Last week’s update was my last post before a vacation in Europe, where I have been alternately having too much fun in Stockholm and Prague, and at the same time suffering from marginal internet access. The thrust of that update was that Microsoft is hedging its bets on Windows and Surface by releasing Office Mobile for iOS. This mobile solution requires a subscription to Office 365, and has somewhat limited functionality, but demonstrates that Microsoft can’t pretend that Office is so strong a draw that people will buy Windows-based devices to continue using Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.

This week, Microsoft apparently passed on the opportunity to buy Nokia, who arguably makes the best Windows phones. So Ballmer has not doubled down in that arena.

The new news suggests Microsoft has finally smelled the roses: the PC era is over and Windows is coming to a rapid and long-overdue end. All the evidence is mounting. Microsoft’s phones are a fizzle, at best. The Surface is a catastrophe.

Given all that, the rumor — reported by AllThingsD and others — is that Ballmer will be announcing a major reorganization that will simplify and consolidate things in Redmond. The reorg will lead to four groups: enterprise business, hardware, applications and services, and an operating systems group.

Windows and Windows Mobile will be consolidated into one organization headed by the pair that currently run the two unintegrated groups. That won’t last long, I bet. One of those two — Windows Phone chief Terry Myerson and head of Windows engineering Julie Larson-Green — will win the implicit horse race. Ultimately this group will shut down, or maybe might be supporting the Xbox OS and nothing else.

No one seems to know exactly where the Xbox group will land (hardware? operating systems?), but it’s really immaterial to my argument, today. I am most interested in the enterprise business, which may be the best candidate for long-term viability. I imagine that Sharepoint, Microsoft Analytics, Office 365, and Yammer will continue to be a major source of revenue for the  company, and that Skype, Outlook, and Exchange can continue to have real traction in the enterprise, even without Windows in the picture. In fact, a sensible strategy for those managing this enterprise division would be to aggressively focus on Android and iOS clients, as well as improving the experience of web access to these products.

I am going to make a prediction: sometime in the next few years the enterprise group will be broken off as a separate stand-along business. Without Windows as a foundation uniting the various elements of the Microsoft Empire, there is no reason for sticking together. In fact, the efforts that Microsoft is likely to make to keep Windows afloat will squander huge amounts of cash which could be better spent on retaining a leadership role in the enterprise software sphere.

Just because Windows is (nearly) dead doesn’t mean that Microsoft’s enterprise opportunities die along with it.