This month’s meme, a concept created by Tom LaRock (Blog | Twitter), asks the question “What gift do you want Microsoft to leave for you under the tree this year?” Tom put this question up on the 30th of November so we had some time to think about it.  Today is December 5th, my oldest son’s birthday. Since today is his birthday, I have a hard time thinking of anything for myself.  My mind really is filled with the last 11 years I’ve been lucky enough to have such a great son and family that I have.

So, given all of this, what do I want for myself even with wanting everything to go to both my sons and my beautiful wife?  In the last couple of years, my oldest son has grown to question what I do.  He has grown more curious as time goes on, and is learning more and more about data and development in general.  We’ve even talked about what would happen if SQL Server was gone.  For instance, would something like a cloud based object oriented database management system truly take over the traditional database management systems?  My job would drastically change.  Now, evolution of computing is no secret and things will change.  But what I ask for from Microsoft to leave me
under the tree this year is…

Evolve what we have in computing, not out of selfish gains but, evolve so my sons may have a future, if they so choose to pursue it, in the same things I love so dearly.  Act with the future in mind and how it may impact that future.  We need intelligent and precise decisions in order to evolve the right way and allow the generations to adapt to it.  Don’t act as such that forcing a bad decision to force evolution to go down the wrong road causes pain for them. Your decisions really do make that large of an impact on how this will happen.

I don’t ask too much, right?