Today is a sad day indeed. The first thing I was reading this morning was a Facebook message from my good friend, Oscar: “Hey buddy, did you see the news?”.

I didn’t know what it was all about so I checked news channels first, slowly waking up and taking first sips of the coffee. As everything was still, I grabbed my Surface and started reading through my mails. This revealed what Oscar meant at the first place. I received a pretty nasty mail from the Microsoft Learning Advanced Certification.

We are contacting you to let you know we are making a change to the Microsoft Certified Master, Microsoft Certified Solutions Master, and Microsoft Certified Architect certifications. As technology changes so do Microsoft certifications and as such, we are continuing to evolve the Microsoft certification program. Microsoft will no longer offer Masters and Architect level training rotations and will be retiring the Masters level certification exams as of October 1, 2013. The IT industry is changing rapidly and we will continue to evaluate the certification and training needs of the industry to determine if there’s a different certification needed for the pinnacle of our program.

This means that Microsoft Learning is effectively killing the MC(S)M / MCA program. No matter what reasons are behind this decision, this is a major slap in a face toward the community, the people that invested a lot of time, money, blood and guts to reach these achievements. Thank you, Microsoft Learning.

So, what now? I don’t have this answer yet. I hope that at least the community will try to stick together and keep in touch. The Master training, although expensive one, was the only technical training worth of investing time and money into. Now it is gone.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

P.S. It is worth of checking an excellent article Radi Atanassov already wrote about this topic:

http://www.sharepoint.bg/radi/post/The-fall-of-the-Master.aspx