Steve Ballmer has his sights set firmly on being number 2 in search within 5 years according to the Telegraph. Good on him I say.

This might sound ambitious, but don’t be concerned. You can be quite confident in this happening because Steve has said he is ‘quite sure’ Microsoft can achieve it. That’s right. He is ‘quite sure’. Sleep easy now.

OK, so we’re piling shit on him a bit, but when you see that Live has a piss-weak 3% of the search market and Yahoo (the current number 2) has 11% you’ve gotta wonder. David and Goliath metaphors don’t really cut it.

So the question becomes, did he really state categorically that Live search would be number 2 in five years? To get the real story you should watch the interview that those reported statements come from:

In it you’ll see that Steve is being pushed for a time frame. He reluctantly agrees to the 5 year timeframe after repeated prompting by the reporter (and a pretty shit interview it was in our opinion). So, the moral of the story – it’s pretty hard to rely on anything you read these days (except of course the current blog you’re reading <g>).

Moving on, we looked at a few more of his comments. And, being a little kinder to the man we have to say that he is very down to earth when in retrospective mode. Here’s his honest response when asked about whether they missed the Search and Advertising boat:

"Sure, should we have embraced the opportunity in search and online advertising a few years earlier? The answer is yes," admitted Mr Ballmer. "But there is nothing to be afraid of. It’s all upside, we have a small market share, we are David, Goliath is out there, the opportunity is ours and we need to seize it."

We might give him a hard time here, but deep down we have a high respect for the man. He’s passionate, honest/realistic and focussed. Exactly what you want in a CEO, especially coming into some tough economic times.