One of the stories which caught my eye this week was Microsoft's market cap (on the stock market) exceeding that of Google's parent company, Alphabet. Although we at AAWP are all about Microsoft and Windows on phones, there's clearly a lot that Microsoft is doing well generally.

From the CNN story covering this:

Shares of Microsoft rose nearly 1% Wednesday and are now up more than 15% this year. The company is worth $760 billion, more than Google owner Alphabet's market cap of $745 billion.

Microsoft now trails fellow Washington state native Amazon by about $30 billion for second place in the market value race.

Apple, the world's most valuable company, is worth about $920 billion. Apple lost some ground Wednesday though. It was one of only two stocks in the Dow that were lower Wednesday afternoon. GE was the other.

But times have never been better for Microsoft, because of Nadella's strategy to focus the company more on cloud computing after former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stepped down in 2014. Business is booming for the Office 365 software suite and the Azure hosting business. Microsoft's sales and profits are expected to grow at a rate of more than 10% for the next few years, impressive for a company of Microsoft's size.

In addition to the push to cloud versions for Office and other popular Microsoft business software, Nadella also has made a big investment in social media with the $26 billion deal for LinkedIn in 2016.

So good news for Microsoft overall - after all, companies exist to grow and make money. Though I do find it hard to understand why a company that's doing so well and which has so much money in the bank would choose to withdraw from the mobile world completely. I've said it before and I'll say it again - I can understand the need to cut loose the massive Nokia device manufacturing and support systems, but why not keep making the Lumia 650 and 950 XL at least, throwing a few hundred million at Foxconn or similar to make up units, simply so that there was a Windows 10 presence in the mobile OS world until Windows on ARM hits mobile form factors later this year? As it is, we'll have had a two year gap and all hopes of mind share have effectively been lost with professionals around the world.

All rather baffling from my armchair pundit viewpoint when there's so much money floating around. Windows 10 runs so well on mobile and ARM, if only there was hardware - and services - to match it.