Time to check in on how the Microsoft share price has travelled this week.

And it seems that the announcements at PDC haven’t done much to boost investor confidence. Whilst there was some strengthening during last week, most of that has eroded this week. In a word people are: nervous.

With a P/E in the 11-12 range, the company is a good buy. But emotion rules in the stock market at present.

Following on from our previous post on using Microsoft press releases, comes an example of how sometimes the PR cronies really miss the point.

Here’s an example of how the Microsoft PressPass site can be guilty of pushing out too much shite. Take this post on how ‘Tough Economic Times can be Opportunity for IT Pros‘. This is one of the most shameless pieces of drivel we’ve seen in a long time.

With its catchy title you may think it purports to give advice or strategies on how to embrace opportunities during these uncertain times. No chance. This press release is little more than a listing of some of Microsoft’s upcoming releases. The fuckers at Microsoft PressPass have injected a major credibility killer with this one.

Take a gander at this bunch of hooey:

“We live in a hybrid world of software and services,” Anderson said. “Customers need to choose a path that best aligns with their strengths. Microsoft’s software-plus-services offerings allow businesses to choose, and benefit from both the convenience and security of on-premises software and the efficiency of Web-based services.”

Source: Microsoft PressPass

‘Customers need to choose a path that best aligns with their strengths.’ No shit Sherlock. Thanks a million for that gem.

The release then goes on to list Windows Server 2008 R2, Identity solutions, Dublin and even the TechNet Online social bookmarking site. What a fucking joke. Spare us.

Dear PR hacks, please lift your game. It’s embarrassing.

We’ve copped a bit of criticism for how often we quote press releases here on Microsoft Confidential. And if we’re not doing that then we’re simply link blogging. Etc. Etc.

Sure. All valid. But here’s why we do it:

What you may not realise is that many other Microsoft based blogs do the same. Next time you are reading a post about a new product release from one of the big name blogs, you may want to pop over to the PressPass site and compare the content.

Yes, plenty of times you’ll find that investigative blog post is little more than a press release rehash.

The difference with us is that we are just really up front about it. When you see the quoted stuff in blue, you know it has come straight from Microsoft itself. The rest is all our (added-value <g>) content.

And as for link blogging, yes, no apologies there either. We always add the URL link and attribution, so we don’t see what the problem is. We add our opinion on things, but we never claim to be the originator of news. Quite simply, we aren’t that well connected to be breaking news items.

The reason people are reading us, is because we provide a pretty simple, hopefully readable, up-to-date, list of Microsoft news and views.

Anyway, hope that clears things up.

We’ll be watching

OK, so PDC is over and we are back in the swing of things.

We won’t be dwelling on all the technical issues we had this past week, and the resulting silence on our blog. Frustrating? Very.

There’s too much news to cover. We are back home and back in action and will be going through all our notes and posting updates today and tomorrow. You’ve probably seen most of the news anyway – it was pleasing to see a mini-blogging revival over the last few days.

Maybe it’s just that I’m tired after a bit of travel, or perhaps it’s the downtown smog, but I’m just not in a happy mood this afternoon. The week is ending on a low.

I’m talking of course about the latest stock market news (which I’ve been blissfully disconnected from for the last day or so).

Here’s the damage (in case you too have been out of the loop). The markets are down again! Just when we started to think they’d perhaps hit a bottom, no, they’ve gone further south.

Here’s how they are stacking up:

Microsoft (green) is holding up OK, compared to the Dow (blue) and Nasdaq (yellow), whilst Google (purple) is feeling some pain and Apple (red) is getting smashed.

Surely it must getting close to buying time soon!.

OK, I’ve got to catch up on some sleep now. Perhaps this is all a bad dream.

Well here’s a big surprise.

Bill Gates thinks we’re heading for a ‘fairly significant recession’. He suspects the unemployment rate may even hit 9%.

Scary times? Yeah. Brace yourself.

Sorry to be continuing the doom and gloom.

Yeah, like anyone really cares right?

You’ve seen Dare Obasanjo’s post here.

You’ve seen Michael Arrington’s post here.

You’ve seen Steve Hodson’s post here.

Of course, our post title is meant to be ironic. This is anything but companies fighting. It is individuals.

Anyone care to show some leadership? We’re all waiting.

Kthnxbai.

With all the different codenames flying around in the lead up to PDC2008 it is easy to lose track of what’s what. Here’s a quick summary to set you back on course:

Oslo is Microsoft’s upcoming visual modelling tool. It includes Quadrant (the visual part) and ‘M’ (the modelling language, previously referred to as ‘D’). We’ve discussed Oslo in these posts.

Dublin is a set of enhanced Windows Server capabilities that extend IIS (delivered via the next versions of WF and WCF). The aim is improve deployment and increase the ease of scalability. We wrote about Dublin here.

Red Dog is the code name for Microsoft’s cloud offering for Windows Server and SQL Server. It’s been referred to as EC2 for Windows (EC2 being a reference to the Amazon offering). We wrote about Red Dog here.

Hope that helps.

There’s so many excellent resources online you can easily lose track of them. Thanks to Jeffrey Alexander (who we understand is from Tasmania, part of Australia), we were reminded of the October edition of TechNet Magazine. The November edition is already out (yes, really!), but the October edition is worth highlighting as it concentrates on Hyper-V, with a number of in-depth articles on Management, High availability and general administration (backups, planning, etc).

It’s free.

One thing we really love about the site is that all the editions are available as downloadable CHM files (see the red arrow in the picture above).