Apple and Google are Microsoft's biggest competitors. Is he not supposed to compare Microsoft to its direct rivals?
Meanwhile, Google is basically starting from zero - of course it's going to show faster growth than the lumbering behemoth that is MS. Keep in mind that few people outside of the bank underwriting the IPO and Google employees actually got the awesome starting price.
So yes, he should compare them, but no, he's doing it wrong.
Microsoft makes twice as much as Oracle, pays a dividend, and yet has half the P/E multiplier. It's just not a sexy stock right now, but you can't deny the underlying profitability. Personally I think it's just that they've made some really embarrassing mistakes (Bing?). None of the failures have really dented the bottom line...they still had 8.5B lying around to buy Skype.
And you're right about spare cash and the bottom line. From what I understand, the twin cash cows provided by Windows and Office hide a LOT of sins. In that sense, Microsoft is like some hopelessly corrupt petrostate. Sure, the place is a shambles in every way imaginable, but as long as the oil keeps flowing, nothing matters enough to dislodge the ruling class.
Let's compare with a whole platoon of major tech companies that were big a decade ago:
ADBE: +73.40% HPQ: +47.36% IBM: +48.65% MSFT: -27.03% ORCL: +109.06% SAP: +70.15% YHOO: +70.57%
You'll note that MSFT sticks out like a sore thumb.
In their defense, MSFT also has been paying dividends, which some of the comparison companies have not. When a company pays a dividend, the stock price theoretically should fall by almost exactly the dividend paid. As http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/dividend_yield shows, they had a particularly big payment in 2005. When I put those dividends back in to MSFT, their stock has been utterly flat over a decade. This makes them a lot better than they otherwise appear, but their poor performance still sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the tech industry.
I don't think it was his list didn't include Sun. Or AOL. Or Compaq. Or Dell. Or Sony. But the comparison list was not generated with an eye towards being unfair, and I think that the point made is still valid. Microsoft could have done better than it did.