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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Valleywag is cutting staff by 60 percent – fuckin’ hell, the (assumed) hard times are hitting everyone. We aren’t entirely sure where the 60% figure comes from since the article itself refers to 19 from the 133 being cut. Whatever. It sucks. Microsoft on the other hand are still looking to grow.

Steve Jobs is fine thank you – rumours of a heart attack for the Apple CEO sent its stock price into a dive. The SEC is investigating.

Dustin Moskovitz is leaving Facebook – don’t worry if you haven’t a fucking clue who he is – we didn’t either – but we should have. He’s a co-founder of Facebook (which you may have heard of <g>) and he’s leaving, along with Justin Rosenstein, to start their own company. There’s a long, boring, marketing bullshit guff email from him about it.

Note, we don’t normally post about other non-Microsoft news, unless, like these it is reasonably interesting.

Here’s the abstract:

Abstract – Is Google the next Microsoft?

Internet search (or perhaps more accurately `web-search’) has grown exponentially over the last decade at an even more rapid rate than the Internet itself. Search engine providers such as Google and Yahoo! have become household names, and the use of a search engine, like use of the Web, is now a part of everyday life. The rapid growth of online search and its growing centrality to the ecology of the Internet raise a variety of questions for economists to answer. Why is the search engine market so concentrated and will it evolve towards monopoly? What are the implications of this concentration for different ‘participants’ (consumers, search engines, advertisers)? Does the fact that search engines act as ‘information gatekeepers’, determining, in effect, what can be found on the web, mean that search deserves particularly close attention from policy-makers? This paper supplies empirical and theoretical material with which to examine many of these questions. In particular, we (a) show that the already large levels of concentration are likely to continue (b) identify the consequences, negative and positive, of this outcome (c) discuss the possible regulatory interventions that policy-makers could utilize to address these.

It’s a deliberately provocative title of course, and in our opinion doesn’t really answer the question, but is still worth the read (you can safely skim read it).

You can skip the first 12 pages of preamble and history and pick up the theme from then on. Rufus reviews market share (on page 13) and it is interesting to see that Microsoft has almost 8% Search market share in the US as of September last year (we were under the impression it was much less). And interestingly Yahoo almost matches Google in Hong Kong. Elsewhere Google is creaming everyone. Also interesting to see is that Australia is included in the data but Europe is not (we’d have thought Australia was too small to be relevant).

The paper has lots of formulas, statistical deviations and other impressive looking shit, but we largely tuned out to these (apologies to any academics reading this, and admittedly it is a research paper so there needs to be heaps of substantive content!)

Section 4 of the paper (pages 15-22) covers an attempt to model the Search Engine Market. This is probably boring for most, but interesting to us, especially in terms of the capital required to support the R&D behind the engines as well as their hosting.

The market structure section (pages 22 onwards) continues with assumptions to do with the correlation between utility and quality, and then further to revenue it generates.

By page 38 we were losing our will to live due to all the formulas, but it was worth sticking with. Section 7 (p38 onwards) asks the question whether there should be regulation on the search engine industry. This is actually an important question because Rufus posits that there is good evidence to suggest that a monopoly position in Search (which is current and likely to increase), if left unregulated will cause problems. Here’s his closing statement (p42):

When monopoly, or near monopoly, does obtain it was shown that there is no guarantee that the private interests of a search engine and the interests of society as whole will coincide – and good reasons to think otherwise. It is therefore likely that search, if left entirely unregulated, will develop in ways that are not always to the bene?t of society as a whole. For this reason it is important that policy-makers start now on the process of developing their strategy in relation to this key area of the knowledge economy. The power rapidly accumulating in the hands of a few major search providers is a great one. It behoves to ensure that it is used in a way that brings the greatest bene?t to society as a whole.

Download the Rufus Pollock paper here. Check out his blog here.

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In a totally unrelated event Steve Ballmer was at the Churchill Club (in Silicon Valley) recently talking about his ‘red dog’ – Project Red Dog that is. Red Dog is basically EC2 for Windows, and is going to be given airtime at PDC in October (here’s Mary-Jo’s notes from April).

He also woffled on about Mobile devices, the threat of Google and how Apple is unlikely to increase market share in the personal computer space because they won’t license their software to others.

Steve rightly worries about Linux in the server space (Especially web servers) with Windows only having 40% of the share.

He has both a red dog and black one on his hands we suggest.

First and foremost, we’re called Microsoft Confidential because it is a cool name and the domain wasn’t taken.

But there’s a second and perhaps more interesting reason. We’ve kept our names confidential. That’s right, we’re not planning on revealing our real names anytime soon. Of course, if this blog gets really famous and we need to ‘fess up in order to collect all the cash that’s another matter.

So, in terms of the content being confidential – probably not, although we will happily report breaking news. If you’ve got a cool rumour (that you can substantiate) let us know.