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Comment by NullPrefix | Hacker News Reader

>a Microsoft employee

So it was a Microsoft employee speaking in a conference being quoted by the press?

Yes. In a single comment that wasn't followed up with more explanation going on a tangent about how the Live Tile APIs will probably be around for a long time so go ahead and develop on them. He wasn't the kind of employee to speak as to such massive trends and make official statements of the future development of Windows overall. Everyone taking this as some statement of absolute fact just ran with that without even wondering what that meant or if the one employee might have been misinformed.

There's 300,000 employees at Microsoft. You think they're all on the same page of everything all the time? This employee wasn't there to speak about the future of Windows, just to showcase how to use the new functionality of Live Tiles. It wasn't some big meeting about the future of Windows by any measure.

There's a reason why often we hear a disclaimer "views are my own, not employer's".

A statement by an official employee has been made, it was widely publicized and never corrected. The onus to correct a false statement by an employee is on the company. With the amount of publicity, Microsoft definitely knew about this false advertisement, but did not want to correct it, because it was in Microsoft's interest for public to believe it was the official truth.

On top of that, the employee was an evangelist

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