I never took Microsoft exam but I took a lot of brainbrench exams. 

All the microsoft certs, cisco certs, oracle certs were hot a few years ago but not anymore.  It is because many employers found out when they interviewed a candidate holding the cert, that person was not better than the candidate without a cert.  

I used to work for Xerox.  All the field engineers requried to have MCSA cert.  They just read the book and took the exam.  Everyone of them got the cert but some of them did not even know how to turn on a computer !

I guess that is the reason why the value of the cert went down.