Frans gets it too, about communities
I think Frans more or less agrees with me in
his post, although for slightly different reasons, that Microsoft sponsored communities are a mess of doomed kingdoms. I already
said my peace about it.
The only thing I might slightly disagree with is that all Microsoft initiatives are doomed to fail and that the people in the trenches really drive the community. I don't totally think that's true. Like I said, eliminating duplication of effort would be a good start.
I thought GotDotNet was very cool when it started, and my login there is one of the earlierst. I racked up hundreds, perhaps thousands of posts. Then it stopped working because the site was (and still is) a poorly coded mess that doesn't work half of the time. Then I stopped going to the ASP.NET forums because they weren't working half of the time. I guess the reasons there were technical, and not community driven at all!