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Microsoft is less secretive about new products than a company like Apple, and with such large fairly constant revenue from things like Windows and Office, the shipment or degree of success of their other products doesn't seem likely to be that big a factor in near future price of the stock. External market conditions, like the state of the economy and trends with competitors seem to matter much more. The short term impact of Win phone 7 will be more one of mood than the bottom line. They're competing with a free smartphone OS limiting licensing revenue and it would take a substantial market share for search/ad revenue to matter much. Without a huge pool of touch apps and trained users, any non-desktop-binary running tablets would see a much slower adoption rate than the iPad is experiencing and even then what they could get would only capture a small slice of the selling price. And not really being something new, it's hard to see much in the way of surprises from licensing revenue for tablets that are Windows-desktop binary compatible. It seems the innovation there won't be from MS, but primarily from lower power Intel chips making them more viable. And even then, to be hugely popular with consumers, they'd have to be at a not so profitable price point. They'd also be mostly cannibalizing netbook/laptop sales to users bonded to Windows.

The sales don't seem likely to be tied to insider info, but may be viewed as an admission of agreement with the ho-hum view of most outsiders.



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