Many industry experts see the next 12 to 18 months as a crucial period for Microsoft, which finds itself scrambling to ride the wave of cloud computing, a threat to its historical business model, based on on-premise desktop and server software.

Microsoft officials have said repeatedly that their strategy of offering enterprise customers hybrid options for cloud and on-premise software deployments is the right one, and is yielding expected results. However, Microsoft faces intense pressure from many quarters, including from Google's Apps suite, which competes directly with Exchange and Office.

Microsoft also finds itself as the underdog in the tablet and smartphone markets, trailing Apple's iPhone and iPad, and Android smartphones and tablets. The concern is heightened by the "bring-your-own-device" (BYOD) trend, in which people are bringing to the office their Apple iOS and Android devices.

As such, much is riding on the success of upcoming Microsoft products like the Windows 8 family of OSes for desktop and laptop PCs, tablets and, possibly, smartphones, and the Office 15 revamping of the Office productivity desktop and server-side applications like Word, Excel, SharePoint and Exchange.

Both Windows 8 and Office 15 are being designed to be tablet-friendly, as evidenced by Microsoft's development of a new interface called Metro, which is based on tile icons intended for touchscreens.