However, in the process, you are screwing over the very customers who have helped to build SL for there to even be a place for corporations to invest in. Private island ownership has been a dream for a lot of residents who have saved up (or were trying to save up) to pay the nebulous "setup fee" and the steep though still reasonable month fees for private islands.
Instead of just turning your back on customers who would gladly buy a fairly priced product from you, in hopes of getting more money out of deeper pockets, why not offer another level of private islands, available to individuals, that matches the current product offering? Why does it have to be all or nothing? Your private islands have been an incredible success because customers have been willing to take a risk on them, even with all of the problems - and the reward they have been given is a giant fuck you. The "we have no plans AT THIS TIME to raise tier" reassurances, always carefully worded to say at this time, certainly doesn't instill any confidence.
In the end, all this announcement has done is create an incredible amount of resentment, and shown that the only two groups you seem to really care about are the free accounts that are sucking the system dry while buffering your resident count, and chasing after big name corporations, while letting paying customers subsidize the rest. Fair or not, it's all in the perception, and you have done nothing to dispel that impression.
Please do something to address this. The fact that you have the audacity to raise prices after the two worst months in SL history in terms of performance, bugs, security breaches, grid attacks, etc.. seems to just further show how completely out of touch you are with your customers, and reality.
I hope free accounts and corporate vanity projects are enough to sustain you, because you seem to be doing everything in your power to drive away customers willing to pay to be here.
EDIT - see, this quote from your wonderful new CFO is a perfect example of how you are coming across as just not giving a damn about individual customers while chasing big corporate accounts:
Zdanowski said corporate customers will not feel any squeeze from the rate hikes.
"It's a non-event" for them, he said. "They're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up an in-world presence, and they're paying almost nothing for the land."
PS - get rid of the unlimited free accounts already, your paying customers are tired of being forced to foot the bill and suffer the effects of them.
