Microsoft overtakes Amazon to become second most valuable company in the world
Microsoft Corporation regained its spot as the second most valuable tech company after overtaking Amazon.
Microsoft Corporation became the second most valuable company in the world, overtaking ecommerce platform Amazon on October 26 after the latter posted weak earnings for the third quarter, which pulled its stock down by more than seven percent.
The fall in Amazon's share price wiped out $65 billion from its market capitalisation. Its market cap now stands at $805 billion, down from $1 trillion in September.
Microsoft, on the other hand, reported strong quarterly numbers, which took its stock up four percent to reach a market capitalisation of $828 billion. This is the first time since April that Microsoft's market cap has surpassed that of Amazon.
Apple Inc has the highest market capitalisation at $1 trillion. The company is set to report its quarterly results on Thursday.
Amazon missed revenue expectations for the third quarter, reporting a revenue of $56.6 billion on a profit of $2.9 billion. Following the release of its results, market experts had predicted its valuation would take a hit as shares fell.
Microsoft acquires GitHub
The tech giant recently announced it had completed the $7.5 billion acquisition of open source platform GitHub, which has a community of over 40 million users and more than 100 million data library repositories. Although GitHub will run as an independent platform, the acquisition marks Microsoft's growing interest in the developer community.
GitHub's founder and former CEO Chris Wanstrath will now be a Microsoft technical fellow. Former Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman will take over as the new CEO of GitHub, according to media reports.
In June 2015, GitHub was valued at $2 billion.
Nat Friedman, in his blog on Microsoft announced he would take over as CEO of GitHub on October 29, and his job would be to make GitHub "better for you". He added the platform would retain its product philosophy and "will continue to build tasteful, snappy, polished tools that developers love".