Many people despise Microsoft (MSFT) for their monopolistic ways within the software industry. But over the years, Steve Ballmer and Co. are starting to wise up to the perception that their firm is losing relevancy and market share thanks to the growing open source community.

And so they’ve begun to move with the times. In fact, their latest cloud service product (called Azure) has become the fastest growing division. Microsoft has begun accepting deployment for open source technologies like Java and Python. Who would have guessed? But we as software developers are loving it. Because this makes those products popular and cheap when compared to other players like Amazon’s EC2 service.

What else is on the horizon? As we all know, Microsoft is about to release Windows Version 8 in the fall of 2012.

The stock is still fairly cheap despite this near-term development. Can we expect a nice pop once the new operating system is released? This could be the start of a nice long uptrend as MSFT could easily increase their value from that point onward. Especially if the operating system lets them implement Windows 8 into a new mobile strategy with Nokia hardware.

Most recently, Microsoft has raised its stock dividend which means only healthy companies are able to do that in this questionable econonomy. It also raises the outlook the company has considering the product and service pipeline described above.

Just check out the low rexent price of Microsoft:

(click to enlarge)

Here is the source.

If this all works out, you can imagine the rise of Microsoft stock. It would be no different than when I saw the HUGE rise of Apple’s stock from 2001 when they were on their death bed. This could be an interesting play for the long run as the company is finally recognizing their weaknesses and implementing an effective strategy.

 

Find out how we generate the above plots by going here. Get access to the source code here.

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