On the stock market, after the release of the annual update, Woodside shares plunged, posting one of their sharpest ever one day losses which wiped $A1.66 billion off the value of the company.

The cause of that drop in value, the result of Woodside shares losing $2.06 (5.8%) to $33.36, was some investment analysts saying that the company's production guidance for 2012 had not met "their expectations".

Consider that for a second. It wasn't Woodside failing to clear any of its own hurdles. In fact, the production guidance was for a solid rise in gas and oil output. The cause of the sell-off was the company failing to meet other people's expectations.

In other words, analysts who do not work for Woodside but who believe they know more than management, had set a high benchmark for the company to clear. When it didn't they dumped the stock.

It is not possible to describe the sell-off as irrational because markets are often irrational or, as Lord Keynes once famously said, "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent".

But what can be said by armchair critics such as The Slug is the analysts who sold Woodside shares because it failed to meet their expectations, or because they needed quick cash to paper over losses elsewhere, is they missed the key message in the company's update.

That message was Woodside has officially become a new company. It is the corporate leopard which has changed its spots or, to speak somewhat more bluntly, it is the company which has ceased to over promise and under deliver and morphed into the company which is under promising and is (secretly) confident of over delivering.

For much of the past decade, especially when being led by former chief executive Don Voelte, Woodside was a company with grand plans, too grand!

Before The Don arrived it had embarked on a global hunt for opportunities from darkest Africa to the overcrowded and over competitive waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Those expensive forays intensely annoyed the company's major shareholder, Royal Dutch Shell, which wanted Woodside to focus on projects closer to home.

Under The Don, Woodside continued to try and punch above its weight, and rather than concentrating on completing (without incident) projects such as the Pluto LNG development it embarked on more LNG projects, assuming the future expansion of Pluto would take care of itself. It didn't.

Pluto today is a project in desperate need of a reason to expand if it is to achieve an acceptable return on invested capital. That can only come with discovery or the purchase of third party gas, with both options being actively pursued.

From an investor's perspective, Woodside has been a company which could have performed so much better if it had not embarked on multiple expansion projects, and got the basics right in what it has.

That, in a nutshell, is what now appears to be happening. Friday's investor update was a plain vanilla document, without cream on top, and certainly not a cherry.

It provided the broad brush picture of a company which will hit its production target for this year, somewhere close to 64 million barrels of oil equivalent, and produce up to 81MMboe next year as stage one of Pluto is switched on.

Looked at on the bright side that means next year will see oil and gas output grow by around 25%, a result which most investors would be pleased with, unless they had factored in expectations of something higher, and delivered more quickly than the slow start up which appears to be underway at Pluto.

Rather than see any of this as a negative The Slug is delighted, because here is a company which has cast off the bravado of the past decade and which appears intent on doing its job by the numbers.

If the last week's update had not been published on a Woodside letterhead, a casual observer might have suspected it came from one of the world's leading, and deeply-conservative oil leaders, ExxonMobil.

Oh, that's right. The new man in charge at Woodside, Peter Coleman, is a career ExxonMobil man, steeped in the traditions of treating everything about oil and gas with extreme care to avoid nasty surprises, perhaps a legacy of the Exxon Valdez spill of many years ago, and the more recent Longford gas explosion in Victoria.

Whatever the reason for the seemingly modest production forecasts the key point, which last week's sellers of Woodside stock seem to have overlooked is that the company, under Coleman, is determined to rewrite its history.

Over promising and under delivering is out. The future will be about under promising and (hopefully) over delivering.

If that assessment is correct then Woodside is not a stock to sell. It is a stock to buy.