INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
"The culture of the company has changed," said an expert.
Microsoft surpassed Google's parent company Alphabet in market value Tuesday, becoming the third most valuable company in the
At the end of trading Wednesday, Microsoft's market value was $760 billion, holding off Google's parent company Alphabet, whose market value
Only Apple and Amazon.com are worth more, at $922 billion and $788 billion, respectively
The ballooning valuations have fueled speculation as to which US tech company will be the first to reach a $1 trillion-market cap
(Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Microsoft's stock price is more than double what it was when Satya Nadella
became chief executive in 2014
Analysts attribute the Nadella-era success to strategic decisions he made to compete with Amazon in the cloud storage business, an emphasis
on maintaining diverse sources of revenue, and opening up what was long seen as an insular Windows ecosystem to other platforms and
partnerships."Microsoft Azure has become a strong number-two player in the cloud wars to AWS," Rishi Jaluria, an analyst at DA Davidson, a
financial services firm, said, referring to Amazon's cloud business
For some sectors, like retail, Azure's cloud service presents an appealing alternative to doing business with Amazon, whose e-commerce
business directly competes against retailers, he said."The culture of the company has changed," Jay Vleeschhouwer, the managing director of
software research at Griffin Securities, said
Vleeschhouwer noted Nadella's willingness to partner with other companies such as Adobe, and moves to reorganize Microsoft to build more
Nadella's approach, described as pragmatic, can also be seen in the decision to sell the money-losing Nokia, he said.Compared to tech giants
such as Amazon and Apple, Microsoft is less reliant on one particular business to generate income
In the company's most recent earnings report, Microsoft disclosed that its $24.5 billion in revenue is split across three categories: about
33 per cent comes from productivity services including Office and LinkedIn; 28 per cent is server products and cloud services; and 38 per
cent is personal computing and gaming
In contrast, about 86 per cent of Alphabet's revenue comes from Google ads
And about 70 per cent of Apple's business is selling iPhones."The diversity that Microsoft has is really helpful to continue that march to
the trillion-dollar market cap," Jaluria said
"Whether it will happen before Apple or Amazon is a different story."While the stock prices of tech titans often track one another through
dips and climbs, Microsoft's shares began to pull away in March
Morgan Stanley software analyst Keith Weiss told investors at the time that he expects Microsoft to reach $1 trillion in market cap within
the next year, owing to the growth of its cloud storage unit and the company's existing Office customer base that will probably upgrade to
its cloud subscription service.Alphabet and Microsoft have traded places before; the first time occurred in 2012, when Google surpassed the
Redmond, Washington, company, signaling the transition from desktop-based software to Web platforms and mobile computing.(Except for the
headline, this story has not been edited by TheIndianSubcontinent staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
