After Ballmer: One Microsoft, Or Many?

Steve Ballmer will be out as Microsoft CEO sometime within the next 12 months. Will his successor run the same company Ballmer is leaving?

There have always been calls to break up the software giant, dating back to the days when the Department of Justice successfully painted Microsoft as a monopoly. At the time, the government was unwilling to go that far. But with Microsoft’s top leadership now on the way out, the question is again coming to the fore.

With Ballmer retiring, speculation will be whether MSFT worth more broken up and sold in parts.

— Mitch Kapor (@mkapor) August 23, 2013

There are two scenarios in which Microsoft could split up. The first fault line falls along the enterprise and consumer boundary: one new company would sell or manage Windows, Office, Bing and Xbox to consumers and the other, more enterprise-oriented company dealing with Windows Azure, SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics and SQL Server.