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Some of you are not going to like this message, so take a deep breath now...I have deliberately split the earlier topic "Perspective" to focus on one issue discussed in that thread that deserves a separate conversation. This statement is what motivated the split:Tom Allensworth, on 15 January 2012 - 10:53 PM, said:"The FLIGHT Team leadership did not state that they would develop beyond FSX, nor did they say they would not. We asked that question directly, for all the obvious reasons. You draw your own conclusions.""Hello Tom,call me stupid but I cannot draw any conclusions from the above. Still in the soup. I don't understand why this secrecy from the FLIGHT Team. I stated this question in another post too"There is a lot of history that comes to mind with a statement like the one I have highlighted. For the old timers here, you will know of what I speak...In the 90's, the MS FS Team had a single spokesman; a single public "face". It was during this period that MS FS 4.5, then 5.0, 5.1, and FS98 were released. Dealing with the MS team, toward the end of the 90's, was a test of patience, especially because of the bottleneck that a single person creates. Add to that Microsoft's policies of silence, NDA's, competitive paranoia, and so on, and the result was an organization so distant from its customer base, it might as well have been working on the moon, or so most believed at the time. I call this period "The Age of Dinosaurs in FS".What slowly emerged was an understanding of what the MS team really did to stay in touch with the dedicated simmers, and their opinions, suggestions, and different perspectives... IN SPITE OF THE DINOSAURS. We realized that some of the team members were avid forum denizens, and looked for feedback on their product via that mechanism, as well as the IRC channels, file libraries, and so on. Because of MS policies, they had to participate in stealth mode. They had always been there. The change that started to emerge was that in background, some staff were talking to us; not on the record, but communicating never the less.Throughout that period, the normal AVSIM reader was very disappointed by the lack of participation by MS in its community of users, and without violating confidences, we could not tell them otherwise. I can remember forum posts made, begging for MS to be part of the conversation with absolute silence in return. You can still see some of those posts from the 2002 / 2003 period.I hate to make this connection as one of the contributing reasons for a change by Microsoft, but I must... My personal opinion today is that the MS team saw the relationship that Terminal Reality, and specifically, Richard Harvey, developed and nurtured through the development, production and follow-on support of the FLY series. The support, the willingness to participate in bug stomping, soliciting ideas for improvements; all were very visibly done by Richard and others on the TRI team, in these very forums. People are still here who witnessed and understand the importance that the participation of Richard and his team brought. Scrounge around and you will see dramatic evidence of that too in the forum achieves. Richard passed away in early 2003, and by the end of the year or maybe early the next, the TRI team had its funding removed and became a paragraph in the history of Flight Simulation.It was at our FANCON in San Diego in 2004 that dramatic changes in direction were taking place within MS. An internal argument appeared to have been won, and MS team members showed up at the FANCON, willing to talk, on record, and participate with the attendees... The Golden Age of the Aces Team was upon us. The realization that users were being listened to and were getting feedback, positively changed the hobby and you can also see evidence of that today in these forums. The DEVCON and the FANCON that followed in Redmond, Washington, in the fourth quarter of 2008 was the last time that the ACES team made an appearance of any degree.Now, nearly ten years later, we seem to have come full circle. The team appears to be closed off and a spokesman (or two) have been saddled with the community as part of their job description.Some readers in these forums have expressed anger, dismay, disappointment, et al, at MS' lack of dialog and their antiseptic press releases as the only method of communication with this community. One way, of course.There are three aspects of this that I believe need to be remembered... ACES are gone and the evident connection with, and participation in, the community have gone with them. As far as I am aware the FLIGHT team are not embedded or linked to the AVSIM community, nor any other in our hobby for that matter. The second point is that with the demise of ACES, the corporate mindset of little, if any, interaction has re-emerged.Finally, I think the third aspect that we need to understand is that Joshua Howard and his team fully anticipated the frustration and downright anger that some have shown toward the introduction of MS FLIGHT. He and his team KNEW what was going to happen, and as history shows, they were right to anticipate the reaction that has occurred in our community. My point? If you know you are going to be in front of a hostile audience, why get on the stage in the first place? Dealing with a hostile minority of your anticipated user "base", and having a product to launch and more important things to do, why invest and indeed, waste, that energy? I can tell you for certain that whether we as a community get on board or not, is not a major concern of theirs. Their eyes are firmly on the market that they are attempting to address with FLIGHT. Like it or not.Some have been asking why only a handful of groups were invited to Redmond in December to meet with the FLIGHT Team and see the product. I suspect that some of us were invited in order to soften the blow to this community of "hard core" simmers that the FLIGHT product and the obvious message it would convey.These are my opinions with a little bit of history thrown in for context. This "silence" is no surprise to me, and I suspect a number of folks who have been around here awhile would agree. MS' attitude toward "hard core" simmers is not a surprise for me either (with all the benefit of hindsight)... A new team, with no connection to our community, focused on delivering a product that can meet and exceed management expectations, and a market size that makes this "hard core" community minuscule in comparison. What other outcome could we anticipate?You can be angry about it, resent the message, bemoan the death of a relationship, and run around with your hair on fire screaming betrayal. You are wasting your energy if you do so. As I tried to say in my "PERSPECTIVES" topic of yesterday; take a deep breath, withhold judgment, and wait to see what really appears on launch day.