Windows 11, which was recently announced, will be offered as a free upgrade for all Windows 10 users. Apple, which became the only firm to ever score a $3 trillion valuation last summer, remains slightly more valuable than Microsoft, with a $3.03 trillion market cap Wednesday. Nadella steered the company ahead of the curve, and its momentum could propel its valuation past $3 trillion in the near future. Analysts project the company to report $61 billion in sales, according to FactSet, which would be another all-time high. The $3 trillion milestone caps a dramatic rise for Microsoft coinciding with a broad technology rally and its backing of OpenAI, producer of the hit generative AI chatbot ChatGPT. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has led his company to a record market value amid the AI boom.
Author: Alaina Yee, Senior Editor, PCWorld
Nadella’s “mobile-first, cloud-first” approach initially squeezed the company’s margins, but it clearly paid off and made it an exciting growth stock again. A single license for Microsoft’s Office Home & Student software works on just one computer. With a Microsoft 365 subscription, all users can be active in Office apps on up to five different devices simultaneously—and still have the programs installed on the other non-active devices. You’ll automatically be logged out of devices not in use when you use the apps on a new or previously deactivated device. A Microsoft 365 subscription unlocks access to the full versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and more across the web, mobile, and desktop.
Microsoft Market Cap
First, the global cloud services market could still grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.4% between 2020 to 2027, according to Allied Market Research. If Microsoft keeps pace with the market, its commercial cloud revenue should continue rising at high double-digit percentage rates and account for an even higher percentage of its top line. If you owned one share of Microsoft at the time of its IPO in March 1986, you’d now hold 288 shares after the nine stock splits. That means your shares would be worth over $115,000 as of Aug. 6, not including dividends. Second, Microsoft’s gaming business will continue to grow as it introduces new Xbox consoles, expands its cloud gaming platform, and acquires more publishers like Bethesda to develop exclusive first-party games.
Full web, mobile, and desktop access to Microsoft Office apps
Windows 11 will keep all its users on the same page and enable it to roll out new services as smoothly as Apple and Alphabet’s Google. When Satya Nadella became Microsoft’s third CEO in Feb. 2014, the company was worth just over $300 billion. At the time, Microsoft was struggling to integrate Nokia’s smartphone unit in a desperate bid to save its embattled Windows Phone OS. Its Windows and Office businesses faced uneven upgrade cycles, and many users stuck with outdated versions of its desktop software. As mentioned above, the Family plan includes up to six users—and each person in your group gets the same benefits as the primary account holder. That means six people can get the perks of the Personal plan for just a fraction of the price.
If You Bought 1 Share of Microsoft at Its IPO, Here’s How Many Shares You Would Own Now
Get stock recommendations, portfolio guidance, and more from The Motley Fool’s premium services. Azure will continue to attract customers, especially retailers, as the top alternative to AWS. And the growing need for data storage and AI solutions will tether those customers more tightly to its platform. Analysts expect Microsoft’s revenue to rise another 16% to $166.2 billion this year. Two years ago, Microsoft’s (MSFT 1.76%) market cap topped $1 trillion for the first time. Microsoft “continues to dominate market share within the AI transformation taking place despite increased competition,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in an October note to clients.
- The market capitalization, commonly called market cap, is the total market value of a publicly traded company’s outstanding shares and is commonly used to measure how much a company is worth.
- Microsoft (MSFT 1.81%) is one of the stocks you probably wish you had scooped up at its initial public offering (IPO).
- Currently her focus is on security, helping people understand how best to protect themselves online.
- Azure will continue to attract customers, especially retailers, as the top alternative to AWS.
- Paid users also get unlimited use of Personal Vault, a feature that lets you put files into a special folder that you must unlock to access.
It also guarantees updates to the latest versions of the apps as they release, unlike with a standalone copy of Office. Meanwhile on the Family plan, you get 1TB of space per user (up to six total), with each person’s storage counted independently of everyone else in the group. It’s still a smoking deal on cloud storage—and the plan still includes other benefits. Microsoft (MSFT 1.81%) is one of the stocks you probably wish you had scooped up at its initial public offering (IPO). The tech giant debuted as a public company on the Nasdaq at $21 per share on March 13, 1986, and now the price is 19x higher, closing at $399.61 on Aug. 6. Microsoft’s market cap doubled between 2017 and 2019, then doubled again between 2019 and 2021.
A company’s market cap, which is calculated by multiplying its number of outstanding shares by its stock price, isn’t a useful investing metric on its own. However, it’s still remarkable for Microsoft — one of the world’s largest software companies — to double in value in such a short time. The market capitalization sometimes referred as Marketcap, is the value of a publicly listed company.In most cases it can be easily calculated by multiplying the share price with the amount of outstanding shares. Market capitalization, also called net worth, is the total value of all of a company’s outstanding shares. It is calculated by multiplying the stock price by the number of shares outstanding. As of August 2024 Microsoft has a market cap of $3.072 Trillion.This makes Microsoft the world’s second most valuable company by market cap according to our data.
