For a fleeting second, if nothing else. But for the first time in 8 years. Microsoft briefly overtook Apple in market capitalization yesterday, become the world’s most valuable company temporarily.
The two companies are now trading blows for the title.
It was back in 2010 that Apple first surpassed Microsoft, with stock of the fruity Cupertino company seeing phenomenal growth over the past 5 years. And though it all culminated in a $1 trillion valuation for Apple, investors have expressed concerns about the falling iPhone sales.
These make up nearly 60% of the entire revenue for Apple.
Microsoft stock has also been performing spectacularly well in recent years, with the Redmond based technology titan making big gains in cloud against AWS, its primarily rival in this space. Microsoft passed Google earlier this year, and also passed Amazon last month in market cap value.
Add to this the fact that the company has a surprisingly diverse business compared to other technology companies — Windows, Xbox and Surface only make up 36% of its entire revenue.
All this has allowed Microsoft to leapfrog and move beyond the frozen days of Zune and Clippy.
So much so that many investors are expressing confidence in Microsoft stock, which has seen notably less damage by the reversal of optimism of US stock investors. In the long term, too, Microsoft is expected to perform well, as the company focuses on its strength and refashions its product lines.
It has increased revenue, profits, and more importantly, relevance.
And its impressive market cap valuation of $812.93 billion that it reached to overtake Apple at $812.60 billion comes as no surprise, then.
Microsoft may have failed fabulously in the mobile era with Windows Phone, but its resilience has been on display as it diversifies on cross-platform technologies, the cloud, blockchain and artificial intelligence.
It is also engaged in quantum computing and mixed reality computing, paving the way for the future.
And by the looks of things, a very bright future.
