Tech giant surpassed oil industry giant Exxon Mobil as second most valuable company, only one spot behind Apple Inc.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft's new CEO made sure that the company's re
Under new CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has worked to change how the company is known as a "clumsy" behemoth struggling to keep up with new tech trends and align itself to emerging consumer habits.
Nadella has cut down on expenses and laid off workers while committing to realign the company's mobile technology and cloud computing businesses.
His efforts have fueled a stock surge that drove Microsoft's total market value above $410 billion on Friday, surpassing that of Exxon Mobil's value of $404 billion, which was badly hurt by the drop in oil prices.
"Microsoft has made a strategic change," said Daniel Ives, a tech analyst at FBR Capital Markets.
He said Nadella still faces challenges with a company that's heavily dependent on the declining personal computer market.
However, compared with other veteran tech giants like IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, "Microsoft has done the best job of trying to skate where the puck is going," Ives said.
Meanwhile, Apple took the No. 1 spot as the world's most valuable company with a market capitalization of over $668 billion-more than what Microsoft was valued at when it was No. 1 back in December 1999 ($616 billion).
However, Microsoft's stock went up on Wall Street by 70 percent since April 2013 after activist investor ValueAct Capital got hold of $2 billion stake in the Redmond, Washington-based company.
Since then, Nadella pushed new efforts to expand in cloud computing, which promises to be more lucrative than the traditional model of selling software that is installed on clients' computers.
Aside from that, the company also plans to redesign its flagship Windows operating system and released versions of other popular software for smartphones and tablets, including devices made by competitor Apple.
