@asr - I think the OP's point is a bit more subtle than that. He's not suggesting that MS - a large and mature company - should still be growing like companies

@asr - I think the OP's point is a bit more subtle than that. He's not suggesting that MS - a large and mature company - should still be growing like companies that only hit their stride recently. Rather, he's noting the degree to which Apple and Google have dramatically outperformed the NASDAQ, citing this as an indicator of how much room to grow the tech sector has had in general. The real point is that MS has realized none of this potential. Forget lead, it hasn't even followed. Instead of swiftly copying the wildly successful iPhone, they just mocked it, telling everyone that it was a hopelessly niche product. Likewise, the iPad was being written-off by Ballmer as a pointless device with no appreciable market. In reality, it was busy becoming the most successful consumer electronic product of all time. This goes well beyond a failure of vision. A remark like that indicates total ignorance of present reality. It's a bit like calling Avatar "a flaming fiasco seen by nobody" on the same weekend it breaks a billion dollars at the box office. Coming from the head of a major studio, an assessment that poor would be career-ending. If your model is imitating others, fine. But you HAVE to be fundamentally aware of what others are doing if you're going to make it work. So if you're demonstrably clueless about what "two of the most successful publicly traded tech companies of the period" are really up to, or why their products are selling so well, you're simply the wrong man for the job.