Is it ok to microwave veggies without water instead of blanching them in a pot of water?
My kitchen manager (fine dining restaurant) said that that the only thing a microwave should be used for in a professional kitchen is to heat water.  

Microwaving tends to dry out the outside of vegetables, and hurts both texture and flavor.  Proper blanching takes about 5 minutes once you have water at a boil, and maintains both the crisp, fresh flavor and full texture.  Blanching also tends maintain color better, because the outside of the vegetables heats to the same extent as the inside, and this is doubly true if you use an ice bath to cool vegetables after blanching.

So yes, you are Doing Things Wrong.  That said, we all take shortcuts at times, and microwave ovens do work rather well for thawing frozen vegetables.  With frozen vegetables you've already lost a lot of the texture, so the microwaving doesn't do much further harm.