Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

Scott Forstall is available last I heard.

tl,dr; Board of Directors, "Buddy time to go, it's not working out."

I think that's pretty unlikely considering his commitment to the Foundation.

Now the question is, whoever will be next at the helm, will he / she be able to reverse directions and steer Microsoft into more relevant and fruitful territories.

Ballmer's Microsoft was always late to the party, overseeing important technology trends and society transformations out of, I'd call it a mix of ignorance and arrogance; maybe they were also too blended by their previous successes. The way he dismissed iPhones, iPads, the way they developed their OS. Or the Zune, or Bing, there has been much criticism over the years. I don't know which moves would have been better (except for seeing the mobile future and the suckyness that was Windows Mobile 6 in time), but Ballmer was always more of a numbers guy I hear, and less of a visionary. I hope their next big guy is going to have more vision.

This may be a good day to buy their stock, if you like 50/50 games.

Nice. Microsoft does some really awesome research work and can easily come out to position themselves as leading the tech space again. Though some would argue they already do, but that's not correct looking at the growth other companies have demonstrated.

MS has had some massive misses, a couple of super bungled opportunities in the past decade only because of the ageing 'bored' (pun intended) that thought marketing is the only thing to drive innovation. I hope they find a replacement that's good and that his/her selection is not too much influenced by the existing board or its psyche.