Bill Gates’s leaving Microsoft last Friday made ways for its chief executive officer, Steve Ballmer, to get the office the company’s founder had. All these happening, one of the biggest questions in the mind of most of the people in the software market is how will Microsoft fare under Ballmer’s new leadership.

Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates have been friends since they went to Harvard. The two came from very different families, but shared the same passion for math. While Gates dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft with his friend Paul Allen, Ballmer graduated from the university. After two years of working for Procter & Gamble, where he became friends with Jeffrey R. Immelt, the person behind General Electronics, he started his master degree in economics at Stanford University.

It was there in 1980 when Gates asked him to come and work for the Redmond based company. Even though this meant for Ballmer to discontinue his studies, he eventually accepted the offer and he managed to work his way to the top, becoming the company’s president in 1998 and then its CEO in 2000.

Most of Microsoft’s success has been due to the team Ballmer and Gates made. While Ballmer was a shrewd economist, with an eye for numbers and nose for acquisitions, Gates was the company’s technical genius, knowing just what the public wanted, and how it wanted it to be made.

So now that Microsoft seems to have lost the guy behind the technical vision, will the company be able to keep ‘innovating,’ and will it be able to turn the new focus on the internet market to its advantage? This question is a good one, especially if we look at the fact that Microsoft hasn’t done too good in solving these issues even when Gates was working there. The failed acquisition of Yahoo and the way Vista seems to have been dismissed by corporate consumers are some serious signs that the company isn’t able to influence the market the way it used to.

Even though some people are skeptical at answering ‘yes’ to the question, let’s not forget that one of the moves Gates made before quitting the company was to make Ray Ozzie, one of the visionaries who created Lotus Notes, Microsoft’s chief software architect. This means that Ballmer will have the tech-savvy person to make a good team with even now that the founder is gone.

What is more, Ballmer is known to be a guy who understands technical issues very well, and knows how they work. Of course, he was never implied in code writing or code reviewing, but he has the ability to understand how thing should work if they are to make a bang on the market.

Another thing that could mean that Microsoft has all the chances of remaining the leader on the software market is the fact that even though Gates has officially ended his days as a full-time employee of the company, he will still work one day a week for Microsoft, so if things go sour, the company could benefit of his expertise, and hopefully solve potential crisis.