Microsoft just overtook Apple as the most valuable publicly traded company.
Well, Apple actually fell from its valuation of $1 trillion a few months ago (possibly because of the hit tech stocks have been taking recently and poor iPhone sales).
The Beast of Redmond dominated the personal computing era during its peak but then fell from grace
between 2007 to 2014. It was still pofitable during those years but it was not considered the innovative
giant it once was but rather a stagnating, possibly dying beast largely because other tech companies asserted their
dominance in the areas of search (Google stifled Microsoft's Bing), mobile (Google's Android and Apple's iOS also
didn't allow Microsoft's mobile OS to gain much in market share), online advertising (Google and Facebook are still King here)
and cloud computing (Amazon AWS reigned supreme).
These have all started to change in recent years.
Microsoft has started biting away on Amazon's dominance in the cloud computing space.
In Scott Galoway's book The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, Scott implied that
Microsoft could become a force to reckon with again if they focused on their strengths (Microsoft office productivity suite and professional products like
SQL server and Visual Studio) on enterprise marketplace rather than consumer marketplace like most of the other tech giants.
This is exactly what they did.
How Microsoft Became a force to reckon with again
Satya Nadella has breathed life into the Beast again since becoming its CEO in 2014 after Steve Ballmer stepped down.
Satya previously led Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise division so it was logical that he focused on Cloud services to
breathe life into the Beast again.
From then till now, the Beast of Redmond's stock has seen an increase in stock price nearly 3 fold and a 30% increase just this
year alone (Microsoft is worth about $850b as at time of writing).
Satya's strategy bet big on the fact that the market will shift towards the cloud in years to come and that was exactly what happened.
They positioned themselves to receive new cloud users and also try to steal some of Amazon AWS users over to their Azure platform. They also
made a cloud version of their popular productivity tool, the Office (Office 365 is the clouyd version).
So how was Satya able to manage this feat in a short space of time?
Microsoft switched strategy and focused on its cloud computing offering (Azure) after they wrote off the mobile division they acquired
from Nokia for $7.2 billon when the mobile division was making too much loses.
Microsoft also changed from being a very unlikable company to become very friendly. Microsoft's very likable CEO and
their recent change from using proprietary softwares (IPs) to the open-source movement which won them the heart of developers (Proof of
this was when GitHub was sold to them as against Google on June 4th this year).
“It’s really the coming together of the professional cloud and the professional network,” Mr. Nadella said at the time.
So maybe the time has come again for Microsoft to become the King again of all Tech Giants.
