Yea what a big impact that had 14 years afterwards.
Except you it seems as at first you said that Mr. Kelly offers nothing but his word he has viewed some slides - and it seems he's the only person in the world to view them, and then when that was proven not to be the case you changed tack and decided to call him out of his use of the word "leak", then you go on to claim that he gave the wrong site when the only site he mentions in the opinion piece is the ComputerWorld site who originally found the slides on the Microsoft investor site.
So can we at least agree that Mr. Kelly wasn't the only person in the world to view these slides as you first claimed, or are you going to carry on casting aspersions because someone doesn't share the same world view as you personally?
If you don't care to defend them then why do so?
It's all well and good taking umbrage at what you perceive as personal attack, but perhaps you should re-read your post before accusing others, would not consider accusing people of fear, uncertainty and doubt, that their posting misinformation when the very company that should be providing that information is refusing to do so, claiming screenshots are fake when you have no evidence to base that accusation on, would you not consider those petty, are those not personal attacks.
At the end of the day the burden of proof is on Microsoft and their absence of evidence, the lack of evidence to the contrary, less than two week before release is entirely their choice but as I said before Microsoft also has a responsibility to convey that information to customers so they can make educated decisions and right now, for whatever reason, that’s not the case.