The market capitalization, commonly called market cap, is the total market value of a publicly traded company’s outstanding shares and is commonly used to measure how much a company is worth. Founded in 1993, The Motley Fool is a financial services company dedicated to making the world smarter, happier, and richer. The Motley Fool reaches millions of people every month through our premium investing solutions, free guidance and market analysis on Fool.com, top-rated podcasts, and non-profit The Motley Fool Foundation. What makes Microsoft’s growth story even more compelling is its history of stock splits. Although stock splits don’t fundamentally change the value of a company, they’ll increase the number of shares you own. This share increase, combined with the rise in stock price over the years, would have made the current value of your initial Microsoft stock purchase significantly higher.
Microsoft doesn’t require all plan members to live at the same address, either, so your “family” can be spread far and wide. Nowadays we all have access to Google’s editing apps and even Microsoft’s own gratis version of Office Online, plus free productivity suites like Libre Office. So it may seem strange to pay $100 per year for Microsoft 365 Family or $70 for Microsoft 365 Personal—why spend money on a productivity suite? Dig past the idea of it being just about Office apps and you’ll see why pretty fast. With Microsoft’s stock price hovering around $400 and its heavy influence on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, I wouldn’t be surprised if the company finally stopped its stock-split drought soon. Microsoft’s history of stock splits and impressive growth has made one IPO share worth six figures today.
The company also launched new Surface devices and Xbox consoles and expanded its gaming ecosystem with subscription-based downloads and a cloud gaming platform. When Nadella took the helm, he introduced a fresh “mobile-first, cloud-first” mantra. Under his watch, Microsoft ditched Windows Phone and developed mobile apps for iOS and Android instead.
Microsoft could gradually also remove the gaming boundaries between Windows PCs and Xbox consoles with more local streaming and cloud gaming options. You may also expect Access, OneNote, OneDrive, Skype, and Teams, but the full list includes far more these days. You’ll find useful tools like Clipchamp, which lets you trim video files quickly, as well as heavyweight apps like Power Automate and Power BI that let you easily whip up automated tasks and data dashboards. Along with more space, Microsoft 365 also offers tighter security in OneDrive, too. Paid users also get unlimited use of Personal Vault, a feature that lets you put files into a special folder that you must unlock to access.
To get to $3 trillion, its stock only needs to rise another 50% — which could certainly happen within the next two years, for three simple reasons. A 14-year veteran of technology and video games journalism, Alaina Yee covers a variety of topics for PCWorld. Since joining the team in 2016, she’s written about CPUs, Windows, PC building, Chrome, Raspberry Pi, and much more—while also serving as PCWorld’s resident bargain hunter (#slickdeals). Currently her focus is on security, helping people understand how best to protect themselves online. Her work has previously appeared in PC Gamer, IGN, Maximum PC, and Official Xbox Magazine. Whether you need to make the occasional domestic or international phone call, Microsoft 365 has you covered.
This feature can be worth the cost of the whole subscription, no matter which tier you choose. You could never touch the Microsoft Office apps and you’d still get a lot of bang for your buck—especially if you sign up for the Family plan. Since December 1, 1998, Microsoft’s market cap has increased from $322.92B to $3.08T, an increase of 854.00%.
It’s perfect for tax forms, bank statements, and other sensitive info you decide to put in the cloud—and anything in it is encrypted on your local drive, too. Dynamics won’t usurp Salesforce as the customer relationship management (CRM) leader, but it will profit from the same secular digitization of businesses. Microsoft 365 should also reinforce its leading position in the productivity software market with its sticky subscriptions.
All Personal and Family users get 60 minutes of free calling to landline and mobile phones per month. Should you accidentally delete everything, encounter file corruption, or run into some other mishap, you can roll back to an earlier time within the last 30 days. And if a ransomware attack is detected, you’ll get help restoring your files up to 30 days afterward. If you don’t need more space, you’ll save between $30 to $50 compared to rival plans from Google and Dropbox.
It transformed Office’s desktop software into cloud-based services, which locked in users with subscriptions, and expanded Azure into the world’s second-largest cloud infrastructure platform after AWS. Microsoft 365’s newest price tier costs $20 per year (or $2 per month) for 100GB of space, along with access to the full versions of web and mobile Office apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and OneDrive. It’s a decent plan meant to go head-to-head with Google One’s basic plan, but lacks many of the Personal and Family plan perks. We primarily recommend it for people who need the Microsoft ecosystem but don’t want desktop Office. Even if you didn’t catch Microsoft at its two-figure price tag, its stock has had some enviable price appreciation over the last 10 years. The company’s remarkable growth streak has pushed it into the elite $3 trillion dollar market capitalization club, and it most likely won’t stop there.
Free document editors have limitations, particularly Microsoft’s own free versions of its web and mobile apps. If you’re in a position where your document edits require formatting consistency across organizations or more sophisticated tools, you’ll need Microsoft Office. Stock splits were common in the 1990s, and Microsoft wasn’t shy about jumping on the trend. But since then, they’ve tapered off, with Microsoft executing its last stock split in February 2003. In 2015, Microsoft launched Windows 10 as the foundation of its “last” desktop OS, which would be continuously updated online and monetized with its app store and additional features.