Jefferies: Buy Rating for Microsoft (MSFT)

Katherine Egbert and Ignatius Njoku at Jefferies have given a Buy rating to Microsoft

. The stock has been trading at $25.29 and target price is at $36.00. Apple

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

, which apart from its namesake search engine has stretched competitive space with its Android and Chrome.