Posts by Paperghost 3 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Oct 2009
"I've dealt with all sorts of MVP responses when dealing with Microsoft brand issues. While I haven't experienced any evangelism I sure as hell haven't experienced anything approaching "expertise" either."
As long as everyone understands that not every MVP deals with "brand issues" on a "let me help you out with this incredibly convoluted series of posts" type of affair - I simply obtained mine because someone, somewhere in Redmond thought the security work I'd done warranted a "thank you" from them and don't actively do anything to keep the award or mess around in help groups - then I have no problem with that. It's the broad, sweeping "must be an MS fanboy / evangelist / whatever" line of thinking that seems to descend into insults in discussions such as these that I take issue with.
also, certain geographical regions now encourage people to self nominate for an award which is a *terrible* idea and a few years ago would never have happened. With policies such as that in place it's no wonder many peoples experience of MVPs isn't a particularly brilliant one, because I can guarantee that self nomination idea has probably bloated the ranks with people of questionable talents. There will always be a (very) sharp imbalance with regards MVP skills, and some will be very good and some will be terrible.
more often than not, this depends on the geographical location, which department decided to nominate, whether the person self nominated and whether the overall pool of people who do work in their specific area were actually any good to start with.
"MVPs are little more than Microsoft evangelists".
As an MVP myself (consumer security) I have to take issue with this.
I am *not* an evangelist for Microsoft - in fact, more often than not you can see me criticising many of the silly and vaguely horrible security mistakes they make in a lot of their products. To insinuate I'm some kind of cheerleader for MS is a bit of a joke. Interestingly, the mere mention of the award is enough to make some people foam with rage over imaginary Microsoft smear campaigns:
http://bit.ly/19isvE
Happens a lot. I rarely mention my own award, because I find too many people either misunderstand what the award is or resort to crazy ad hominem attacks with no basis whatsoever. Sad but true.
Oh, and by the way - not only do I *not* post in Microsoft newsgroups (I couldn't think of anything more boring, but fair play to anybody who does) - I was given my award for work done on a security exploit that affected Linux Apache servers. Quite how that equates to an award related to Microsoft products I'm still not certain, but a rabid Microsoft cheerleader I most certainly am not.
Cheers.
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