The State of the Microsoft MVP Program

Well, after a long, seven year run, I’m officially no longer a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional. Given what’s happened over the last 24 months, I’m not surprised about my non-renewal, but I’m inclined to give my honest assessment of the program. It’s time to ask “cui bono” – literally, who does the program benefit (any more)? The goal of this article is to ask some hard questions, questions I hope may reform the program over time. However, I’m not holding my breath, nor will I be seeking reinstatement any time soon.

Disclaimer: These are my opinions and perspectives based on seven years in the program. Other MVPs are sure to have different perspectives on the program and Microsoft.

Background and My Road to Becoming a Microsoft MVP

Back in 2016, my buddy and bandmate Kevin Goodman of FSLogix fame encouraged me to submit a session to BriForum. To all you “young’uns” with no gray atop your noggin, BriForum was the BEST EUC (End User Computing) forum there was and will ever be- with maybe only E2EVC giving it a run for its money. So, I mocked up a talk about all of the radical changes that had happened in Remote Desktop Services from Server 2008 to Server 2012, especially the dual transport enhancements in RDP and all of the new RDP performance counters you could monitor. My presentation was accepted, and off I went.

As luck would have it, Eric Orman and a few others from the RDS group at Microsoft decided to attend my talk. They apparently appreciated my content and my take on the improvements. Eric helped shepherd me through the Microsoft MVP nomination process, and a few months later, I was a MVP. To this day, I have nothing but the utmost respect for Eric, who has bounced around Microsoft in different roles but is now the Principal Product Manager Lead for Microsoft 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop.

The First Few Years

The first three to four years of being a Microsoft MVP were fantastic. It seemed like everyone in my area (Enterprise Mobility – Remote Desktop Services) was a rock star. Benny Tritsch, Claudio Rodrigues, Freek Berson, Ruben Spruijt, Kristin Griffin, and Esther Barthel to name just a few. Microsoft would hold several conference calls with us a year, in addition to hosting a huge annual summit, filled with all day sessions covering every bit of minutia you could possibly absorb about your product area. Most importantly, they usually *listened* to our feedback, incorporating it into subsequent versions, and I think it made the Remote Desktop Services offering much better. They also shared product roadmaps with us well in advance (multiple years), as they trusted us to adhere to the NDA. This was actually a win-win for both Microsoft and the MVPs, as Microsoft could hopefully avoid costly missteps in the product evolution, and we and our companies had a good idea as to what was coming down the road, providing us with some “first mover” advantages.

While we all contributed to the community in various ways, it was never just regurgitating Microsoft press releases on social media. We wrote lengthy and introspective blog articles about the technologies, we conducted, published, and relayed market research that helped Microsoft, we tested the products, we answered questions on TechNet forums, we created free community tools and scripts to help RDS admins, and authored whitepapers and technical deep-dives for the community.

The Last Few Years

The Rise of Marketeering and the “Selfie MVP”

In contrast, the last few years for me as a Microsoft MVP was an era of disillusionment and frustration. From my perspective, someone at Microsoft decided that the more MVPs they minted, the bigger an amplifier they could get to promote anything and everything Microsoft on social media- without a lot of critical thought. MVP shifted from “Most Valuable Professional” to “Most Valuable Promoter”, or “Most Valuable Pitchperson”, or “Most Valuable Propagandist.”

Now, don’t get me wrong and don’t send me hate mail, as I know there are plenty of veteran MVPs (and even some new MVPs out there) who generate really high-quality community contributions. That said, over the past several years I’ve seen a lot of MVPs that simply retweet/re-post every single bit of Microsoft news in their product area, without any sort of critical analysis as to the pros and cons. Think of these as the new “Selfie MVPs,” constantly posting photos of themselves at some event or re-posting MS tweets and announcements, but not really adding anything constructive in terms of the “hows and whys” of new tech, or whether or not said tech will actually benefit the Microsoft customer as opposed to Microsoft shareholders.

