the situation.”

I think my take is quite different. While the head of the food chain does set the tone, and has enormous influence over the personality and culture of the organization (if organizations can have such things as personality), I’m not sure I can chalk it all up to a personal failing on Philip Rosedale’s part. Passive-aggressive behavior is avoidant, negative, and deceptive, but I haven’t read Linden Lab’s “personality” as passive aggressive at all. Rather I think there was an element of naivete involved, when SL really hit the hype cycle they weren’t ready. I read much of the last year as a desperate scramble to keep up with the interest, the challenges, the inquiries, the questions. If you’ve ever been the victim of your own success, you know that sudden panic when you realize you’ve reached the tipping point, it happened when you were too busy to notice, and now your whole paradigm has to change to cope with the new reality in a _re-active_ rather than a proactive way. And it takes some time to get back on your feet, to get things in place to be proactive again, and to repair any mis-steps made while you were in full damage control mode.

That’s my take on where things stand, and I hope this year will reflect a real commitment to the users who have helped make Linden Lab and the Second Life platform relevant in our institutions, our workplaces, and our social circles. The best PR is still “word of mouth” and sincere testimonials from people you trust, and a company who has the good will of its heaviest users benefits exponentially from their expertise, their evangelism, and certainly all the free technical support they (we) give.

Loyalty can’t be bought, it can only be earned, and it isn’t a one time deal.

We’ll see what happens moving forward, and I could certainly be wrong, but what I’m hearing in Philip’s (and to some extent Mitch Kapor’s) remarks isn’t passive aggressive, incapable, ducking the responsibility b.s. I heard someone reflecting on a difficult year and acknowledging that it was difficult in spite of the “Philip is ‘sad'” remarks it was sure to generate, and that’s the sort of thing that can go some distance in earning _my_ loyalty. It doesn’t go as far as filing a support ticket and getting a quick, accurate response, though, and the proof will be in the pudding.