The reverse-engineering of PDC 2005 pass colors

Raymond Chen

Last night, the MVP Global Summit broke up by product groups for dinner. I was at the Windows Client product group dinner. The problem for me was figuring out who were the MVPs and who were just Microsoft employees looking for MVPs to chat with. Unfortunately, the people who made up the badges didn’t think of making it easy to tell who is who. I saw badges of different colors, but they appeared to be coded by product group rather than by attendee status. More than once, I sat down next to someone and introduced myself, only to find that they were another Microsoft employee. (Hey, but I made Robert Flaming do a spit take. That’s gotta be worth something.)

One thing I was able to figure out at the 2005 PDC was the badge colors. Here they are, for reference:

The color-coding by attendee type made it much easier to identify attendees to chat with. Though I somehow have developed an unfortunate knack for picking a table where people aren’t speaking English. At the PDC, I sat down at a table and realized that everybody was speaking Dutch. Unfortunately, although I intend to learn Dutch eventually, it’s a few languages down my list. Last night, at the MVP Global Summit, I was about to join a table but realized that they were speaking in what sounded like a Central or possibly Eastern European language. There’s nothing like an international gathering to make you feel linguistically inadequate…

Raymond Chen

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