Microsoft's 'hockey stick on wheels' rolls on optimism • The Register

Microsoft's finance division has a term for an overly optimistic projection that seems to march backward year after year: the hockey stick on wheels.

The hockey stick graph will be familiar to anyone who's seen those wildly optimistic forecasts from companies or consultants promising that, yes, growth may be flat or negative for now – but a sharp exponential rise is just around the corner.

Pretty much every sales forecast tends to have this hockey stick shape because, let's face it, you've got to be an optimist in that line of work.

Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen – long fluent in Microspeak, the variant of English spoken at Microsoft – said on the company's developer blog site: "The Microsoft finance division has their own variation on the hockey stick: The hockey stick on whee