First, everyone likes to think they “own” the attention of the people who gave them a business card or email address. Since those people generally have nothing else of value to them, they guard them, pretend to represent them, extend almost fiduciary duty when talking to others. Naturally, your effort to take the attention of their crowds and put them somewhere behind a wall where their “influence” and “leadership” can’t shine leads to some fighting. So when you start something without getting input of every Bob, Sue and Joe it hits your kneecaps immediately.

Second, what have you done for me? Seriously, you’re an MVP, you’re paid to do all this stuff for me and frankly I am not feeling the love. Oh, you’re not getting paid? Well, still, I don’t see how this does things for me directly. Let me offer you some feedback: I want my questions answered, quickly, professionaly. If I have a followup, I expect to call you on the phone, and I expect you to answer immediately. If I am at a customers site, I expect you to stay on the phone with me until it works. I expect you to send me a shirt, or at least a mousepad, so I can put it on the clients desk and show my affiliation with you. On the second thought, I want my logo and my color scheme all over it and just “Powered by Chris Rue” on it. But make it small. And no web site, because I don’t want my customers to go to you. And don’t you dream about going direct. But you should advertise the crap out of yourself. So in closing, I expect you to market, spend money, give me marketing, do my work for me - and I will just be the trusted advisor that goes in and gives impartial advice to the customer because I am ethical and you’re just a filthy mobility board operator thats paid off by Microsoft. Ok, fine, not paid by Microsoft, but still a jerk.

Now, above is a joke, but its a joke people play on me every single day. Why did you expect it be any different for you? In order to get people to pay attention to you the system needs to work for them, not the other way around.

We’re in a different space now. The good, decent, hard working people that would have appreciated your efforts and gone to the deep end for you are few and far in between. They have been disaffected and turned away by the masses of charlatans posing as IT people, unskilled middleman IT guys crowding the market with their mediocre marketing, dudes that couldn’t get along with their coworkers and let their skills depreciate so they got fired an unable to find another IT job.

So now you get the pleasure of dealing with the same people that couldn’t keep an IT job because they have the personality of a whiny 7 year old, which used to work in the marketplace where an IT guru would sit in a dark room and not expect to have any social graces.

Now they are out and about and you, YOU CHRIS RUE, are not doing enough for them.

The times where peer collaboration existed are long gone, most the people out there are not our peers and the only way to get them is through a filtering group like HTG - but in the open field you get exactly whats out there.

Can you filter out a few good men out of thousands of unskilled pinkslips? I think your own statistics answer that question.

-Vlad