Technology Evangelists and Technology Zealots

Everyone seems to want to be a Technology Evangelist these days, some of them are, but some of them aren’t. Some of them are glorified sales people, some of them are really zealots.

Let me explain:

The dictionary definitions of ‘Evangelist’ are all Christian and relate to someone who takes ‘good news’ from place to place for the purpose of converting them to Christianity. In technology terms I am assuming that those people who call themselves Evangelists are doing so because they want us to convert to their particular version of ‘good news’.

The thing about an Evangelist is that they believe what they are preaching.

If you want to be an evangelist for something then you need to realise that you need to be in it for the long haul. You can’t just see it as a job, this is something that you believe in. This is clearly not your usual sales person!

Scoble has been talking recently of being offered more money to go somewhere else but he is demonstrating some belief and staying at Microsoft (Can’t find the link, ah). Dave Winer; there’s another evangelist (even if he doesn’t call himself one), he believes in what he creates, he doesn’t just create it so he can make loads of money from it.

A zealot is different. The dictionary definitions for zealot  talk about being fanatical; being part of a sect; being partisan. It’s this word partisan that is the key one. A partisan is someone who exhibits blind, prejudiced and unreasoning allegiance.

I don’t hear of many people wanting to be a technology zealot, but you know what, there are plenty of them around. My arena is primarily the desktop and collaboration arena so it may just be my arena, but I don’t think so.

How many of us have had a reasoned debate on the merits of Notes/Domino v Exchange/Outlook? This one is a great one for the zealots. Mention anything about either technology and you will get some wise-crack answer from the other side. It’s great. Sometimes I enjoy bating them. Both sides miss one huge thing sitting right in front of them though – neither is dominant in the market place for a reason and that is because both are good enough and both have their place. The other thing they miss is that the debate has moved way past them and on to collaboration and neither of these products has the answer to collaboration question. If the answer lay in these two products alone IBM and Microsoft wouldn’t be investing billions in other technologies – as they are. I have experience in both, there are bits of both that I think are terrible, there are bits which I think are great. Ask me which I would choose and I would tell you that it depends – but it doesn’t depend on technical squabbles (I’m faster than you are?) it depends on all sorts of other things. It’s that inability of the zealot to see the bigger picture that ultimately hurts us as an industry.

So what is it about the IT industry that breeds zealots? As IT people we like to think that we are all scientific and business like but that’s just rubbish. The fact that we have Evangelists demonstrates that. This industry is more like a religion to most of the people in it; and the thing about the people in this industry is that they don’t represent the society as a whole. We are a predominantly a small sub-section of people with a particular set of characteristic. I’ve been doing a reasonable amount of interviewing recently and this has been confirmed over-and-over again. Perhaps it’s time that we started a rehabilitation programme for all of us IT people; something that gets us out into society and shows us the bigger picture. Notes v Exchange – who cares. Farming subsidies resulting in thousands of children starving to death every year – now that’s an issue…

I’m off now to have lunch with some colleagues, old and not so old. We’ll talk a bit about technology, but most importantly we’ll talk about LIFE, try it some time.