I

opened my newsreader last night and there on the top of my “Must Read” folder was

a post from Hanselman entitled

“Blue Badge”. Apparently Scott has decided to take the jump and join Microsoft

in ScottGu’s division. According to him, this is what he’ll be doing:

The HR title is a nice generic one like “Program Manager” (I was thinking to get this

on my business card – Scott Hanselman – progman.exe,

what do you think? 😉 ) but in essence I’m going to talk about .NET and Visual Studio

– the whole of DevDiv, including ASP.NET, WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, CLR, LINQ, IIS,

DLR, .NET CF, everything. This means videos, screencasts, podcasts, maybe some Channel

9 stuff, doing articles, wikis, speaking at conferences and large events (invite me!),

creating starter kits, samples, as well as my regular hobby of plugging things into

other things. I’ll also be working on understanding our community (that means

you, Dear Reader)thr ough conversations, visits, and trying to bring

some big picture analysis (the kind of stuff I do now, again) to the .NET 3.5 and

.NET Futures stack. I am also obsessed with getting my new Apple Newton Messagepad

2000 to sync with Outlook 2007, so watch for that.

Personally I’m absolutely thrilled to hear this, because Scott is so very good at

communicating things about the .NET Framework and things developer. I also find

it funny that he created the image above because he knew that the Borg joke would

be made. He’s right of course, people will say he’s going to become faceless,

nameless, and simply join the “Evil Empire” but in reality shouldn’t we be thrilled

that Microsoft wants to hire someone who is so community focused as Scott?

I often give the Linux community crap about hating Microsoft and a reflex, no basis

just a reflexive “Microsoft == Evil” embedded in their psyche. Yet most (certainly

not all) of Scott’s readership are Microsoft .NET developers, because that and gadgets

are what he talks about most often, and yet I expect that many of his own readers

will relate this to the Borg as he did. Why is this?