Microsoft finance slang defines the eternal optimist: The 'hockey stick on wheels'

The wheels on Copilot's hockey stick must be giving off smoke by now

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 wheels."

"Consider a team which presents their forecasts in the form of a hockey stick graph," said Chen on Tuesday. "They come back the next year with their revised forecasts, and they are the same as last year's forecast, just delayed one year.

"If you overlay this revised hockey stick forecast on top of the previous year's forecast, it looks like what happened is that the hockey stick slid forward one year.

"When this happens, the finance people jokingly call it a 'hockey stick on wheels' because it looks like somebody bolted wheels onto the bottom of the hockey stick graph and is just rolling it forward by one year each year."

It sounds a lot nicer than another variant often trotted out to describe charts where the hockey stick keeps being pushed to the right, the "hairy back." This is caused by a seemingly jagged appearance where the previous hockey stick remains visible beneath the new forecast after things didn't go as hoped.

Curiously, Chen chose to use the sales forecast chart for Intel's doomed Itanium processor to illustrate his point, when Copilot is right there.

The hockey stick chart will undoubtedly be familiar to investors dealing with AI companies and promises of profitability due anytime now. ®