I'm a Microsoft Certified Master myself (of SQL Server) so I'll explain a little about what's got everybody up in arms.<p>When you do enterprise admin work, you often can't share that work publicly. It's not like someone can look at my DBA.StackExchange profile and see the deployments I've done for StackExchange, AllRecipes, Discovery, etc. The MCM was Microsoft's highest technical certification that gauged your sysadmin skills, so that work you've done for high end enterprise systems pays off here. When other high end companies came to call, I could say, "I'm an MCM. There's only a couple hundred of us worldwide, and most of them work for Microsoft as consultants - I'm one of the few independents." Combine that with references, and it's just easier to get doors opened.<p>Of course, it only makes sense if the certification is actually hard - and hoowee, was it hard. Originally, it involved spending 6 weeks onsite at Microsoft undergoing a series of tests, culminating in a monster 6-hour hands-on lab test. It was the toughest 6 hours of my life, and I've gone through some pretty tough outages. There were no braindumps that could get you past the MCM (unlike the near-worthless MCITP exams.)<p>Unfortunately, the MCM was too hard to achieve for most folks, and they couldn't get the market adoption they wanted. It's really expensive to write and administer these kinds of high-end tests, and Microsoft was faced with updating the tests faster and faster due to the faster release cycles coming out on the software side. Worse, they wanted the Master certification to cover not just on-premise software, but cloud services as well, so you had to test Master-level skills across both - but the cloud services changed constantly. (Heck, the MCITP-level tests for Windows Azure SQL Database still has the wrong marketing brand name on it even today.)<p>Just ended up being too expensive for them to manage in the face of limited adoption.<p>The current MCMs are bummed because it cost us a ton of money and time to get certified, and we never saw significant benefits from the program. The best resource was the mailing list. (I'm not bummed because the cert has paid off the initial investment for me, even though I put out something like $25k total out of pocket.)<p>People who are currently working on their MCMs are bummed out because they've invested a lot of money and time (in some cases, international flights & hotels) and they won't finish in time.