> Did you agree to such micromanagement in your contract?
No, funny thing with TechEd - there's a million different people involved in running it, none of whom appear to know anything about the others. So you sign the contract, which is fairly innocuous, and then the crazy emails start trickling in, one at a time.
When I talked to my MS track leader about it, even he didn't know about all these meetings and the departments that we're requiring them.
At one TechEd, just after the Surfaces had been released but no technical details were out yet, I found myself in yet another mandatory speaker meeting. We were told that we weren't allowed to answer any questions about the Surface, and that instead we were to just say, "I'm very excited about what's coming."
I'm a SQL Server community guy, not an MS employee, not a Surface advocate, but that meeting was mandatory. That was the last straw.
