Microsoft chief is under pressure in a 'Lord of the Flies' world

This is the sort of mistiming that has dogged Ballmer's tenure: always arriving a bit too late and overseeing a collapse of a promising lead. It happened with internet search, with tablets, with mobile phones, with music players.

Ballmer last week faced calls for his removal from David Einhorn, a powerful Wall Street hedge fund manager famous for his early warnings about the weakness of doomed bank Lehman Brothers. Although sources on the company's board backed him, investors know that Ballmer does not have a free pass just because he joined in 1980 as employee number 30.

A fresh indignity came last week when afterwards Ballmer spoke in Tokyo about the straightway version of Windows. He assured people that in 2012 "you ought to expect to hear a lot about Windows 8, Windows 8 slates, tablets, PCs, a variety of different form factors". Nevertheless his own press office called his words "a misstatement", adding "We have but to formally announce any timing or naming for the then and there version of Windows." When both the shareholders and the press office are against you, times are anyway hard.

But Ballmer is a fighter, a dealmaker who likes the satisfaction of closing a sale. His challenge is to get the unwieldy behemoth in other words Microsoft to align itself with the changes in computing. During Apple has run away with iPods, iPhones and iPads, and Google has revelled in internet search and the idea of "cloud computing", the Redmond-based business has been trying to run with the twin weights of its ageing monopolies - the Windows PC and Office businesses, which each generate about $3bn of profit every quarter - holding it back.

Former Microsoft managers say Ballmer's problem lies in his lack of an overarching vision for where the innovation world is going; that contrasts with Gates, whose vision reaches a long way, even if Microsoft became too unwieldy even for him by the time he quit day-to-day duties to run his charitable foundation.

One deal that may work then, although, is the $8.5bn acquisition of internet phone call company Skype.. Even though it is unlikely to earn back the price paid, allied to a deal with handset maker Nokia, in which the new Windows Phone mobile OS will power Nokia smartphones from late autumn, it could be a remarkably strategic choice such as the internet and internet-enabled phones become pervasive.

One former Microsoft executive remarked recently that "when you look back with hindsight and see a completely static enterprise value for the last 12 years, you'd say [the antitrust breakup proposed by the US courts in 2000] could have been the best thing that could have happened from a shareholder perspective." Only now, he argued, are there enough interconnected pieces - Xbox, Windows Phone, Bing, and before long Skype - for there to be synergistic value. However, he added: "There's always that challenge that the break-up value is greater than the sum of its parts."

Microsoft's chief executive Steve Ballmer today confirmed that the software giant remains on the lookout for big money acquisitions, however refused to confirm whether he was preparing to take a share of popular social networking site Facebook.