Hey Steve, keep pushing your pricing down to hold the line on market share. Cool by me. Apple keeps raking in the cash selling really nice equipment that people love.

Your race to the bottom can only last so long-- then what will you do? What will you do when your manufacturing partners tire of not making much money on each unit they ship? What will you do when your investors tire of watching their Microsoft stock continue to stagnate?

Maybe you haven't noticed, but the stock market says that Apple is valued at more than 70% of the value of beleaguered Microsoft (MSFT = $229B, AAPL = 165B). The market has noticed that Apple is making money and taking market share. Why haven't you?

Sorry to burst your collective bubbles, but Steve Ballmer is the second best prognosticator of things to come that the tech industry has.

So who's the first you ask? Well, all the rest are in a dead-even tie.

. . . the model works. In any market, the biggest section is always slap bang in the middle - the major fast food chains (McDonalds, Pizza Hut, etc) are neither the cheapest, or even the worst quality, but they are very successful.

And when someone criticises their food, of course they are going to defends it's quality - 'our burgers are made from 100% beef' - rather than say 'yeah, we know you can get better in a proper restaurant'.

On the other hand, neither are they so publicly nasty about local competition.

is that nobody really CARES except Ballmer. Apple is financially sound. Mac users are happy with their platform regardless of how large the Mac market is. Apple is using this position to move the technology landscape. If that means that the Mac (or PC) as we know it doesn't really exist in 10 years, then so be it. Apple will lead the way to whatever things replace it.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has proven over and over that it's incapable of leading any technology shift. And it's primarily because of their management team headed by Ballmer. They're so focused on winning marketshare today that they're missing the real point: they're losing the technology war. The iPod took them completely by surprise. Then iTunes. Then the iPhone. Unless Microsoft figure out how to innovate, all the PC market share numbers in the world won't save them in the long run.

True, he has helped Apple a ton via his tech incompetency, but really, does anyone take him seriously? He can pronounce fiction till the cows come home, Windows will still be a bug ridden, clunky snake pit that apes the better, original work of it's competition and it is loosing market share to OSX and Linux. Where he's at, people just tell him what they think he wants to hear. His repeating those things doesn't make him a jot more relevant.

The tub o lard spews his trap yet once again....here monkey boy...have a banana and STFU!

For MicroSoft (MS) to hold or gain a little marketshare against the Mac, MS has at the same time had its worst financial year ever, while Apple has had its best. So you have to ask, "What is the actual bottom-line here?" and "Who is really losing ground?"

It's all in the exchange-rate when translating marketshare from a PC dollar to a Mac one.

Every Mac sold returns a large comparative profit to Apple. Every Windows OEM licence, a very small one to MS. So a single percentage increase in Mac marketshare is worth many times more than a lost MS one. The larger part of the PC profit goes to the hardware makers. For MS to gain a little marketshare in an expanding market is not the same thing as Apple doing it, because Apple makes the software profit and then gets the larger hardware profit as well.

It's as if MS marketshare is measured in Hong Kong Dollars, while the Mac marketshare is in Greenbacks. It's all dollars, but one is worth seven times less than the other. If Mr Ballmer had included that concept he would have said MS had perhaps gained a few Hong Kong Dollars in comparison to Apple's US Dollars, but I doubt anyone would have been impressed.

A CEO says what a CEO has to say to buoy consumer and shareholder confidence. The fact that Ballmer looks increasingly out of touch in so doing is a telling indicator of MS's poor comparative position.

While Rome burns it may be easy to fiddle the books, but it doesn't stop the fire.