Many financial advisors would consider it foolish to have huge piles of cash, vs investing (that is, "spending") that money on improving the product lines.
So, with Apples' smaller market cap and larger "cash" position than Microsoft, those analysts would say that Microsoft is the better managed company.
Interesting take. I'm sure Apple is investing that many in other preferred stocks or shares in other corporations, or changing the monetary exchange of the US dollar especially with how weak the US dollar is currently performing this month. Also take note that Apple's CFO, COO, CEO and board most likely have bonds as part of that liquidity.
Initially, when it comes to loosing lawsuits more liquidity to pay what is owed in the judgement loss usually is a good thing.
I'll agree that Apple needs to further invest in technologies - especially their XServe, XSAN, XRaid and business software/feature lineup. I'm not too versed with this about Apple but I'd LOVE to see a major campaign into the corporate office from simple things like deskspace, uptime, reliability to speed & reliability of data, costs/per year of running a MacOS X server/infrastructure/backend with OpenDirectory supporting multiple platforms and how seemless such a transition could be.