Unfortunately after nearly 17 years (first awarded October 2001) of being re-awarded the MVP Award year over year for an ever name changing space around Windows Server Directory Services I was not awarded this year.
While the book, blog, and tools are as popular as ever and the questions continue to roll into my inbox at a high rate of speed I was told that my contributions do not reach the level of being re-awarded. I am only guessing but I do believe it is a bit more than that because my contributions have been pretty constant year over year for the last decade. What I think is different is that the goals and direction of Microsoft has changed significantly enough in the last 2-3 years that I no longer fit the mold they want/need for their MVPs to push forward their desired goals.
Obviously this is perfectly ok as it is their program and they can do anything they like with it regardless of what I or anyone else thinks about it. Perhaps our ships will realign again at some point, perhaps not. I never tried to get the award at any point[1], it just so happened our work was aligned for a period of time. We are no longer so well aligned so it makes sense from that angle. 
Do not worry, I will continue to work on and release tools and still put tech posts here as I can. Again this wasn’t a change in any way shape or form on my side. 
joe
[1] Funny story. When I was first approached about the MVP Award I told Microsoft to go away and leave me alone, I wasn’t interested. I was doing a lot of work in the NNTP newsgroups (so much better than Web Forums IMO) helping out Microsoft customers who were trying to fix their systems that were being compromised and hacked left and right with Nimda and Code Red. I was also helping people set up secure Active Directory environments and many others who were struggling to deal with scale that clearly wasn’t considered in the tools from Microsoft. I thought Microsoft was trying to “pull me in” and get me to sign an NDA to shut me up. I spoke to the MVP Leads at the time for a while and they promised me that what I was thinking wasn’t the case and I should try it out and I could get out of the NDA agreement at any time I chose. I was happy to see that they really didn’t try to censor me though over time I had to admit there was self-censoring going on because of concerns around what I could prove I knew myself versus what was heard via the NDA discussions and it became even harder once I started beta testing the MVP Source Code access which I have had non-stop since roughly 2002/2003. I admit I will really miss that one benefit though I was able to reverse a lot of functionality in the products long before I had source access; it isn’t rocket science – you just have to pay attention.
