A year ago, I completed my MCSD for .Net. One of the attractive
benefits of this certification (as well as the MCDBA) was a $500
discount on a one-year MSDN Universal subscription during the first
year of certification.

Although the MCSD benefits page still lists this benefit
(http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/mcsd/benefits.asp), they
quietly removed it as of April 2005. The text on the page still
states the following:
Rebates or discounts on a one-year subscription to MSDN during the
first year of certification.

If you call or write to get the certificate as I did, you'll get the
terse response it's no longer available, and they just haven't
updated the site. I figured I would help them get the word out since
they didn't deem it important enough to change on their site or
announce. It would be a shame if anyone expected this benefit based
on the MS web site information.

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Above is what I posted to our local .Net community group on Yahoo. Now I am going to add some personal comments. Once again, MS has dropped the ball in supporting the developer community. Earlier this year, MS announced the MSDN Universal would not include the new .Net Team Development system (or some name like that -- I am too lazy to go look it up). Fortunately, enough of an uproar went out that they reversed that decision. Their waning support of VB also caused a petition/uproar. Likely, since the MCSD/MCDBA community is a lot smaller, there isn't likely to be a huge outcry on this issue.

This is a HUGE mistake on MS's behalf. Someone that is likely to spend the extra time and money to get certifications are the ones MS should really cater to. There's always been a criticism that the certifications are worthless, and that benefit alone made it real easy to justify spending the money on books, training materials and exam costs for achieving the certification. I won't argue the merits of the certifications here, but I have a lot of them -- MCP, MCDBA, MCSD for VB, MCSD for .Net (C#), and MCAD. Will I continue? I may have to given I am an Independent Contractor and it helps to get me in the door. Will I recommend it to someone not in my position? Not likely.

Don't get me wrong, the MSDN Universal is still a great deal. My disgust over this situation is that the benefit is still listed, as well as no announcement in April 2005 when they made this decision (or if they did, I sure didn't see it). I have been one of the most stalwart supporters of Microsoft over the years, and I have personally been involved in projects which have generated millions in licensing revenues for Microsoft in the last 10 years. The past 1.5 years I have watched MS anger the core base of developers.

I think this is indicative of the internal problems at MS, and why Google is going to be a viable competitor to MS. In a paraphrase of the words of Stephen King, and the Dark Tower series, MS has forgotten the face of their father. One of the reasons MS dominated the market over Apple was that MS supported developers way beyond the norm. In the name of profit, I think we are seeing this slowly change.