's (NYSE: IBM) market cap briefly eclipsed Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) back in Dec. 2011. At the time, both tech giants were worth just over $210 billion, and they were both struggling with the seismic shift toward mobile and cloud technologies. But today IBM is worth $168 billion, and Microsoft is worth $3.04 trillion.

IBM struggled to expand its on-premise software, hardware, and IT service divisions as its enterprise customers pivoted toward cloud-based services, and it repeatedly reduced its annual revenue by divesting its weaker business segments. Microsoft countered those existential threats by aggressively expanding its Azure cloud infrastructure platform and shrewdly transforming its desktop software into cloud-based services and mobile apps.

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Source Fool.com