The MVP program has become a marketing program to encourage becoming unpaid shills of Microsoft and MS products, where the best way in is to evangelize and write articles and tweets promoting Azure. Your social media presence is more of a factor for determining membership than any technical prowess.<p>They've even used it to encourage members (behind closed doors) to shill Microsoft links [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/rickasaurus/status/636269822595235840" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/rickasaurus/status/636269822595235840</a>
I have been a Microsoft MVP from 2006-2018. While I was proud to be part of a group of so many smart people at the beginning, my professional and personal life changed over the years and I stopped blogging regularly, never engaged in their new web forums (which replaced the newsgroups – anyone remembers them? ;)) and finally filtered out all of the many emails and newsletters coming to my inbox. So I would say for 10 out of 12 years I have been a ghost. A ghost that has been "re-awarded" every year – for whatever reason. I think that alone tells you something about the value of that "title".
A few years ago I told my friend "If I ever add 'Microsoft MVP' to my Twitter bio shoot me"<p>I don't know why seeing this made me cringe so much. Probably because it was so transparently a ploy from Microsoft to make their most loyal devs feel special in hopes that they'd promote Microsoft tools more.
I've seen this first hand at several conferences where Microsoft "MVP"s come on to the stage and try to make Microsoft seem all "hip" and "rad" rather than talking about real engineering and technical improvements, it was not only nauseating - so many people could clearly see right through it.
> Where I used to get weekly updates, and focused, useful, invitations to what are called “Product Group Interactions” — stuff about the new WDK or changes to OS features — I now get an endless stream of invitations to SQL and SharePoint events.<p>If I had to wager why it seems like the MVP program dieing (I have no clue if it is, this is the first post I've ever read about the MVP meta) it has to do with this point the author called out.<p>I suspect that, at least in its early days, the MVP program help guide product development teams. In return for helping guide development, these MVP's were given preferential treatment over other customers and access to insider information. Now that Microsoft is (at least appearing) more open, they can get their feedback from their open source communities.
Hi, I’m Lenn from Microsoft, and I have responsibility for the MVP program. I appreciate the feedback, and apologize that we didn’t respond to your earlier emails. We will get back to you directly to address your questions and concerns. The MVP program does evolve over time and our goal is to ensure that it stays relevant and meaningful for participants. On behalf of Microsoft, we really appreciate your support of the program and community.
Let's face it, MSFT is dropping all of their eggs into the cloud basket and, whilst this isn't necessarily a bad thing, the byproduct is what the MVP sees: Invitations to things like roadmaps for COSMOS DB, which is almost purely an Azure service and has nothing to do with the scope of the MVP's expertise.<p>Others have suggested that SO and the OSS community, in general, are much wider audiences for MSFT to receive feedback from and that's not, inherently, true. MSFT still avails of things like the BETA program[0], so they still (seemingly) recognise that they have a need for that feedback loop (for the most part).<p>What seems to happen at Microsoft is constant culture shifts, based purely on who's making the most money at the time. In the previous years, it was Office that was the top dog, now it's Azure and, not surprisingly, things are changing in the company to push the biggest seller.<p>The byproduct of that, of course, is that everything else gets thrown to the wayside by chasing these new endeavours (by constantly changing directions) and not having a plan to fluidly bring everything forward and inline.<p>[0] - <a href="https://www.onmsft.com/news/join-microsofts-pre-release-beta-program-office-and-help-make-next-version-better" rel="nofollow">https://www.onmsft.com/news/join-microsofts-pre-release-beta...</a>
I remember the battle between Jamie Cansdale and Microsoft regarding Jamie's MVP status [1]. The TL;DR was that Jamie developed TestDriven.NET as an add-on to Visual Studio. He released it for the pay versions <i>and</i> the free version: Visual Studio Express. Microsoft wanted him to make it unavailable for Express and decided to kick him out of the MVP program because they didn't want nice features in the free version of Visual Studio. ;)<p>[1] <a href="https://www.infoq.com/news/2007/06/TestDriven-Express-Emails" rel="nofollow">https://www.infoq.com/news/2007/06/TestDriven-Express-Emails</a>
Ten years ago, when I see a MVP give technical advice (they seldom do), they are very helpful.<p>Now when I see technical advice from mvp, I wonder if they had ever read the manual...
What's the practical function of MVP in the era of GitHub and open source where everyone can join discussion with devs and PMs without a need to be part of any elitist group?
Just to keep a handful of folks still proud of their MVP badges they earned in 2001?
The Windows kernel driver development was one of the most hardcore programming in software development, requiring in depth knowledge of the kernel and a very different mindset. Have to be very defensive and thorough, or things would go badly.
This is completely understandable. I've submitted for MVP for a product (not Microsoft, but built on Microsoft technologies) and I never get it due to the fact that I don't re-tweet all day and focus on development.
Before ASP came out, I wrote a DLL to connect IIS to VB5/6 applications. I was also the VB guide on The Mining Company (which became about.com around 1997). This was enough of a resume that I was awarded the title MVP for IIS/ASP. I got a watch, notepad and pen. Seemed pretty cool for an 18 year old in smalltown Ontario.<p>Eventually, they announced that VB6 was the end of the line for COM and VB.net was VB in name alone. I was one of about 100 MVPs that signed a petition encouraging MSFT to keep VB moving forward as a parallel product. "No, and stop asking" was the reply.<p>Fast forward a few years, and I saw the original DHH "Build a blog in 15 minutes with Ruby on Rails" video. What I saw didn't even seem possible. I knew that it was going to be a big deal, and the next day my friends and I cofounded the first Rails consultancy in the world circa Fall 2004. This led to my first Mac Mini, and deploying to Linux. Today I only boot into Windows to do VR and hologram stuff.<p>I haven't thought about my MVP certificate in over a decade, but I'm confident that it exists in a box. I'm honestly a little shocked to know that it's been going all this time.
Writing low-level magic and solving gnarly bugs seems to be linked to making hardware in the first place.<p>Microsoft MVP is still a very west-centric program. If I had to guess, I'd wager the rising stars of this world are in Asia where the new hardware is being made. Microsoft doesn't really reach out to them, and I guess the feeling of disinterest is mutual.
no response from PM, amazing!
I've been MVP for (just) 6y, 2012-2016, and probably replaced that many community PMs, and few categories also, that I didn't know where I belong any more.
And last year, when I thought I did my biggest contribution by organizing workshops and meetup talks, writing OSS, and finally got great feedback from real people, not just page views of blog or twitter reach, they called me and said its not enough. And that I can apply next year when I do more of the things they measure, whatever that is this year! I just don't care any more.
I wasn't aware of the program till recently and just thought it was a marketing gimmick for vaguely technical people who can throw a little open source varnish on the company.