• Information Week, Friday, May 2, 2008 11:15 AM

While Microsoft continues the prickly business of a forced marriage with Yahoo, Google and IBM have willingly joining forces to deliver what they think will become the tech industry's dominant software model: so-called cloud computing. The companies' CEOs made a joint appearance at an IBM conference in Los Angeles during which they revealed plans for a worldwide network of servers where businesses and consumers could tap everything from personal schedules to engineering applications.

"It's the story of our lifetime," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "The cloud has higher value in business, that's the secret to our collaboration." Through the cloud, Google and IBM could together supply a range of hosted offerings-anything from word processing programs to sophisticated security and management tools.

The actual Google-IBM partnership has been going on under a relatively low profile for several years now. "(IBM CEO Sam Palmisano) called and wanted to know what we thought about distributed computing," Schmidt said, adding that the companies' technological visions complemented each other nicely. Right, joked Palmisano: "We're boring, they're exciting; we're slow, they're fast; we're fat, they're skinny."

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