Just noticed a post on JGO saying "evangelism" is what the world of Java gaming needs. While I'm sure the poster meant someone publicizing java gaming in a big way, technical evangelism in the corporate world is one of my pet hates.

I've had the pleasure of acting as, working with and receiving speel from technical evangelists in the past. The concept is sound, have someone that really believes in the technology, someone that can see how to apply it to most any situation, someone to get excited and get other excited.

Unfortunately in my experience technical evangelists often lose the "technical" bit and end up just pushing the technology on everyone and anyone with any problem to solve. Really technical people listen and quickly assume one of two things, either:

a) The evangelist is stupid and can't comprehend the problem well enough to see that the technology doesn't fit.
b) The evangelist isn't technical and rather is a marketing and sales person who, as every technical person knows, can't be trusted.

In both cases the the evangelist's point of view is marked as untrusted and the whole point of the evangelism is gone. In some cases it's worse than that, the impression is so bad that the evangelist's point of view is marked as "assumed to be wrong" meaning that the speel actually pushes people away.

Companies, people, countrymen, geeks! Don't employ technical evangelism - stick to the objective and make the product good, it'll work way better at convincing people.