Google and Microsoft Look at Clouds From the Same Side Now (It's Still War Though!)

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer went all misty in a speech at the University of Washington, declaring in his strongest statement that cloud computing was mission critical for the software giant.

“This is the bet for the company,” Ballmer said. “For the cloud, we’re all in.”

And that’s also pretty much all the language you’ve been hearing from Google of late.

In a press event in Silicon Valley in December, in fact, Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra, when talking about mobile search, noted that the future of computing depends on one thing.

The “missing ingredient,” he said, is the cloud.

(Here is his slide showing that.)

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said much the same at the Mobile World Congress in Spain last month.

And as recently as yesterday, in fact, one of the company’s execs–Europe head John Herlihy–said the desktop computer was finished because of the combination of smartphones and the cloud.

Microsoft’s Ballmer could not agree more. “We must move at ‘cloud speed,’ especially in our consumer offerings,” he wrote in a letter to employees yesterday, “All of our products make the cloud better, and the cloud makes our products better.”

While it’s doubtless that Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) will take the battle to the clouds, it is nice that they are both on the same marketing page for now.

And until we are all floating in the atmosphere, here’s a video of the ethereal Joni Mitchell singing “Both Sides Now” in a live performance in 1970.

Clouds apparently got in her way and–unlike Google and Microsoft–she really doesn’t know clouds at all.

Enjoy the terrific video anyway: