MSFTMicrosoft Corporation

Microsoft is an enterprise software and cloud vendor for which Azure has long mattered more than Windows.

The business splits three ways. Azure sells compute and storage by subscription and grows faster than the rest; its growth rate is the number the market reads first each quarter. The productivity suite — Office, Teams, Exchange — has moved to subscription and delivers steady recurring revenue. The third part covers Windows, server licences, the Xbox gaming arm with the acquired Activision Blizzard, and advertising from Bing and LinkedIn.

The strategic bet of recent years is artificial intelligence: the OpenAI partnership, Copilot assistants embedded across Office and developer tooling, and selling training compute through Azure. It is a source of growth and a cost line at once — building AI-capable data centres has sharply raised capital spending, and whether that spending pays back is the central argument around the company.

The durability of the business comes from selling to enterprises rather than consumers: contracts run for years, switching is expensive, and the products reinforce one another. The flip side is the same antitrust attention in Europe and the United States, aimed chiefly at bundling Teams with Office and at licensing terms on rival clouds.