We’re not really sure how to take Joe Wilcox’s post on the I’m a PC campaign. He seems to think it is a failure. That’s fine. Because we don’t really tune into his advertising related posts for his opinion anyway.

No, whenever there’s a critical post about Microsoft we tune in to have a good laugh at the comments he gets.

You should too. They’re a hoot. Out come the usual cronies and wackos. Joe really needs to invest in a good moderation tool for his blog.

For the record, we here at Microsoft confidential are big fans of his blog. He may be critical at times (as are we) but he’s always well considered. Keep it up Joe.

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This is one of our typical fanboy posts – we love Raymond Chen’s blog. His writing about Windows and such larks is both enjoyable and informative. Everything you want in a writer.

Ever wondered why Task Manager will let you kill critical system processes? Now you know.

The FAST fiasco continues. Thanks to Joe Tartakoff for alerting us to this article on Reuters that details the latest in the sad story of Microsoft’s acquisition of Fast Search & Transfer (they paid $1.2B in February for it).

Here’s the story from Norwegian police attorney Baard Thorsen:

"We are raiding Fast’s offices now to secure evidence," police attorney Baard Thorsen said. "The charge is for accounting fraud."

Source: Reuters

Here’s a tip for spotting dodgy accounting practices. It’s when comments like this are made that you need to start raising an eyebrow:

.the company said in mid 2007 it would no longer recognise revenues from memorandums of understanding, and instead book revenue only from final deals.

Fast is alleged to have inflated revenue by USD 40M (on a 162M total).

Keep in mind all of these alleged accounting practices happened long before Microsoft got involved, and in all probability being acquired is the best thing to happen to the company (Microsoft is well known for having rock solid accounting and financial practices).

And, just because their directors fucked up the company accounts doesn’t mean that the technology behind the business isn’t worthy. Time will tell.

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Sometimes I think Microsoft has a major split personality disorder.

One one hand they’ll be out spruiking new stuff years in advance (for example the upcoming Visual Studio 2010). And then on the other they’ll be tight lipped about standard release information (eg news about Vista SP2).

They’ll happily talk at length about Windows 7, but they’ll keep  quiet on what this so called Cloud operating system is all about.

Yes, they’ve got to control the message I guess -  but we’re just saying that it can be very irritating and inconsistent.

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Hands up everyone who has a mobile.

Now, leave your hand up if you think Microsoft has a compelling strategy for you and your mobile.

OK, so there’s a few.

Now leave your hands up if you don’t work for Microsoft.

Yep, that’s what we thought – a hands free zone.

We’re the first to admit that we love just about everything Microsoft does. But when it comes to Mobile, we have to agree with Joe Wilcox, Om Malik and many others when they say that Microsoft is letting a major global strategy slip out of their grasp.

Microsoft seem to be at pains to hype up all the ‘cool new stuff’ coming at PDC, especially cloud based and Windows 7 based. But where’s the mobile stuff? There’s nothing there on the PDC Agenda about mobile.

Microsoft is losing ground to numerous other mobile vendors, and with Google’s Android being available shortly, the noose is getting tighter.

Windows Mobile currently sits at 11.5% of market share.

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Yes, the Vista capable case continues to cost both sides thousands and thousands of dollars. Ahhhh – it’s a good time to be a lawyer. (Here’s our earlier coverage that explains what the case is about.)

As Joseph Tartakoff updates us, the discussion has now moved to whether Windows Update is a good medium to send out notifications to potential class members. This has got to be one of the biggest fucking jokes in a long time.

But don’t worry this joke has a lot of mileage left. The legal bill for this will be in the tens of millions and at the end no one will come out at all happy. Microsoft will have learnt a costly lesson in being lax with their marketing – and keep in mind this was just silly little sticker on machines.

And if you’re having trouble getting to sleep at night, just take a few pages of the court filing to bed with you – this little number had us snoozing in no time.

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So little interest in fact, that they’ve seen fit to issue a press release.

“Our position hasn’t changed. Microsoft has no interest in acquiring Yahoo!; there are no discussions between the companies.”

Source: Microsoft PressPass

OK. Thanks.

We’re expecting Yahoo shares to dive even further now, and then a Microsoft offer a few days after that <g>.

Well, using the term ‘open source’ more anyway.

Sure, they’ve been talking about their involvement in open source initiatives for years (CodePlex, MSDN Gallery and others).

But here’s a suggestion. Over the next few weeks, make a note of how often you hear the term ‘open source’ popping up in conversations around Microsoft. Listen to podcasts, blogs, articles and the like. It’s going up as Microsoft attempt to bring down the ‘evil closed source’ arguments that are getting louder these days.

Why? Simply because if you hear ‘open source’ and ‘Microsoft’ associated together enough times, you actually start to consider them as an open source company.

By the way, Phil Haack’s post back in 2006 still has one of the best discussions of what constitutes open source. And his discussion of how this should be incorporated by Microsoft is a great read.

Are we completely insane? Keep your eyes and ears peeled and let us know your thoughts.

We didn’t interview him, nor did we attend any of his events. So, why pretend we’re up to speed with man? Hell, we’ve never even seen him in person.

But that doesn’t stop us keeping tabs on what he’s up to. You should too – he’s one to watch (obviously) and he seems to have a good head on his shoulders.

Go read Joseph Tartakoff’s interview and reports – well worth the read.

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.