Tim Rayburn
Tim Rayburn
Lead with grace and be wholly you.

Hanselman joins Microsoft

Hanselborg 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?