A little less than 10 years ago, on February 4, 2014, Satya Nadella took over as CEO at Microsoft, following in the footsteps of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. It wasn鈥檛 an easy situation to come in for Nadella, considering that Microsoft had missed the transition to mobile devices, Windows 8 had flopped terribly and the PC market had started its decline, putting Microsoft鈥檚 core business, Windows, into question.
鈥淗aving worked with him for more than 20 years, I know that Satya is the right leader at the right time for Microsoft,鈥 said Steve Ballmer, as his successor. And right he was. Having managed the transformation to the cloud infrastructure and services business before being appointed CEO, Nadella doubled down on this transformation as CEO, turning Microsoft鈥檚 "Intelligent Cloud" business into an industry-leading powerhouse that generated almost $90 billion in revenue in the latest completed fiscal year.
Back in 2014, most people given the choice to invest $1,000 in either Microsoft, Apple or any other of the so-called GAFAM group probably would have snubbed Microsoft in favor of Apple, considering the huge success that Microsoft鈥檚 old foe was having with its mobile devices, most importantly the iPhone. And yet, here we are, 10 years into Nadella鈥檚 tenure and Microsoft is not only the most valuable public company on the planet, it has also outperformed Apple (and other rivals) over the past decade. As the following chart shows, Microsoft鈥檚 share price grew by 969 percent since Nadella took over, beating Apple鈥檚 923-percent increase over the same period as well as Amazon, Meta and Alphabet. The S&P 500 index "only" increased by 173 percent over the past 10 years, illustrating once again how well the tech sector has performed in the near past.
