Is Citrix's version of the Microsoft MVP program dead? It's been a year with no action!
It's been a full year since Citrix announced that they would create their own version of the Microsoft MVP program called the "CVP" program.
It's been a full year since Citrix announced that they would create their own version of the Microsoft MVP program called the "CVP" program. (See "Citrix Responds, Plans to Create its own MVP Program" from April 22, 2004 and "The Cultural Differences between Citrix and Microsoft" from April 13, 2004.)
So after a year, where is the program? It was to be headed by Citrix's then-CTO Bob Kruger. Kruger invited me to Citrix's Ft. Lauderdale headquarters in May of 2004. However, before we actually met he pushed that meeting back to June and then back to July. On July 1 Kruger was suddenly no longer employed by Citrix. (Whether he left voluntarily or was fired depends on who you talk to.)
Kruger's departure left a void at the top of Citrix which was partially filled by Tony Marzulli. I spoke to Marzulli's team in September about the CVP program and I was assured that Citrix was working on it and that they would announce something by iForum. iForum came and went in November 2004 with no mention of the CVP program.
All was quiet over the winter until Tony Marzulli left Citrix in on April 1, 2005.
So it's now one year later and Citrix doesn't seem to be any closer to making the CVP program a reality then when they announced it. That's really too bad. Compare this to Microsoft who in the past year met with all the MVPs, collected our feedback, and actually improved their product based on our recommendations. (The Windows 2003 Service Pack 1 licensing notification and policy enhancements and SSL-based session initiation encryption where both things that came out of our meetings with them in April 2004.)
The REALLY funny thing is that I think they would get invaluable input as to what we acctually see out there. I mean just talking to the TS team at MS yesterday we talked for some time at the end of con call about how they have addressed their bottlenecks, at the virtaul address space point, and how 64 bit will take it further, and that their tests with 550 users on a quad, are NOT what 99.9 percent of the users of the TS product really see. Guess what? Liked to hear it, they wanted to talk about what we see, what the perfomance really looks like, etc etc etc.
Citrix might not want to hear about it I guess.
Ron