Steve Ballmer discusses Microsoft’s past, present, and future

Steve Ballmer can never be called shy. Within moments of opening his appearance oat the Web 2.0 Summit this week, he started his offensive against Google with jabs about their Apps cloud collaboration software and Android, then went after the Apple iPhone.

As a speaker at the event 2 years ago, Ballmer lauded the recently-released Bing. Yesterday, he noted that Bing’s reach had more than doubled since then, going from 7% market share to 15% itself and twice that when you factor in Bing-powered search such as Yahoo!.

“Together with Yahoo, we’re between 25 percent and 30 percent market share,” Ballmer said.

He then challenged the audience to compare searches on Bing and Google. According to his numbers, 70% of searches do not care which engine they use. The remaining 30%, he said, are split between Bing and Google on preference.

On the social front, co-host John Batelle asked, “Have you decided to punt on social, or are you going to surprise us at some point?”

While he mentioned the company’s relationship with Facebook, he pointed more towards Xbox Live and recently-acquired Skype as their social entries.