Earlier this year, I received a mysterious invite to spend a day at Microsoft to talk about the IT Pro* community and Microsoft. It was sufficiently off the wall - phone call from some admin with a followup email - that I pursued it. I found they wanted me to be one of three panelists to talk about data center consolidation - and the other two were Microsoft Vice Presidents! I backed away from that panel in a hurry, being both unqualified to speak about datacenter consolidation (even without VPs) and on the express train to an RGE (resume generating event) by being an Intel employee pontificating with MS VPs! So many of my professional colleagues I know from speaking and writing were invited - Mark Minasi, Darren Mar-Elia, Gil Kirkpatrick - we began joking about them closing the doors and turning on the gas :). There were also prominent bloggers from ZDNet, university people, and journalists present.
They let me go despite my panel decline, and the trip even tied in nicely with an already planned campus trip for the Longhorn (now W2K8) Technology Adoption Program. It was held in the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center, a very posh place - all the free espresso drinks you could want. And the "conference room" we were in was filled with leather sofas for seating; not a task chair in sight.
One of the day's discussions centered around Microsoft's involvement with IT Pros and what they could do to improve their relations. This was a worthwhile discussion because for most of its history Microsoft - being a company full of developers - has been much more developer focused than IT Pro focused. What really made it special is that the 50 or so of us invited guests shared the discussion with Steve Ballmer (CEO in case you didn't know), Bob Muglia (Senior VP), and Ron Marsevitch (VP). They listened, asked a bunch of good questions, and took down notes to follow up on. Well, what was interesting is that they themselves didn't take down notes; they had minions from their entourage in the back that took a note whenever they raised an eyebrow :).
To round off the day, we went to dinner with the VPs at Columbia vineyards in Woodinville just north 
of Redmond. My friend Mark Russinovich, who had recently joined Microsoft as a Technical Fellow, showed up for the free food and drink :). I shared a table with Bob Muglia, Gil Kirkpatrick of NetPro, Karen Forster of Windows IT Pro, and a couple other interesting folks. Gil was able to give Bob visibility to Gil's DEC (Directory Experts Conference), the premier industry conference for directory service people. Many of Bob's own employees are regular attendees; in fact the conference has a huge attendance from Microsoft. It's not often you get to have dinner with such an interesting group!
*IT Pro is one of the two major categories Microsoft splits its customers into. (The other is Developer.) IT Pros generally don't write code; instead they evaluate and deploy Microsoft products in the enterprise.
