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:

You can see videos of Walt Mossberg and me undertaking that arduous effort (visits to Dublin Castle, fancy hotels in the city of Dublin, a stroll in the streets and a trip to the Wicklow Mountains to see a bit of the lovely Irish countryside.

But we also went to visit the Dublin offices of Google, which has its biggest facility–outside of its Mountain View Googleplex headquarters in California–here in the Docklands section of the city, with 1,300 employees. We got a tour of the facility from John Herlihy, who is director of online sales and operations for Google’s European operations.

The search giant has grown its presence here in Ireland, like a lot of other U.S. Web and tech companies, including Dell, Apple, eBay, Amazon, IBM and many others, because of its educated and multinational population and the country’s digitally friendly government.

Here’s a video of our tour by Herlihy, where we talked about innovation in Europe, explored new Web trends and, of course, encountered those same annoying exercise balls as at Google’s California HQ. While futile, I know, it is my personal goal to eliminate them entirely from the corporate ethos for their sheer irksome “Googley-ness.”

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.