Jefferies: Buy Rating for Microsoft (MSFT)

Katherine Egbert and Ignatius Njoku at Jefferies have given a Buy rating to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). The stock has been trading at $25.29 and target price is at $36.00.

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) recently announced support of Bing, Microsoft's search engine, on its iPhone and on the new Safari 5. Also, Microsoft has recently made positive comments on Apple supported HTML5. The cut-throat competition between the two Giants has seen instances of cooperation and mutual support between the two companies.

Both companies have a common target in terms of Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), which apart from its namesake search engine has stretched competitive space with its Android and Chrome.