Over the years, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant series has been a helpful guide to those selecting applications. It doesn’t tell the whole story, of course. That depends a lot on your specific needs. But it’s interesting to see how consistently Microsoft ends up in the upper right quadrant when cloud is the issue.

This May, Gartner put Microsoft in the Leaders quadrant, second only to Amazon in Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas). This was on the heels of Gartner’s rating Microsoft as second only to salesforce.com in Enterprise Application Platform as a Service (PaaS) in January. These two followed Microsoft’s high rating in Social Software last September.

It’s fascinating how Microsoft has a gift for doing very well, but usually coming in second. The remarkable thing, however, is how many different categories it can do this in, while other vendors may excel in one but fall much farther behind in others. We think this argues well for considering Microsoft when you’re trying to achieve overall integration across the organization, as opposed to simply selecting best of breed. What do you think?

Here are the graphs for the three Magic Quadrants discussed above.

The two above are nicely labeled. The one below is the 2013 Magic Quadrant for Social Software. Here’s where I got it.

I got the two graphs above here.