Steve Ballmer talks about Amazon and Apple

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has decided to share his feelings about Amazon. In an interview with Bloomberg on Friday, Ballmer was asked how he felt about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

"Microsoft's culture is very strong." Ballmer started.

"You've got to remember there's intense competition between Microsoft and Amazon," he said, referring especially to the fact that both companies are based in Seattle. Ballmer then quickly added, "I think Amazon is a place where people don't want to work."

His comments about Amazon referenced an August article in The New York Times that mentions employees crying at their desks and an evaluation process that encourages criticism of co-workers. Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos and others at the company have said the article wasn't accurate.

Ballmer wasn't finished: "Anybody who ever left Microsoft to Amazon, we could count on them coming back within a year or two, because it's not a great place to work to do innovative stuff as an engineer."

He was also asked about Apple. He admitted that Cupertino has done a great job. He believes, though, that the only competition Apple has left is Microsoft.

"If there's going to be any competition at all from Apple, it's going to come from Microsoft," Ballmer said. "No one else is trying to compete with them anymore, really, seriously in hardware. Who's really going after the Mac? Who's really going after the iPad?" Ballmer said, citing the Surface Book laptop introduced this month with a detachable screen.

"The Surface Book is not either an iMac or an iPad but it's a new category. It's an innovative category," said Ballmer.

Ballmer also said that he had taken a 4% stake in Twitter Inc., which he revealed last week, before Jack Dorsey was selected as permanent CEO. He said Dorsey's decision Thursday to give a third of his company stock back to employees was "incredibly altruistic and shows great faith in the company."