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.

Hands up all those people who use Live Search. Yeah we thought so. But that’s all gonna change.

Scene at Microsoft HQ

• Live Search Program Manager: We seem to have a problem with Live Search
• Drone: What’s that?
• Program Manager: It doesn’t seem to be very popular
• Drone: No shit, Sherlock.
• Program Manager: What can we do about it?
• Drone: Nothing. Face it you’re fucked. You couldn’t even pay people to use it.
• Program Manager: You’ve just given me a great idea.

You get the picture. With absolutely no traction in getting people using Live Search, Microsoft has turned to its last resort: pay the punters to use it.

That’s right: with SearchPerks you get credits for using Live Search (we’re not kidding). Next April (yes we checked if it was April 1 – it aint) you can start redeeming these credits for all manner of goodies including music downloads, plane flights and even an Xbox controller.

It’s limited to the first million to sign up (and only in the US – sorry O/S readers – you obviously already use Live Search and don’t need to be bought off).

Madness.