With his pierced eyebrow and hair past his shoulders, Leo Artalejo doesn't immediately strike you as an emissary of Bill Gates, until you realize he shares both Bill's optimism about technology and his insane work hours. But Leo feels no need to defend his hip look. He explains that in the rapidly expanding world of Web development and publishing, the man in the grey flannel suit is not necessarily the right one to represent a cutting-edge company.
Leo is less likely to arrive at a developer's office with a briefcase than with a video camera. His skills as a video producer have become an important part of Microsoft's evangelical strategy for its Web platform. World Wide Live, broadcast from Redmond around the world, features Leo and other Microsoft techies explaining Internet Explorer 4.0 technology on a set that resembles a Jetsons-meets-Cocktail-Nation combination juice bar and cybercafe with a Letterman-style band that plays between presentations. Station breaks consist of tightly edited videos of third-party developers enthusing about their development experiences over techno soundtracks. The entire show is produced and performed by actual members of the Internet Explorer platform group in an attempt to overshadow any lingering memories of Microsoft as the stuffy corporation that dismissed the Internet as a "fad" not long ago.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer evangelists are on a mission to change that image in the hearts and minds of the people who build the Web, as well as to determine emerging technology needs. In the past year and a half, Microsoft has turned around, moving from trivializing the Internet to threatening to own the Internet, counting heavily on evangelists to get the message out to the right people.
Evangelists spend one week each month traveling and meeting with everyone from marketing execs representing online publishers to senior engineers writing code. The role is not to preach to leading programmers and Web designers about how great Microsoft technology is, but to learn how well (or not) Microsoft's emerging technologies are meeting the audiences' needs. Prospective evangelists need to understand that they, not Bill Gates, represent Microsoft to the developers and companies.
A solid technical background is just the beginning of an evangelist's requirements, according to Leo. Communication skills and an ability to react and adapt quickly to wildly changing schedules and situations are crucial. "You have to be able to sit down with developers and fix bugs ... talk to CEOs, CTOs, marketing people, game writers, or developers writing low-level device drivers. It might be Netscape or a mom-and-pop company," says Leo. "You have to constantly be figuring out, 'What's the right way to communicate with this particular audience?'" he adds. "You have to be a sort of technical renaissance person."
The climate at the home office can be as varied as the job, as the company grows rapidly with talent from across the board and around the globe. Leo makes Microsoft meetings sound less like Dilbert and more like Babylon 5. "There'll be a pierced guy - that's me - next to a guy in a turban, a barefoot hippie, another guy in a two-piece suit, and a stereotypical yupster who just parked her Grand Cherokee out front. By the end of five minutes, though, we're all scribbling on the whiteboard and just focusing on the platform we're trying to improve."
Most of Microsoft's 30 evangelists operate from Redmond, but there are also offices in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Although it's been more than two decades since the company was founded by two college students, and there are now 22,000 more employees, the company is organized into small teams that control their own budgets and are created or folded according to changing opportunities. Changing affiliations and careers inside the company to maximize your own potential is encouraged. Leo started as a programmer on MS Word two years ago, then switched to recruiting on college campuses before finally finding his personal niche as an evangelist for Internet Explorer.
Microsoft is always looking for qualified evangelists and has several openings at the moment. The platforms around which the teams are currently organized include Internet Explorer 5.0, Microsoft Java VM, Windows NT 5.0, the Direct X gaming platform, and, of course, Windows 98. Pay varies widely according to experience, but it's highly competitive - as you might guess - and comes with those enviable Microsoft stock options.
Still, it wasn't his portfolio's increasing value that excited Leo this summer. It was getting the go-ahead to rip out the entire stage set of the previous World Wide Live shows, repaint the walls, install new furniture, and shoot on-location documentaries of the work his clients were doing. "The previous settings were a little too Eddie Bauer for the Web community," Leo chuckles, explaining the modus operandi of a successful evangelist: "We took the content of a dry technical event, and turned it into entertainment."
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
