But ultimately, "the truth is, Microsoft competes in a lot of new areas, and in those areas, they're generally more open than the competition, probably because they're far behind and want to win developers' attention and trust. In the traditional desktop software market, which the [Comes v. Microsoft Inc.] case seems to largely address, they may still be closed and proprietary, but it's hard to argue that this market hasn't been largely supplanted by Web 2.0 anyway."

Another expert on developer evangelism said that if Microsoft really does treat its third-party developers as "pawns" and "one-night stands," as it is being accused in the ongoing Iowa anti-trust case, it would be outside the industry norm. he was referring to comments by one-time Microsoft evangelist James Plamondon.

"If you've ever tried to play chess with only the pieces in the back row, you've experienced losing, OK, because you've got to have those pawns," Plamondon said in a Jan. 16, 1996, speech to members of Microsoft's developer relations group. His comments were part of a transcript presented as evidence in the Comes vs. Microsoft Inc. class-action lawsuit in Iowa.

"Technical evangelism is not about manipulation," said Frederic Lucas-Conwell, a consultant with SiliconValley-based Growth Resources Inc., who presented a survey on technology evangelism at the first Global Network of Technical Evangelists (GNoTE) conference in December (download PDF).

"It is not also about managing others. If this is what a company is doing, this has to be compared with a Machiavellian style of manipulation and management."