Many industry watchers think they have caught the foul whiff of a PC sales slump. Their increasingly negative market outlook is beginning to affect share prices of tech behemoths like AMD and Intel. Now, that negative outlook has elicited a very strong reaction from Microsoft.  A slowdown, or mere talk of a slowdown, is the last thing the company needs at this stage. After all, Redmond has been waiting for the PC market to fully recover from a previous slump so it can make the most of Windows 7's phenomenal show.

Bill Koefoed, Microsoft's General Manager of Investor Relations, accused analysts of hastily jumping to conclusions during Oppenheimer’s Annual Technology, Media & Telecommunications Conference in Boston. “I don’t know that I would take two guys that go visit some ODM (original design manufacturer) in Taiwan as a reference on what the market looks like. I would gather a lot of information and then decide what you think that it looks like.”

He is not really alarmed by the constant “chatter” about the PC market slowing down: “You know, whether or not the market’s up or down one month or another, I don’t know, there tends to be, since I’ve had this job, there tends to be a lot of chatter.”

Another top Microsoft executive was also quick to downplay all such apprehensions while speaking at the Pacific Crest Leadership Forum on August 10. Robert Youngjohns, Microsoft SVP and president, North America Sales & Marketing, reminded everyone that besides PCs, “a substantial part of our business in North America is selling infrastructure software like Windows Server 2008, like SQL Server, like System Center, the stuff that runs the enterprise not just the PC.”