The best stock of all time.

Apple hitting $2 trillion market cap, Tesla surpassing $2,000 per share. Tech industry is the backbone of the modern world. The FAANG is widely mentioned in the mainstream media, but Microsoft’s performance history making it one of the, if not the, best stock ever.

Microsoft recently won the cloud contract with the U.S. Defence Dept, worth up to $10 billion over 10 years. Given its dominance in software, it has been a hell of a ride for Microsoft.

IPO’ed in 1986, shortly after releasing Windows to compete with Mac OS. Along with their Office applications and a growing interest in GUIs, Windows came out on top with over 90% market share at the time. To this day, over 75% of desktops still use Windows.

The early 2000s is when they start losing its way, they were too reliant on the Windows and building everything around it. Microsoft developers were many steps ahead, developing e-reader, smartphone device and mobile software but never found any success. They introduced Zune in 2006 to go against the iPod which was released in 2001.

Google was launched in 1996, Microsoft didn’t launch Bing until 2009 and cost them $6b in the next 3 years. Let us not forget the Nokia’s, purchased by Microsoft in 2013 and was wrote off in 2015 for $7.5b. It’s hard to pinpoint what went wrong for Microsoft, but in my opinion, the senior management failing to capitalise on Microsoft early success is definitely one of the reasons.

In 2014, Nadella came in and saved Microsoft. Making cloud technology the highest priority of the company, and to repackage its product and enterprise to claim back market shares. Changing the culture to be more innovative and competitive. Acquiring Github, Linkedin, Mojang, Minecraft with great intend to expand into the gaming industry. Pairing with its success with Azure, Microsoft will continue this amazing run lead by Nadella.

Since its IPO, Microsoft has an annualised return of 25% every year for the past 34 years. And since Nadella took over, the market cap for Microsoft went from $300b to $1.6t in just 6 years. Making it the best stock of all time.