Microsoft is, finally, partying like it is, well, the late s. Along the way, the ride for investors has been a rollercoaster with a long lull in the middle. For most of the oughts it was stuck in the 20s.

And with the run up in its stock price, Microsoft's stock valuation has pushed higher and higher. Microsoft's price-to-earnings multiple is now higher than the market in general, and higher than it has been in years.

So are Microsoft's shares still worth uploading to your portfolio? Nonetheless, that doesn't necessarily mean Microsoft's shares are cheap now. Figuring that out is in fact more difficult these days than it was two decades ago, when most of Microsoft's earnings came from one product, Windows.

But one way to do it is to take a closer look at the different and much more diverse business lines of today's Microsoft, and see how investors are valuing their competitors in those businesses. Microsoft reported better than expected earnings last week. What seems to have pulled the company out of its multi-year slump lately, though, is not a Windows revival but the company's push into the cloud.

Of course, the cloud—shared storage and virtual operating systems—along with big data, is among the buzz areas of the computing business these days.

And lots of tech giants want in, from retailer Amazon amzn to consumer management software developer Salesforce crm. Salesforce trades at a price-to-sales ratio of nearly 7.

That's higher than Microsoft's overall price-to-sales ratio of 5. What's more, Microsoft's cloud services include software tools as well as computing power and storage, so it's not exactly comparable to Salesforce. That business has shrunk in the past few years, but it's still valuable. That means the market isn't anticipating much growth from the company.

It's valued at what the company's business lines are worth now. And that could be because Microsoft hasn't grown much in the past few years.

But that appears to be changing, as the company's pivot into cloud services gets more momentum. Etsy Is Reorganizing Its Workforce, Which Includes More Layoffs.

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Chuck Hughes OTME

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