The MSDN credibility gap

I’ve been a longtime subscriber to MSDN magazine and its predecessor, MS Systems Journal, and I’ve always liked to read their stuff and learn. The last year or so, I haven’t read more than the columns at the very end, the editorial and maybe something by Michael Howard on security or John Robbins on debugging. For some reason, I don’t trust the rest of the mag.

Today I sat down to read the November issue which is all about security and I tried to figure out and formulate why I couldn’t bring myself to read this highly interesting issue. And I discovered I don’t trust it, which actually surprised me. So how did this happen?

For instance, Stanley Lippman now writes for MSDN. I loved his book on the object model in the C++ compiler, but I don’t like to read anything he writes for MSDN, since a little voice keeps telling me he’s not a “good guy” anymore. He’s fawning all over the new constructs in C++.NET simply because MS is paying him well. That’s what my little voice tells me.

Now, reading the mag and seeing an article about how to write secure code, I sneer inwardly and go “see who’s talking, why don’t you read your own articles?”. I know this is wrong, MS isn’t that bad (they can’t be, can they?), but that’s what my emotions tell me.

So, MSDN magazine has become useless to me, because of all this and I cancelled my subscription.
Am I alone in this largely emotional reaction to MS and this inability to receive wisdom from them anymore?

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