It's just a decoy!

That way, when Ballmer does show up and announce that Apple is ditching OS X, Cocoa, and XCode for Windows 7, .NET, and Visual Studio, you'll all be really surprised.

yeah and the iPhone gets Windows Mobile 6.1 and the iPad Windows CE

And people will return them because they wanted XP

Or someone other than Ballmer (like Muglia) does show up.

Maybe my all-time favorite tweet; I bet the MS PR folks are having a good laugh today as well.

Is nobody else wondering at how news stories can dissect, at great length whether code-creation companies still have a business with the iPad but also Apple will suddenly allow MS to use its dev tools on their platform? Confusing.

Paul, I beg of you, pleeeease implement a "merge stories" feature, before it's too late...

Sounds like extra complexity - maybe just have a textarea field when submitting/modifying a story to reference other stories (a list of links, one per line, which the HN engine translates into each link's title as a clickable link)

What a great way to deliver this news! I would have thought that they'd want to let the expectations build more, but if they're going to announce, they couldn't have chosen a more direct, humorous way of doing it.

wait so you mean apple ISN'T going to let ballmer present and go against everything they've done in the last 2 months by allowing their top competitor to exactly what they've just taken a ton of shit from the dev community by not allowing? how shocking...

The whole "just repost some speculation from someone with more speculation" was totally insane.

It's pretty much standard operating procedure for many sites that cover Apple news. Some of them even repost with a "we think this is bullshit, but we'll run it anyway" angle to try and cover themselves. When then thin shred of possibility the original rumor was based on vanishes, they more often than not then write posts about why it was clearly not in Apple's interests for said news to happen. Rinse and repeat.

9 to 5 Mac are the worst at this behavior, but to be honest I'm embarrassed for them all.

  > Steve Ballmer not speaking at Apple Dev Conf. Nor 
  > appearing on Dancing with the Stars. Nor riding
  > in the Belmont. Just FYI.

That's just what 'they' want you to think! Steve Ballmer is going to do his entire speech while demonstration the iPad's new text-to-voice feature! So he won't be speaking at all!

They let a former politician on Dancing with the Stars, I would think Ballmer would have a better shot.

There is one problem with Ballmer being on Dancing with the Stars - he would have to dance with a partner...I think that's part of the rules. As we all know, Ballmer can only dance by himself (and yell "Developers, Developers, Developers").

It's amazing how fast baseless information flies around!!

Even more amazing how fast it gets voted up here. You'd think this crowd would know better. :(

For a minute there, I was actually scared.

It seems Microsoft's tweet has taken Twitter down. It's been unavailable for the past half-hour!

I'm pretty sure he was going to speak. Steve Jobs cancelled because Microsoft failed to keep it a secret.

> I'm pretty sure he was going to speak.

Why?

Highest rated comment on other post:

"Even if the rumour is false (I don't know) I don't find it unbelievable at all, because (a) it makes sense (b) this move would be both typically "Apple" and typically "Microsoft", if you look at the history of these companies. Hell, Microsoft started as a programming tool company."

Hate to say, "I told you so..."