From Minstrel to Heretic

It was the early 2000s and I was sitting there with a massive brick from Microsoft Press.¹ The proud price back then: 129 Deutsche Mark. I flipped through it and felt a déjà vu: I knew these pages! Not in terms of content, but the layout, the structure, the examples, even the icons in the side notes: These were the lost manuals of the 1990s!

Okay, for the younger generation, I’ll have to explain: Once software used to come in boxes. Big ones with printed books inside. At first, thick ring binders. Later, massive volumes printed on thin and razor-sharp bible-like paper. Overnight, these vanished. First to CD-ROMs, then into the still young internet.

This was the exclusive MSDN membership.² A club for those willing to pay four-figure sums annually for Microsoft developer programs performing for the corporate crowd. It was the forerunner of today’s subscription models and paywalls. Luckily for students, it was (almost) free with a university ID and even allowed for commercial use.

So there I was, holding these lost manuals rebranded as training material, with that nagging, unshakable feeling: Something’s off.

Welcome to the Vendor Cult

Microsoft courted developers intensely, speaking of technological partnerships, sending invitations to their roadshows and product launches. Together we conquer the world and the new millennium! We developers were the key. The now-legendary “Developers, Developers, Developers!” outcry from Steve Ballmer in 1999 comes to mind.³

I was in my early twenties and believed it all. At the release of Windows 2000, Microsoft stood at its technological zenith. I followed the invitations and was convinced that being a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD)⁴ would help me land projects and clients more easily. In today’s Microsoft lingo, that’s roughly equivalent to an “App Builder.”⁵

But clients didn’t care. They wanted problems solved. Nobody ever asked to see a certificate. Even fewer were willing to pay higher rates because of one. When I tried to raise this point with an “Ask the Expert” at an event in Karlsruhe, I noticed an atmospheric shift. From open, encouraging and friendly to cold, guarded and cautious.

There it was again that uneasy feeling. Something wasn’t right.

Am I Exploited?

Back then, Microsoft exams were product-bound. Windows Server 2000? Sorry, 2003 is just released, throw more money and time at it and come again. Though the concepts barely changed. Same with the Win32 API. The holy cow of backward compatibility prevents real evolution till today. Every Windows 11 or 2025 Server still builds upon the unchanged MMC with its Snap-Ins from 2003.⁶

Here’s one tiny programming example: You can’t create Windows services with full description text in one go. There are no methods for that in the .NET Framework. You have to go down to the Win32 SCM API⁷, use CreateService() to create the service, and then call ChangeServiceConfig2()⁸ on the same handle to set the description. Note the “2”, there’s also a plain ChangeServiceConfig(). All wrapped in a nest of security checks, because CreateService() might have failed earlier, and your app will crash the moment it hits a null handle.

To this day, the following heuristic holds: Empty description fields in Windows Services tell you a lot about the developer or vendor.

I can’t recall ever learning such details from any exam or manual. Even not from “the Petzold”,⁹ the Win32 reference Bible. You only learn such things through hands-on experience in environments, where stability and quality matter. I found it increasingly difficult to associate these with products from Redmond.

That uneasy feeling again. This can’t be normal.

Certified Incompetence

Somewhere between 2005 and 2007, the penny dropped: Being a certified Microsoft Partner was like being a member of the medieval church. You paid your tithe, joined the congregation, and got excommunicated at the moment you dared to ask questions.

And the certificate itself? Well, it tested your knowledge of features, never your understanding of architecture, code quality or something as radical as common sense.¹⁰

Over the years, I met plenty of people who collected exams like Pokémon cards but whose code lacked a single “try..catch” exception handler¹¹ and who’d never heard anything of SRPs¹². One day they swore by Silverlight only to watch Microsoft bury it on another day.¹³ Then came Metro, then UWP, then WinForms and then… whatever came next.

This parroting of trends, this chasing of erratic product politics, it’s not normal. For a business it’s downright toxic.

Lost my Faith

Today, many years later, I see it clearly: What I acquired back then wasn’t knowledge. It was an act of loyalty disguised as a certificate of competence. Not education, but indoctrination, value added for Microsoft, not for us.

Since 2007, I’ve quit all memberships and partner programs. This photo of my home office documents the last version of Windows I ever used productively. I skipped the leap to Windows Vista entirely.

Ironically, I still solve problems involving Microsoft technologies and infrastructures. The difference now: I follow the client’s needs and aim for sustainability and real problem-solving free of product politics, free of that religious vendor cult.

The lost manuals of yesteryear still sit on my shelf. A reminder of a bygone era and a warning, never again to work under such vague, uneasy feelings.

Now my tech stack and toolchains are open and can’t be locked away by anyone. Unlike what recently happened to many Microsoft partners.¹⁴

Now I sit here with a coffee at my GNU/Linux workstation, working with and on free software, standing on the shoulders of giants, countless open solutions, for the good of the community.

It’s been a long road, but now everything finally feels right.

Yours,
Tomas Jakobs