Alphabet Inc (GOOG)

[FrancisUnderwood]

Converting users from a single time purchase to a monthly cost at a higher price will make more money but its not exactly growth and not exactly what people mean when they say cloud business, especially when that product they have a virtual monopoly on (office). It is true Microsoft has improved after Windows 8 but that isn't a great feat.
We will see if it can plough ahead and make something more of itself than it already is. It still fails in mobile and cell phones and has lost ground due to cloud computing. That is why its stock is still heavily discounted.

Thing with cloud is it's very sticky. Once a company signs up to Azure, it becomes a strategic ecosystem for that company. Most of those companies will go to Azure/Microsoft first when they need software / IT services. That represents a huge opportunity for growth for Microsoft. You must have seen an article from Google last week that they believe the cloud revenue could surpass the ad revenue within the next few years. The market potential is huge. What Microsoft has going for them is they are building data centers all over the world, whereas Amazon and Google are not (yet). There are a lot of data residency concerns (e.g. Europe Safe Harbor) where companies do not want their data to ever leave their legal jurisdiction. There is a huge opportunity for Microsoft here if they can execute. Under the new CEO, strategy & execution have looked very promising. It's time to be long GOOG and MSFT.