Ballmer & Microsoft Roasted On CNBC- Herb Greenberg Returns!

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has been in the news in the past few days.

The Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital conference gave rise to an extensive interview of Apple's CEO Steve Jobs by Walt Mossberg. Jobs made some disparaging remarks about PCs and laptops, intending, many thought, to diss Microsoft.

Ballmer shot back with some rather lame comments, to judge by this morning's Journal article on the topic. Essentially, Ballmer's remarks boiled down to, 'oh yeah? Well, we're going to come out with a tablet, too! So, there!'

But I think by far the more interesting treatment of Ballmer was on CNBC yesterday morning.

Herb Greenberg, the very outspoken and independent-minded analyst who left MarketWatch last year, is back on CNBC. In New Jersey, no less, which had to have been tough to move from Newport Beach, California. Not to mention from one nearly-bankrupt state to another. But, I digress....

Spurred on by Greenberg, several guests and co-anchors spiritedly debated the Apple/Jobs vs. Microsoft/Ballmer/Gates topic.

Greenberg was pretty firm in his contention that Microsoft has just gone nowhere. Either he, or another guest, noted, as I have contended in this blog years ago, that Microsoft's biggest disadvantage is a huge operating system business which hinders its ability to excel in entertainment devices, applications and other software or hardware areas. Someone even called for the spinoff of the unit containing the XBox. Just like I did years ago.

At one point, somebody said that Ballmer simply 'has his head in the clouds,' which I think is being charitable.

As the nearby price chart of Apple, Microsoft and the S&P500Index for the past five years illustrates, Ballmer's Microsoft has done no better than the index, while Apple has shot ahead with a total return exceeding 400%.

Ballmer has completely dropped the ball for his shareholders. One guest argued that you can't even "bring back" Bill Gates because- horrors!- he's still there in a Chairman capacity.

The most stunning and disappointing element of the discussion was when the CNBC blonde female co-anchor, whose name escapes me just now, argued that it wasn't fair to cast the choice as 'Apple vs. Microsoft,' and why couldn't portfolio managers hold Microsoft as one of many tech issues?

As someone with equity and options management experience, I found that comment to be totally inane. Why would anyone take equity risk on a single issue when it performs no better than the diversified S&P, which one can buy for a fraction of the transaction cost?

Of course, this comment came from someone who works for GE, another equity that managers seem to love to hold, while it either loses money or goes nowhere.

At least it was fun to see Greenberg back and firing on all cylinders.