Yet, Microsoft loves the relentless social media push, as you can see in your LinkedIn and other social media feeds, both by their employees and Microsoft MVPs. This sort of marketeering, in my mind, is worthless without honest context and analysis that seeks to benefit the consumer of Microsoft technologies. Also, the more marketeering that floods your feed, the harder it is to locate the really high-quality content from professionals that actually do their homework. Of course, given that one of the conditions of being renewed as an MVP is your community contributions, this sets up an arms race which is precisely why your feeds are choking to death currently with lots of Microsoft propaganda.

I’m not the only person who feels this way – for more context, read these posts here, here, and here.

Azure Uber Alles – Cloud Only Above All!

Around 2019, Microsoft really started to invest heavily in their Azure Public Cloud platform, pulling out all the stops they could think of to drive migration from private datacenters into Azure. Whether it was bundling Teams into Microsoft 365, restricting how other hosters and public cloud providers could license Microsoft’s software, mimicing features from partners to make their offerings “good enough” etc, they were on a war path to increase Azure revenue at any cost. I call this business strategy “Azure Uber Alles.” To paraphrase Twain, history doesn’t repeat but it often rhymes, and “Azure Uber Alles” sounds a lot like “Internet Explorer Uber Alles” at the turn of the last millennium.

This definitely bled into my product area (Enterprise Mobility & Remote Desktop Services), with the nascent rise of Azure Virtual Desktop- a successor to Azure RemoteApp (ARA), Microsoft’s first abortive attempt to bring remote desktops into the cloud. Other MVPs and I let Microsoft know publicly that not everyone wants to run their application workloads in the public cloud, for cost reasons, security reasons, migration challenges, etc. We also championed hybrid models where infrastructure roles could be cloud based, but actual workloads could run in private datacenters (a true hybrid approach, not one with the Azure Stack HCI licensing tax and being tied to specific hardware).

Those opinions were clearly rebuffed, as can be largely witnessed in the marketplace to date. MVPs, like my friend Claudio Rodrigues, started getting frustrated. He spoke truth to power one too many times, and conveniently was not renewed as a Microsoft MVP, even though he was the VERY FIRST Microsoft MVP in the Remote Desktop Services product area and had been one for 15 plus years! He’s also a genius in the EUC space and any vendor ignores him at their own peril. In my opinion, Microsoft is in a weaker position for removing him from the program.

On top of that, it just seemed like there were fewer and fewer opportunities for MVPs to interact with the product teams. Whether or not all of that can be attributed to the pandemic is up for debate, but I felt there were less opportunities to give feedback, and there was less collaboration with MVPs in general. It also seemed as if information was gated from MVPs, much more than it ever had been before.

Enough Is Enough

By Spring of 2022, I was growing weary of much of the above (plus a whole host of other reasons that I’ll leave out of this article in the interest of time). I notified the MVP program that I was no longer interested in being renewed at the next renewal cycle, and didn’t submit any contributions (even though I had been doing community work throughout the year). Lo and behold, imagine my surprise when I was renewed for another year in the summer of 2022. LOL!

So, I continued on with my community work, generating arguably more community contributions in 2022-2023 than ever in the past and, as an experiment, fully submitted all of those contributions to the MVP program renewal process. However, at the same time, I was becoming increasingly vocal on my social media feeds and YouTube channels, constructively criticizing some of Microsoft’s business practices around Azure, QA quality and bug rate increases, and other peccadilloes that had been bothering me for years. Finally, a few weeks ago, I was not renewed. So, whether there was simply a year lag in processing my resignation, or they didn’t like my increasingly “real talk,” I was out. That’s fine by me, but a very odd way of it transpiring, right?

And, via my little experiment in 2022 to 2023, it is obvious that community contributions rank lower to the MVP program heads than how much you drink and spew the M$ Kool-Aid, so to speak. I was certainly extolling the benefits of classic Microsoft Remote Desktop Services, especially when run on-premises or private datacenters, but I was also calling out the licensing games and other things I perceived as anti-competitive in Azure and Azure Virtual Desktop. Honesty and candor has its place in many areas, but it’s safe to say it really doesn’t have a place in the MVP program, at least as it is currently structured. Perhaps the saddest thing for me to note personally is that Microsoft has a ton of amazing technologies and incredible people driving those products, but their licensing games and artificial cloud-based restrictions are damaging their goodwill in the marketplace. They seem to be doubling down on a myopic focus of must win at Cloud at all costs and must wring out maximum revenue each quarter for shareholders even if those approaches damage their long-term growth potential.

