Steady, reliable Microsoft is back in the spotlight as it challenges Apple for the title of most valuable public company.
Wall Street investors are enamored with a newly emergent tech company.
It has nothing to do with posting selfies or finding a soul mate. The company is instead making billions of dollars selling cloud-computing and other technical services to offices around the world.
Say hello to Microsoft, the 1990s home-computing powerhouse that is having a renaissance moment – eclipsing Facebook, Google, Amazon and the other tech darlings of the late decade.
And now it is close to surpassing Apple as the world’s most valuable publicly traded company.
Yes, that Microsoft. As other tech giants stumble, its steady resilience is paying off.
That Microsoft is even close to eclipsing Apple — and did so briefly a few times this week — would have been unheard of just a few years ago.
But under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has found stability by moving away from its flagship Windows operating system and focusing on cloud-computing services with long-term business contracts.
« Microsoft looks like they’ve finally turned the corner and have become a viable cloud player, » said Daniel Morgan, senior portfolio manager for Synovus Trust. « They’ve made a very strong transition away from the desktop. »
A brief period of trading Monday was the first time in more than eight years that Microsoft was worth more than Apple. Microsoft surpassed Apple again briefly Tuesday, before Apple closed on top with a market value of $827 billion, just 0.
