Steve Ballmer Goes HUGE! At Microsoft Worldwide Partners Conference

Four minutes to go in our interview – Steve Ballmer‘s lavalier microphone suddenly quits.
Squawk, pffft, zzzzz, poof. Then nothing. It’s happening in front of 16,000 people at the Toronto’s Air Canada Centre during Microsoft‘s 2012 Worldwide Partners Conference. I’m interviewing Ballmer onstage and so I have a front row seat to this … interesting situation. A technician runs up onstage and gives Ballmer a hand microphone. That quits, too. Then a third mike quits.
So Ballmer gets out of his chair and yells to the audience. “WINDOWS 8 IS GONNA BE … HUUUUUUUGGGGGEEE!”
Ballmer didn’t need the microphone. Picture the crazy college basketball announcer, Dick Vitale. “BRING IT ON, BABY!” Now double the volume. That’s Ballmer. What could have been a debacle in Toronto is actually funny. The caricature of Steve Ballmer, you see, is that of a bombastic loud mouth … a boomer. He doesn’t talk — HE BOOMS!!! He looks like the old Green Bay Packers middle linebacker Ray Nitschke. He booms like Dick Vitale.
Ballmer became Microsoft’s CEO 12 years ago just as Microsoft was becoming the world’s richest company at over $500 billion in market cap. So rich and powerful was Microsoft back then, that the U.S. Justice Department tried to break it up. Recall that Bill Gates  was hounded into retirement. Ballmer’s bad luck was (1) to replace his famous friend Gates as CEO (2) just when Microsoft was going from widely admired as an icon of American success, to hated as an alleged monopolist.
From there, Ballmer could go nowhere but down in the eyes of many.
Yet, during Ballmer’s tenure, Microsoft’s revenue has more than tripled, from $23 billion in 2000 to $70 billion in 2011. This bears repeating. During its supposedly “lost decade” Microsoft’s revenue has tripled. Not bad. But Microsoft gets little credit for this. Two likely reasons why:
1. Microsoft’s historic rival, Apple, had a monster decade. Apple, not Microsoft, is now the world’s richest company. Apple has made Microsoft look sluggish.
2. Microsoft’s 2012 market cap ($252 billion) is slightly less than half of its early 2000 peak value.
Onstage in Toronto, and backstage in our dressing rooms, Ballmer described Microsoft’s 2012 as a “bold bet” year. This is true. Microsoft’s simultaneous introductions of Windows 8 on PCs, tablets and phones, an updated, cloud-friendly Office suite, a tablet computer called Surface, and an 82-inch flat panel screen for collaborative work will make 2012 as big a year in the company’s history as any. Ballmer ranked 2012′s product announcements up with Microsoft’s founding in 1975, its big operating system design win on the IBM PC in 1981, and Windows 95 in 1995.
I’ll post my interview with Ballmer tomorrow.
Question: If you had to chose between Microsoft’s stock ($30 a share, $252 billion market cap) or Apple’s ($614 a share, $574 billion market cap), which would you chose?
Short term, I’d take Apple on its momentum. Longer term, it’s a coin flip. Microsoft, like its CEO Steve Ballmer, has been beaten down to the point where it represents value. Put a bet on The Boomer.
What do you think?