>And I do think that this (possibly) represents a new branch of business/marketing not previously seen from Microsoft - FULL INTEGRATION of "community" into the MARKETING of a product... .NET. And I don't think that this is how businesses, and especially Microsoft, operates (I should say 'operated' in the past).

Probably in what we call, "Agressive marketing".

>The worry/complaint, as I read it, is that this is underway without notification AND is significantly IMPACTING long-established communties and user groups. It's like Microsoft has taken over "community" and is molding it as it desires without even participation of long established (and heretofore most beneficial to Microsoft) user groups and communities. Worse still, many community members willingly helped Microsoft in its building efforts for a .NET community and the reward is betrayal and unwitting participation in a business process.

"Without notification" is also something important. First of all, if Microsoft would have wanted to recognize ongoing and well established effort from various resources in regards to user group structure, they would have at least come to them and let them know in advance of their plans so they would have been able to adjust in order to continue to run as is. And, maybe some of those user group leaders might have wanted to get involved as well in the .NET user group. But, other than that, they are completely doing a major cleanup. They prefer to start with new people with no experience in user group, move away those who have, apply a monopoly on existing local trainings, hide very important information to user groups and other training facilities and all that for people that wish to promote the same things as them in order to have local developers to be better integrated in the MS development technologies and for sharing knowledge.