Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told The Wall Street Journal that his impatience is partly to blame for Microsoft's languishing paid search business, CNET reports. Popular opinion suggests that Microsoft will make another run at buying Yahoo's search business, although questions still abound as to whether such a move will be too little too late for the software giant to make any worthwhile inroads against Google.

In his interview with the Journal, Ballmer suggested that Microsoft's early missteps help explain how Google became the uncontested leader in paid search and why the Redmond, Wash.-based firm finds itself playing catch up today.

"The biggest mistakes I claim I've been involved with is where I was impatient -- because we didn't have a business yet in something, we should have stayed patient," he told the publication. "If we'd kept consistent with some of the ideas" that Microsoft had in-house in 1999, "we might have been in paid search."

Here's how the Journal summed it up: "Nearly a decade ago, early in Ballmer's tenure as CEO, Microsoft had its own inner Google and killed it." In 2000, Microsoft had a rudimentary system called Keywords that married web search with advertising, even before Google, but Microsoft executives shut it down after two months, fearing it would cannibalize other revenue streams.

Three years later, the company had a second chance when top executives urged the company to acquire Overture Services, but Ballmer and co-founder Bill Gates shot the idea down. Soon enough, Yahoo purchased Overture, which "now forms a cornerstone of the Yahoo unit Ballmer covets."