I don't know whether ousting Ballmer is the answer. If you were just looking at stock prices, then someone could make the argument. The problem is, the stock market makes no sense when thinking about it from the theoretical point of view.
Typically you buy a stock, the company makes a profit, you make money. Unfortunately, today's stock market is rife with speculation. People don't buy stock to share in profit, they buy stock for the market price of the stock. If it's sexy it sells. That's why GOOG and AAPL are raking in the dough, it's the stock price not the fundamentals of the company.
I will be honest, when I was in systems administration and planning, I looked at the Apple stack as an alternative to Microsoft. Apple has nothing for the enterprise, in fact all of their moves lately shows they are running away from enterprise business. If enterprise wants to deploy Apple, they are on their own. No management system for iPad or iPhone, no real server product, no central system for software management. Have you ever looked at the logistics of upgrading or downgrading the latest Apple products? We had a few Macs, and when we ordered a MacBook with Lion with known issues with Adobe, there was no way we could downgrade.
Microsoft is still the best for enterprise at this moment. With open source trying to chase them down, they may not hold forever.
As far as the Zune, Kin, etc. Kin was a reject from the get go, and an example of a bad acquisition. Taking an open source product and trying to make it a Microsoft product, throw on top of that the Intellectual Asset of the founder of Danger running to your rival made it a disaster from the get go.
Zune on the other hand succeeded too late. It was far superior to it's competition, yet could not gain market traction. This comes back to the one thing Microsoft has always lacked, and that's sexy marketing. Could the Zune product succeed? Yes, but the marketing strategies and the commitment of the company had to be there.
So what does that mean for now? I think Ballmer needs good technical leadership if he is to remain. He needs to stay back, let the tech person lead with vision, and Ballmer needs to handle the numbers.
Does Microsoft need to pay attention to it's enterprise customers? YES.
With the rumors about the start button and boot to desktop, I believe they are. It's these two things that gives me hope. No, the start button doesn't bring back the start menu, but it's a beginning. Honestly, that bloody button is the one thing that could make me think about deploying Windows 8 with minimal training. Listening to feedback from the admins of enterprise systems would go a long way towards cementing Microsoft permanently as the OS or business.
(Side Rant: If I had known that Customer Experience would be used to determine the life of the start menu, I would have skipped ever single setting that pinned programs to the taskbar and placed icons on the desktop in my answer files when I deployed 700 machines year before last. Instead of making things convenient for my users, I would have made sure they would have to go to the start menu for every program they launched. If the decisions to remove the start menu were based on Customer feedback instead of a data point saying that customers didn't use it, then we would never have had this hullabaloo in the first place. END RANT)
Ok back to topic. So, let's say that Ballmer is thrown out.....Who in the heck would you replace him with? Would he be business focused? Would she be marketing focused? Would they be tech focused?
I think business wise, Ballmer is doing a good job, but he needs someone there that can provide the input for the tech side, and argue why losing money on a tech product is better for the long run. God knows he could use someone savvy in marketing for sure.