TC is largely trustworthy. Everyone screws up sometimes (particularly in a high-stakes environment where some people give you bum leads just to watch you make a fool of yourself). One fuck-up out of hundreds of reports does not an unreliable source make.

In this case, I'd say the point is pretty believable. Although you should never trust anything you read on the internet 100%, I think this one is likely to be correct.

Right. The report just seems a bit off. A day after the acquisition, an unnamed source goes to Techcrunch before anyone else? Even if the source does exist, no guarantees they're not lying, deliberately misinforming, or misinformed themselves. (I wouldn't be surprised if HP was trying to light a bit of a fire under Microsoft, or really just gauge potential market reaction à la $999 iPad.)

I'm also somewhat peeved by the title of this submission of HN; no "Rumour:", no "Source:", no "Techcrunch:", just a statement of fact.

I haven't seen any non-TC confirmation of this story yet.

edit: saw a Business Insider piece which basically said "they might do it". No attribution.

I'm giving your upvote back. I'm not much of a TC fan either, a lot of it has to do with that they have a lot of the same tendencies and nuances that mainstream journalism has; namely: rushing to print so often and so frequently that sometimes really unfortunate things happen.

One such was the Last.FM/U2/User data deal.

But this is an unfortunate casualty of reporting, and TC while not immune, still in my opinion deserves more scrutiny from the tech community than they get. Arrington did a great job putting the blog on the Map as a voice in the echo chamber, but it's just one voice.