Well, as a Microsoft employee who wrote some of the manageability tools, I always find these articles humorous. We wrote (and write) a wide array of tools - graphical, command-line, and yes, PowerShell - all of which are designed to give you choices. You can use any, all or none of these tools in any way you wish, and we're just as pleased as we can be when you do. In fact, we have a lot of DBA's at Microsoft, and even while I was helping to write the tools, I volunteered (and still do) as a DBA, so I do the same job many of you do, in addition to my day job. I don't like it when I hear someone say "Microsoft is trying to MAKE us work in a certain way!". Bah. Not even remotely true. We even work hard (nobody's perfect, of course) at making sure you can do just about anything you need to do in T-SQL, SMO, SQL Server Management Studio, PowerShell, etc. That's dictating? Not hardly. We don't make you do anything in a certain way. I've seen people administer and monitor SQL Server with everything from Perl to Python, and from Redgate (who make great products, by the way) to Outlook. That's right - I helped a person the other day that had an entire job monitoring system he built into Outlook.

I take personal offense with the statement that Microsoft does not respect the diversity of our users. We even have an entire team that researches (at a great cost to us, I might add) how and what the amazing array of customers do every single week. They fly all over creation, watching and learning from lots of users, from the small shops to huge companies. These folks have advanced degrees in Human Computer Interraction, Computer Science, and even Psychology!

That research forms the basis of how the tools are put together. While it might not be exactly what you might want or expect in the tool, you might do well to take your own advise and respect the diversity of our users. What doesn't work for you might be perfect for someone else, who uses another language, is sight-impared, or has a different requirement than you do. I think we do a fairly good job given the millions of installations for SQL Server that exist.

It would be useful to remember that the "Microsoft people" are *people* first, many of whom have worked in the industry for years before we joined Microsoft. I was a DBA (yes, I actually still use that term, without shame), developer and data architect, as well as a person who worked with Business Intelligence systems, on Oracle, DB/2 and Microsoft SQL Server. Of course we all do other things - I've done management, documentation, and everything else, but at the end of the day we all work with data.

Instead of accusing Microsoft of being a large conglomerate that doesn't care, grab a blue-shirt at one of the conferences and sit down with them. I think you'll find they are pretty nice folks, and that our only goal is making the system better - for you. We do care - and we work very hard at making the product better, every day.

- Buck