Where is the love?

As most of you know, I'm employed by Microsoft as an evangelist. I would not, however, describe myself as a Microsoft evangelist. When I came to the company, I came with a love for technology, a passion for sharing my knowledge with others, and my eyes wide open and ready to listen to anyone and anything. I've still got all that - I've just got a bit more information now to fuel it.

I came from a fairly non-MS background. I was a Windows user, mostly, but from a developer point of view, I was completely out of things. Java, PHP, MySQL - you name it, if I used it, it wasn't from MS. Why was this? Simple, I'd always found it easier to get access to non-Microsoft stuff - mostly through open source communities or my university teaching.

When I arrived therefore, it was up to others to educate, and sell me on the various Microsoft technologies. As such, when I explain the benefits of the .NET platform over the Java platform to a customer, I do so very convincingly, as I made that transition myself. When I talk about Microsoft on the web, I do so from an informed point of view, having come from the other side of the fence. And those bits I don't agree on - I don't try and convince others of.

Likewise, I'm not a brainwashed clone either - I use LAMP on my sites, and this blog's hosted on Google's Blogger, not Microsoft's Spaces. I devour new technology, and want to know as much as I can about everything and anything - but when it comes to actually using some technology to complete a personal goal, I'll use whatever's best at getting the job done.

As such, it's been quite depressingly recently to talk to some tech-savvy, lovely people about various Microsoft technologies, and experience a very negative attitude. It's not that these people don't like the technologies - they don't even seem to take that into account. They don't like Microsoft, and therefore they don't care about the technologies.

I just really, really can't appreciate that mindset. Maybe these people do have legitimate points when they rail against Microsoft's licensing schemes, or MS not complying with standards - I simply don't care. I spend entire days at work talking to companies about what software they should use and how they should use it, but if one of them asks how much it'll cost their company to buy the development tools, or how much they'll have to pay Microsoft for every bit of their product that ships - I have no idea. I leave those questions to the business guys, who know and care about that stuff.

Take something like photosynth. Do you think the guys making that care about the bottom line? That they want to antagonise open-source developers by not conforming to a standard? Of course not, they're a bunch of geeks in a lab having fun making something cool. And I'm a geek sitting at home, looking at what they've made, and thinking it's immensely cool.

I love my job evangelising Microsoft's products, and I love my lifestyle, evangelising any cool technology I see, no matter who it came from. But when people let corporate image matter more than cool bits of code, fancy graphics or clever algorithms, I do sometimes wonder whether it's all worthwhile.