Our sources on the WinXP teleconference DoS story get back to us, sounding worried and shamefaced and stressing that it wasn't IDG that published the phone number after all. You'll recall that Jim Allchin's big announcement of the release date of WinXP yesterday was somewhat blighted by huge numbers of people dialing in, thus making it really difficult for idle hacks with short attention spans (e.g. The Register) to get to hear what Jimbo was saying.

So what, we said. When we wrote the story we said we didn't believe it was IDG, and it was all Microsoft's fault anyway, so what's your problem? But our sources are worried about IDG coming down them like a ton of... Well, like a handful of styrofoam pebbles, anyway, if the true story doesn't get out. They now claim it was Bloomberg. Not only that it was Bloomberg, but that Bloomberg contrived to publish the phone number and the login and not mention that it was supposed to be a teleconference for the press.

This is not immediately verifiable, because although Bloomberg's "Microsoft to Release Windows XP on Oct. 25, People Familiar Say" looks like a possible candidate (and doesn't Bloomberg do just the greatest headlines?), they want $2.50 for the text, and we're not that interested.

So it definitely wasn't IDG, it might have been Bloomberg, it might not have been. But we also got a snippet from the tail end of Jim's DoSed conference. We're told he apologised for the difficulties in getting in, and explained that Microsoft had been overwhelmed by demand. They'd been expecting, he said, maybe 25 people or thereabouts.

So to sum up, Microsoft publishes the phone number and the login ID on the Windows XP web site, and despite this expects maybe 25 people to dial in. Maybe they still don't get the Web... ®

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Oops - MS mounts DoS attack on own WinXP telecon