A while ago, I wrote a blog entry on my old blog called Why I’ll Never Be a Web-Guy.  I knew it was an inflammatory piece when I wrote it, but my small audience, where-ever they are, never said a thing.  And so I moved on.

Fast-forward a few months, and I now find myself in the midst of a swam of criticisms after the post was put up on redit by an enraged web-lover (even Jeff Atwood has chimed in).  Note to self: if you want to upset a large swath of engineers, use sweeping generalizations and tell them the technologies they work with require no intelligence and that they must be poor engineers.  In retrospect, there are at least a few lines that I wish I had phrased differently.  But they are my words, and I’ll lie in the bed that I made.  I would have reacted to this earlier, but I’ve been on vacation for the last week.  I will attempt to clarify that post in the next day or two once I have time.

It’s fine for people to criticize me, but what’s upsetting about this is that because I work for Microsoft, people are associating my opinions with that of Microsoft’s in general.  And this is far from reality.  Much of the harshest criticisms I’ve read so far have come from Microsoft employees.  This is a company that, in my opinion, has finally turned the corner in the Internet battle, and it’s disheartening to think that literature such as mine is eroding the good-will that’s been generated recently.  That’s not what I want.  Don’t take my opinions for those of Microsoft’s as a whole – I’m just one of 90,000 employees.

But the lesson I’ve learned from this is that it’s best for me to disassociate my blogging life from my employer as much as possible, and that means that moving to MSDN was not the best ideas.  So I’m going to recues myself from MSDN and go back to my old stomping ground on blogger.  If you care to follow me, the address of that blog is:

http://michaelbraude.blogspot.com/