But Microsoft might still find it hard to buy a big, top-performing technology company. Take Salesforce, the cloud-software company that Microsoft reportedly targeted as an acquisition in spring 2015. At that time, Salesforce’s market value was around 12 percent of Microsoft’s. Salesforce’s stock has soared since then. As a result, Salesforce’s market capitalization as a percentage of Microsoft’s is about the same today as it was in 2015.

But it would be a mistake to conclude that Microsoft has not advanced in the market for acquisitions. Its soaring stock has made sure the company has remained a player in the deals game. The jump in its price-to-earnings ratio makes it more likely that a large deal would bolster earnings per share (after factoring in the extra shares issued to do the deal.) With its operations notching up strong organic growth, Microsoft probably does not need to do a big deal anytime soon. But if one were to crop up, shareholders may not balk.

- Peter Eavis

How Microsoft reinvented itself

In the past four years, Microsoft’s stock has risen by 150 percent, and the company now looks set to have its fastest revenue growth in a decade. What happened?

Satya Nadella happened, for one. (He succeeded Steve Ballmer as C.E.O. of Microsoft in 2014.) And the cloud, for another.

Mr. Ballmer tried to target the flashier end of the consumer hardware market, with things like Windows Phone and the Zune music player. It didn’t work. In contrast, Mr. Nadella has focused on enterprise applications — and in particular, found huge success in cloud computing.

And the growth of its cloud operations has been huge. From Steve Lohr of the NYT, from this past April:

Since Satya Nadella became chief executive in 2014, the cloud portion of Microsoft’s revenue has soared from 3 percent to more than 21 percent this year, according to estimates by Credit Suisse. Microsoft finished 2017 with 13 percent of the cloud infrastructure services market, according to Synergy Research Group, a gain of three percentage points during the year.

The company lags only Amazon Web Services as a cloud provider.

Preparing for the future

Mr. Nadella is also gearing up for the next big thing to be put into the cloud: artificial intelligence.

Because such software is computationally demanding, it makes sense to pay for someone else to run programs on huge servers rather than buying one’s own hardware. But it’s also complex, which means that there is going to be a huge market for user-friendly software that can be taken up by regular developers and not just people with A.I. Ph.D.s.