I don't care for a lesson on the history of VFP managers. "Program Manager" or "Product Manager" I don't care what title you slap on it. All I know is that Milind Lele was supposedly "the" guy now since he was the one doing the "Monthly VFP News" which we all know was never monthly nor on time.
My point still remains...as far as I'm concerned, Milind never cared about the VFP product or community and in some ways I don't really blame him given the position he was in. How's this for an entry to the VFP News...tell everyone who reads it that he's not in a full time position as "whatever Manager" for VFP and that they shouldn't have expected any news on a monthly basis. Tell them that he's not going to actively update the "News" which was pretty self evident. The very least he could do was say "so long and this is the final log entry" then turn out the lights. Who knows, maybe there's still time.
I can't help but feel that he's slipped out he back door wearing a fake mustache and sunglasses and giving a big sigh of relief. Not a very classy image at all.
>Yet another post that mixes jobs. Program Manager and Product Manager are not the same. A Program Manager is more like a project manager. His job is to keep everyone working and on schedule. Randy Brown was the Program Manager for a very long time. The Product Manager is the marketing guy. That's what Ken did. Robert Green was also the Product Manager for a few years. As Product Manager, it was Ken's job to be the face of VFP.
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>Milind technically replaced Randy as the Program Manager. But for Milind, it wasn't a full time job. He had responsibilities on another team too. He inherited some of Ken's repsonsibilities when Ken left. The monthly letter was one of them, but pretty much all other things were just let go and not filled.
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>Milind came into VFP from the outside, so learning the community was one of the things he had to do. But...knowing that VFP was going to be put to rest, and being the PM as a secondary part of your job, how much effort would you put into it?
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>There is no VFP team anymore. There is no time allocated to any former team members to do anything with VFP. If a monthly message were posted, Milind would have to do it on his own time, to a community that he was in for a very short time, and on a part time basis. What news is there to say? Microsoft is doing nothing with VFP now. There is nothing new to report.
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>VFPX is where things are happening. It's a community effort, not one from Microsoft. If you want the latest news on VFP, then subscribe to some blogs from Rick Schummer, Doug Hennig, and Southwest Fox, and others. That's where things are at now.
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>>Once upon a time, if I'm not mistaken, there used to be a monthly update via a news letter from the VFP Program Manager posted on the VFP homepage. I see that the most recent one was done back on April 2009 by the current(?) Program Manager, Milind Lele.
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>>Now I know VFP is at a dead end in the eyes of Microsoft so I shouldn't expect much in terms of "news" to be posted. The thing that really irks me is that while I can understand and live with their decision to pull the plug on VFP, why didn't Milind at least make a post there/somewhere to say farewell? I mean, part of the reason VFP was a success and continued to grow despite the attempts to give it a premature death, was the very close knit community. That community involved the personnel at Microsoft too. It seems to me that since Milind was brought onboard, he never really got involved. Perhaps I'm wrong, but, I've never seen him do the types of things that a guy like Ken Levy did (like keynote speeches, active blog entries about VFP, etc). I don't think Milind "ever got VFP" or wanted to and was simply the guy who drew the short straw when it came to finding a replacement for Ken.
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>>I'll admit that I don't know anything about Milind as a person and he could be a really "good" guy. It's just that to me, he never seemed "into it" as the Product Manager. He seems to me to be there just to fill a space. I could just picture him at Microsoft trying to keep a very low profile regarding anything related to VFP. I can say the same about Ken Levy in that I don't know him as a person, but Ken surely knew how to behave :) Another noteworthy individual was Calvin Hsia. He used to blog constantly about VFP stuff. Over the years, I could see that Calvin was slowly moving into .NET, but, his transition was an observable, gradual swing. Even when Calvin was full blown .NET, he'd blog about converting a VFP app/snippet into .NET. My observation is that Milind seems to be the complete opposite.
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>>Now if you're saying Milind is just a quiet kinda guy and that's the way he is, how do you explain his very active role as Program Manager of the Visual Basic Team at:
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http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/tags/Milind%20Lele/default.aspx and
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http://blogs.msdn.com/vsdata/archive/2008/10/28/visual-studio-2010-ctp-available-by-milind-lele.aspx>>
>>Keep Googling and he's all over VB.NET. I can see he's "into VB.NET". I can see he wasn't a VFPer and in my mind, Ken was the Microsoft face for VFP and always be.
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>>Just my 2cents FWIW.
