24/7 Wall St.

The Dow (DJIA) is up 11.84% this year to 26,089.61, which means it is close to its all-time high. Among its 30 components, one has posted a stock price of almost triple that rate so far this year. Shares of Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ: MSFT) are up 30.40% to $132.45. That puts its market cap over $1 trillion.

A look at some of the comments about Microsoft from experts.

From Barron’s:

Evercore ISI analyst Kirk Materne reiterated his Outperform rating on Tuesday, citing the company’s large opportunity in the gaming market.

“Microsoft is one of the few companies that have the potential to be both a leading content provider as well as a leading platform for gaming publishers,” he wrote. “Ultimately, we believe gaming can become the next major narrative as it relates to Microsoft’s long-term growth opportunity.”

From Morningstar:

Since taking over as CEO in 2014, Satya Nadella has reinvented Microsoft into a cloud leader that has become one of only two providers that can deliver a wide variety of platform-as-a-service/infrastructure-as-a-service solutions at scale. Microsoft has accelerated the transition from a traditional perpetual license model to a subscription model and embraced the open-source movement.

From MarketWatch:

“Microsoft has stepped up the game,” said Maribel Lopez, principal analyst of Lopez Research. “The competitive pressure for both Salesforce and Tableau is the fact that the Microsoft story is hanging together much better than it was in the past.”

According to Gartner Research, Microsoft is listed as a leader in a recent report on analytics and business-intelligence platforms, with cautious comments noting that the company only offers its software on its Azure cloud service.

Based on recent news out of and about the company, its rise is likely to continue