Microsoft
Windows, Office and one of the world’s largest clouds.
52-week range
As of 5 Oct 2026, 17:51What does Microsoft do?
Microsoft, based in Redmond near Seattle, is best known for Windows and Office. Today, though, most of its money comes from businesses: they rent computing power in the Azure cloud and pay subscriptions for Microsoft 365, Teams and LinkedIn. Xbox and the Bing search engine round it out. With its Copilot assistant, Microsoft is betting heavily on AI.
From Windows on your laptop, Word and Excel at work, Teams meetings, or the Xbox in the living room.
How Microsoft makes money
- Office, Teams, LinkedIn & business software42 %
- Cloud & servers (Azure)42 %
- Windows, Xbox, Surface & Bing16 %
Strengths
- A great many companies run on Microsoft software, and switching away is a big effort.
- Much of its revenue comes from subscriptions that renew every year.
- Azure is one of the three largest cloud providers in the world and is growing fast.
Risks
- Microsoft is spending huge sums on AI data centers, and whether that pays off is still open.
- Tough cloud competition from Amazon (AWS) and Google.
- Microsoft reports in US dollars. If the dollar falls against the euro, you lose out as a euro investor.
- Founded
- 1975
- Headquarters
- Redmond, Washington
- Employees
- about 223,000
What if you had invested in Microsoft earlier?
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This page explains the company and is not a recommendation to buy or sell.