Microsoft did not get here by accident. There was a concerted effort that began long before Nadella took over in 2014 to begin a shift to the cloud that included strategic and cultural changes like building more data centers around the world, becoming more developer-friendly (including buying GitHub for $7.5 billion), using an acquisition strategy to enhance its SaaS catalogue and taking advantage of its Office market leadership. The company also took advantage of its strong position in the enterprise, but that's something that rivals behind it (other than Google) could also have done, but failed to do.