Now that pesky antitrust action is out of the way, it's back to business as usual at Microsoft. The kind and gentle convicted monopolist is now seeking a Developer Evangelist who can: “Demolish competition by knowing everything they do and thwarting their every move in the relevant spaces.”

Now don't go running away with the impression that this is necessarily illegal or anything; they probably just forgot to put 'the' in between 'demolish' and 'competition'. And besides, it's perfectly possible to know everything the competition is doing simply because you're incredibly knowledgeable about your market, and this kind of expertise does indeed equip you to thwart their every move. It's all legal, and needn't have anything to do with bribing the cleaners and rummaging through trash cans. That was Larry anyway, not Microsoft (although, come to think of it, we do recall some high-spirited young lads breaking into the demo area at a Borland conference a long time ago).

Nevertheless the job ad does jar slightly, to the extent that you wonder if it mightn't be a spoof. It can be found if you start at the front door of jobstreet.com.ph and dig around, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the main Microsoft vancancies site, so if it is genuine then it can maybe be put down to local over-exuberance in the Philippines.

But there are still some goodies at the main site. Both the UK and Japan are currently in want of Escalation Managers, which we think is some kind of localised elevator attendant, and a clutch of Developer Evangelists will shortly be hitting a slew of US states. Particularly, we liked the want-ad for the spider king of .NET evangelism, General Manager – Evangelism. “For this job, you should be a senior, battle-scarred veteran of 1 or more platform wars who has the chutzpah to make it happen regardless of the barriers, and the sense to ask for forgiveness when appropriate.”

Given the shortage of battle-scarred veterans of successful platform wars who don't work for Microsoft already, we presume this means the successful candidate will have been on the losing side, and will be expected to say sorry to Microsoft. ®