Exclusive: TheStreet.com's Tech Exclusives Are a Crapshoot
TheStreet.com's Scott Moritz has an exciting exclusive: Northeast Securities analyst Ashok Kumar has learned that Microsoft is working on a Microsoft-branded phone based on its Windows Phone 7 Series OS.
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands mid-speculation-cycle: weeks after PPCGeeks reported Windows Phone 7 details emerging ahead of Mobile World Congress, and months after 9 to 5 Mac argued Microsoft would field two iPhone competitors in 2010, TheStreet.com's Scott Moritz runs an 'exclusive' sourced to a single analyst — Northeast Securities' Ashok Kumar — saying Microsoft is building its own Windows Phone 7 Series handset.
Technologizer's point is about the sourcing, not just the claim: the piece labels Moritz's tech exclusives a crapshoot, and the same reporting surfaced at TheStreet under a different framing ('Microsoft, Asus Team on Phone'), which says more about how thin the underlying sourcing is than about any confirmed Microsoft hardware program.
First-order effects
- Microsoft and its Windows Phone 7 hardware partners — Asus by name in TheStreet's own version — face renewed speculation that Microsoft would compete against the very OEMs the platform depends on, an unconfirmed claim from one sell-side analyst rather than any company statement.
Second-order effects
- When a financial outlet can convert a single analyst note into a market-moving 'exclusive,' other mobile reporters are pressured to chase the same rumor mill, and Microsoft gets pulled into a reactive cycle of denying or ignoring hardware plans before it has announced anything.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, analyst-sourced scoops become a substitute for actual reporting in tech-finance coverage — trading speed and exclusivity for reliability, and letting unconfirmed claims shape expectations for products like Windows Phone 7 before launch.
The trend: Mobile-industry news in 2010 is increasingly driven by single-analyst exclusives that blur the line between research opinion and reported fact.