Today I launched twitter and saw some tweets that mentioned that Jon Skeet was no longer an MVP. Jon no longer an MVP? The very same Jon that has an unchallenged amount of reputation on the user list on Stackoverflow.com, the Jon that you’ll have a hard time not coming across if you browser the popular help outlets for .net related questions? Knowing well that Jon is one of the busiest guys in the .net community, when it comes to helping others out, this came as quite the surprise to me. So I headed over to his MVP blog and he confirms that he has asked not to be reconsidered fro renewal this year.

What came as an even bigger surprise to me was the reason behind it all. Apparently he had asked his employer whether or not it would be ok for him to be renewed this year and was advised that it would not be a good idea. So his employer doesn’t want him to receive recognition for his awesome contribution to the .net community? What business is it of theirs if he gets recognition for something he does on his spare time? Turns out (I can’t say I’ve been following his career) he works for Google and this is when I got a really sad expression on my face!

Of course everything here after are purely my own speculation and conclusions, but it looks like Google didn’t want one of their employees to get a Microsoft award, doesn’t it? It’s no secret that Microsoft and Google are fierce competitors. Microsoft is trying to gain shares of the online advertisement business, a multi-billion market, while Google have started gaining shares of markets that Microsoft have been perusing for years, such as mobile devices and operating systems. Don’t get me wrong, I think that the competition is a good thing for me as a consumer and I even endorse it, but I was hoping it didn’t have an effect on the employees of said companies.

I know a lot of people in the .net community and many of them work for Microsoft. There doesn’t appear to be a problem with people at Microsoft owning Apple hardware such as laptops, iPhones and iPods, not does there appear to be a problem with them using the Google search engine instead of Bing. I hope I’m wrong about this, surly Google can’t be that restrictive when it comes to their employees choice of hardware and platforms?

I hope the people at Google wake up and have a change of heart, Jon deserves to receive recognition for his contributions to the .net community despite who he works for. It can’t have been a secret who he was, what he did and that he was an MVP when he got hired.

Jon Skeet for MVP