I don't know if you want to make this into a meta-pattern or what, but Google again seems to be stepping up where Microsoft has stumbled, today hiring laid-off business development director of Microsoft's Emerging Business Team Don Dodge, according to TechFlash.

Dodge will reportedly be working for another former Microsoft development evangelist, Vic Gundotra, who Google picked up a couple years ago and who currently heads their own developer evangelism efforts. Dodge will be focusing on Google Apps, an effort that many (although, notably, not Steve Ballmer) see as one of the most direct challenges to Microsoft Office's domination of the corporate desktop.

I wrote about Dodge's termination and what it might indicate at the company last week. As I indicated then, the interpretations were sheer speculation, and if that's the case when looking at Microsoft's motives for letting Dodge go, then it is equally true when contemplating Google's reasons for hiring him. Yet the simplest and easiest explanation seems to be that Microsoft is pulling away from the startup developer community, while Google is interested in extending their reach even further in that direction. Google hasn't had any lack of interest in their typically open and sexy tools, while Microsoft has been struggling for years to attract new developers (and retain existing ones) to its expensive platform over the free and cutting edge open source tools that have become available. For a company that has risen to such prominence with the necessary cooperation of third-party developers, it's a puzzling strategy. Microsoft continues to boast of the number of applications available to Windows users... does it not realize that spurning the community that creates those applications is liable to remove that selling point (already fast disappearing)?