[gm]

Agreed. To me this is a story of lack of professional common sense. When this guy spoke, he spoke as someone with (implied) inside knowledge of both his employer and his industry.

He should have either stressed he did not have inside knowledge and this was his personal opinion, or he should have said nothing. The problem with the first option is that he did have inside knowledge.

Put another way, if he had said something that had affected stock price, he would probably face criminal charges.

That's reason enough to shut the heck up, bite his lip, and let the internet be wrong. All of us with inside knowledge about our employers (specially if our employer is a public company) do that routinely.

[shurcooL]

> He should have either stressed he did not have inside knowledge and this was his personal opinion, or he should have said nothing. The problem with the first option is that he did have inside knowledge.

All in under 140 characters?

[georgemcbay]

Sure, he could have easily inserted "I am not speaking for Microsoft".

Just one tweet saying that before the stream of stupidity would have made things a lot better, though he probably shouldn't have commented on the situation at all on an account identified as belonging to a Microsoft employee and he especially shouldn't have been such a huge jerk in his responses (eg. his why would I live there? comment, etc).

In the grand scheme of things, I think he's probably getting dumped on a bit too much and is taking some flack for becoming the public face for a poor decision (always-on console) that I believe Microsoft as a company fully intended to deliver on(though they may attempt to change course on this if possible given the backlash). But he really did show some poor judgement throughout the whole thing.

[dragonwriter]

> > He should have either stressed he did not have inside knowledge and this was his personal opinion, or he should have said nothing. The problem with the first option is that he did have inside knowledge.

> All in under 140 characters?

Well, the second options works well in under 140 characters (since it takes exactly 0 characters), and the first option (as noted in the grandparent post) has problems unrelated to character limits, so, yes, "all in under 140 characters."

[jlgreco]

Saying nothing is really easy with 140 characters. Anybody should be able to manage that. ;)

[InclinedPlane]

They used to say: "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." Equally important: "if you can't say something the right way within the constraints of twitter, then don't say anything at all."

[yuhong]

I hope that Reg FD will be fixed to consider Twitter as "fair disclosure".