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Hi Sarah.
Congratulations for holding on so long, it has been a leap of faith trusting in SecondLife, by Linden Labs to turn things around. You and I started about the same time in SL, though my partner and I are coming up to retirement and put a lot of our initial start up cost on credit card. Between us (Rivers Islands and NEF Holdings) we had a fair number of islands with over 600 residents, in seemingly no time at all. We saw you and others (Barts for example) doing well and that rallied us. Our business models may have been a little different, but in essence, we all invested in the expensive start up costs to recover that cost over time from the tiers the other players paid to us because they could not afford to buy a whole sim, or a whole void, or a whole parcel on the auctions.

I have already pulled out, my partner is all but pulled out and I doubt we will have an active presence in SL in the New Year. It is sad to see you go under, it re enforces our view that SL has been cheating on us, undercutting our ability to maintain our investments in them, destroying faith in a stable working platform, denying us the basic ability to forecast costs and gauge returns factors. If we cannot work out if we will lose money over time, we will not invest, that would be foolish; we do not give money away for the fun of it.
I fear the statistics for registrations, land use, dollar transactions et al, as exalted by Second Life  ‘bean-counters’ like Zee Linden adhere too, are make believe. They are unreal in the extreme. The only person being fooled is the fool himself.
Sorry to see you go Sarah, you have been a formidable representation is Second Life, and your absence is a damning representation to all others confirming Linden Labs Second Life is no longer a place for those seriously interested in creating Virtual Worlds for Profit. The model, has been broken.

Condolences
River Ely

Other blogs by this author can be found at http://rivers-rock.blogspot.com/