Takeaways and Suggestions

First of all, I want to reassure my gentle readers that I am NOT stopping my community work whatsoever. After taking some breaks this summer with family, I’ve got tons more RDPHard content. And perhaps even more exciting, I’ll be releasing a new Freemium product in the marketplace soon, that will be fantastic for all sorts of EUC environments (Citrix, RDS, AVD, Parallels, and more).

Also, I’ll be doing more community work with Parallels RAS as a Parallels VIPP. It has truly been a pleasure to be a Parallels VIPP for the past two years. With the VIPP program, Alludo simply gets it. They understand their position in the marketplace, they listen to ALL of the feedback we VIPPs give them, whether it is praise or “tough love,” and they act upon those suggestions. It is truly a partnership between VIPPs and Alludo, and when a company listens and supports you, how you could you NOT want to give your all for that relationship and talk about the wonderful things they are doing. Moreover, that community outreach, on blogs and social media, is GENUINE and ORGANIC, not just “contribution stuffing.” If Microsoft was smart, they’d restructure the MVP program like the Parallels VIPP program, with fewer MVPs awarded, who had much more experience in their areas of focus, and less of a emphasis on marketeering.

Whenever I offer criticism, I try and pair it with actionable areas for improvement. It’s easy to take potshots; it’s much harder to propose solutions. So here are some suggestions for Microsoft. As always, I’m not holding my breath that anything will be changed!

Stop with the Azure Uber Alles Bull$h+!

As we now see in recently released court documents, “true” Azure cloud revenue is considerably less than AWS cloud revenue. So, instead of doubling down on licensing games and trying to force your customers into the cloud by introducing “cloud only” feature improvements, Microsoft, why don’t you invest more in hybrid offerings that really have the potential to save your customers money, and let them design their IT infrastructure in a way that truly benefits their businesses? That will build much more goodwill and will increase your growth prospects over the longer term, both in Azure and outside of Azure.

True innovation should be found in your product development departments, not your licensing department, m’kay?

Change the MVP Contribution Model and De-Emphasize Marketeering

If you cull your group of MVPs into just the “Most Valuable Pimpers,” folks in the IT industry will see them as apparatchiks who are solely an extension of your official marketing department, as opposed to independent professionals who are free to offer honest opinions of your offerings, good or bad. As such, those same IT professionals will downrate their recommendations and stop trusting them when making budget decisions.

It would be much better to have a smaller pool of grizzled, veteran MVPs who are free to disagree with your product and business directions, even publicly, because when you *do* get product/market fit right, those MVP opinions and promotions will be worth their weight in gold. Also, genuine non-marketing community contributions (e.g. script libraries, user forum/support, free tools, product testing, etc) should be given higher rank when weighing annual contributions than “Selfie MVP” contributions. Look at how Alludo runs their VIPP program for ideas.

Get Back To Proper Information Sharing and Collaboration

Go back in time 8 to 10 years and start scheduling more product group / MVP collaboration sessions, even outside of Summit, and actually LISTEN to your MVPs, even if feedback is uncomfortable. This requires time and effort, beyond just short briefings here and there about what you’ve already decided to do in the market. If you go back to this approach, your products will be better and more saleable in the marketplace.

Wrapping Up

I don’t regret my time spent as a Microsoft MVP, especially during my earlier years in the program. I was able to shape Microsoft products for the better and I’ve made some lifelong friendships along the way. I plan to continue my work in the Remote Desktop Services and EUC community. When Microsoft does good things and genuinely innovates, I’ll praise them. When they do anti-competitive things or when their marketing doesn’t match up with reality, I’ll criticize them. I hope more current MVPs will take my lead, which could be a catalyst for reforming the program. We’ll see.