Microsoft doesn’t get much press attention these days, especially compared to Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, or even Twitter.
But that doesn’t really matter, because Microsoft is doing better than ever. Shares of the company hit an all-time high of $60.30 on the Nasdaq composite on Friday, about 11 times the stock price of $5.48 at the end of 1995.
Microsoft’s previous peak was in…you guessed it, 1999, at the height of Microsoft’s PC dominance and right at the peak of the first internet boom.
The new stock market high follows a very positive quarterly earnings report that has become routine for Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella. The story is relatively simple: the losses caused by people abandoning Windows-powered devices are more than offset by rapid gains in Microsoft’s cloud computing business.
Additionally, Microsoft shifted its consumer-facing business to focus on specific products, such as Microsoft Office and the Surface tablet, and these generated more revenue.
The only concern might be the company’s heavy reliance on cloud computing, which forms the backbone of many services on the Internet. And thanks to forays from Amazon and Google, cloud services are becoming a fiercely competitive business.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, when Microsoft’s cloud unit missed analysts’ estimates in April, the stock plunged sharply, before rebounding this summer.
So overall Microsoft just got a lot more boring. But as a result, business may never have been better.
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