Ballmer to retire in the next 12 months

Ballmer to retire in the next 12 monthsMicrosoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has indicated that he is planning to retire within the next 12 months after a long career in the software company.

He has already spent about 13 year as the chief executive officer of the company and spent two decades as company manager as Microsoft pushed its software onto the 97 per cent of all the computers. Experts have said that the company has also missed several opportunities in under his leadership including smartphones, Web search and tablet computing.

Ballmer has been credited with bring the Windows into the modern era and resolving the antitrust case that almost resulted in the company breaking into two separate entities.

Ballmer became CEO of the company in 2000 and the company had already taken a focus away from PC-based computing and was already taken over by Apple and Google. As for the investors, his tenure has not been great for the shareholders as an investment of $1,000 when Ballmer took over is now worth 13 per cent lesser including dividends.

Ballmer, raised outside Detroit and whose father was a manager at Ford Motor, joined Microsoft during his 20's. He dropped out of Stanford Graduate School of Business and joined Gates as Microsoft's first professional manager in 1980. The two worked together to take the company to its initial success.