Microsoft is 3rd Most Valuable Company in the World, Surpassed Google

Microsoft surpassed Google's parent company Alphabet in market value, becoming the third most valuable company in the world.

As trading continued early Wednesday afternoon, Microsoft's market value reached $760 billion, holding off Google's parent company Alphabet, whose market value was $745 billion. Only Apple and Amazon.com are worth more, at $920 billion and $785 billion, respectively. The ballooning valuations have fueled speculation as to which U.S. tech company will be the first to reach a $1 trillion market cap. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. 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 and a continued emphasis on maintaining diverse sources of revenue.

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 percent comes from productivity services including Office and LinkedIn; 28 percent is server products and cloud services, and 38 percent is personal computing and gaming. In contrast, about 86 percent of Alphabet's revenue comes from Google ads. And about 70 percent of Apple's business is selling iPhones.

Story Reference: MSN