Hats off to the by now well-known source of the famous Microsoft mirror site project. It takes a certain panache to take a tale which actually lays the blame at your own feet and make it work against your much larger competitor. But this appears to be what happened, and the Margin is suitably awed.

The original yarn was that Telecom Eireann could not provide Microsoft with the high-bandwidth connections it needed for an Internet mirror site project, so the investment went elsewhere. But according to a highly-placed government source directly connected with the negotiations with the software behemoth, Microsoft was quite satisfied with the connections which Telecom Eireann could provide.

However, Microsoft had reservations about being reliant on only one telecommunications provider and wanted one of the, ahem, competitors to provide an equivalent connection.

Tragically, none of them including the source of the tale could.