The World According to Mitch

I want to thank all of you who commented – both publicly and privately – on my losing my status as a Microsoft MVP.  Let me sum it all up, and hopefully answer all of your questions.

1) I was informed on Monday that I was not being renewed.  However this was several weeks after I sat down with my MVP Lead and told him that I suspected I was not going to get renewed.  My suspicions, by the way, were not at all based on my community contributions throughout the last year – which were substantial.  I believed that there are people at Microsoft actively working against my advancement.  This has actually been proven to me in the past few months, and I suspected that it would manifest itself again on October 1.  I will not elaborate any further.

2) Whether it is ‘fair’ or not is irrelevant.  Microsoft can (and does) decide to award who it chooses to award, and no, I do not plan to appeal the decision.

3) The Microsoft MVP Award is not for people proficient in their technology; it is for people who share their proficiency with community work, such as blog articles, speaking events & presentations, tweets, forums, and such.  For the record I submitted (when asked) more than 15 articles on Hyper-V that I have written over the past year, as well as in excess of six public and unpaid presentations I have given on the technology.  I also wrote a course on Virtual Desktop Infrastructure using only Microsoft technologies, something that nobody (including Microsoft) had ever done before.  However this was determined to be inadequate to be reawarded.

4) What’s next: I continue to do my thing.  I did not get into IT communities to be awarded for it, and my blog (which has been acclaimed both critically and popularly every year for the past five) will continue on its path.  However it might be noticed by some regular readers that over the past several months my pro-Microsoft bias has been curbed, and I am a lot more willing to be critical of them publicly than I was in the past… and yes, I am using VMware in my professional work, but I am using Hyper-V as well.

5) I am not (as some of you have) badmouthing Microsoft.  I am not calling them names.  I am just realizing that they are not the company they once were, and to deny that would be unworthy of an industry commentator that I am considered to be.

6) It is not a sad day for me.  I do not feel sad.  I feel sleighted, I feel insulted, but I do not feel sad.  I am not angry with anyone in particular, least of all my MVP Lead – Simran Chaudhry has been a good lead, and a good friend over the years.  For the record I think he took the news harder than I did.

7) For those who say they are pruning the tree from the bottom, I appreciate the sentiment.  I have done my best over the years to foster community growth, and to help develop new community leaders.  There are several Microsoft MVPs who are that because of my guidance, and I hope they will continue to do their good work.  If anyone is doing their community work because of me, and decides to stop doing it because of this, well then maybe they shouldn’t have been MVPs in the first place.

8) No, I have not joined Microsoft.

9) I am still coming to MVP Summit in November.  This was my greatest worry, not because of the parties (which I would miss) and frankly not even because of the airfare (which is already spent) but because of the people.  I have made a lot of friends in the MVP community, and I am looking forward to seeing them all next month.

10) The truth is I did NOT receive a proper explanation… nor do I expect to.  If my suspicions are correct then any truthful explanation would embarrass the company.  They do not owe me an explanation, and on a similar subject, as the MVP Award is not an employment, the severance package looks like this: ‘Buh-bye!’

Now: I am not trying to burn any bridges, and I am not trying to offend anyone.  Might I be re-awarded in the future? Who knows?  I am not going to seek it out, but anyone who wishes to nominate me is free to do so.  If it happens, that is fine… and if it doesn’t, well that is fine too.  I am proud to have been an MVP for 8 years – in several different categories (I think I hold the record) – but if it is time to move on then that is what I will do.

If you are looking for a speaker for your event, whether it be on Server, Client, Virtualization, Private Cloud, Office 365, or any of the other myriad technologies that I have been a subject matter expert on, please feel free to contact me.  If you have a technical question on any of these (or other) subjects then please feel free to ask, and if I can get it into a blog article I will.  If you feel that I have been wronged, then feel free to say so to whoever it is you would say it to… but it might be more productive for you to go to http://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/nominate-an-mvp.aspx and nominate me again.

Thank you all for your support, and I look forward to helping you all in the future!

Mitch