Google rolled out their Apps Marketplace yesterday at their Campfire One developer conference, unveiling an unexpectedly powerful way to leverage the Apps platform for other applications.

The Marketplace is hitting the beach with applications from fifty developers including Intuit, Atlassian, and Box, and the word so far is that despite the 20% cut of revenues Google aims to collect from partners, the system they have introduced is vendor-friendly. With an available audience of 25 million users, that's sure to attract additional development quickly. Considering the relatively weak capabilities of the Apps themselves, there is a massive opportunity for more business-oriented developers than Google to fill in gaps that are of concern to business users.

Perhaps inevitably, the Apps Marketplace is being seen as another shot at Microsoft. The offering seems to be structured more for the SMB than the enterprise market, but other than e-mail, that's always where Apps have had the greatest appeal anyway. This move is more likely to take a chunk out of Force.com than Microsoft, although the network effects of additional applications (and more importantly, the ability to integrate custom applications) may serve to make Apps a more attractive selection for day to day business overall.

Google acquired document collaboration company Docverse last week, a move designed to shore up the capabilities of Google Apps to interoperate with desktop-created Microsoft Office documents. Such capability has long been desired by business users, who are heavily reliant on the Office platform to date and faced with few good options for moving documents and operations to cloud-based solutions even when those solutions represent significant economic advantages.

The Docverse acquisition represents expertise as much as IP, which is an important step toward bringing Apps a higher level of interoperability with Office. Google is not low on talent, by any means, but it has not, to date, shown much capacity or interest for delving into the intricacies of Microsoft products. That sort of talent is going to be necessary to bring better and smoother interoperability with those products, and that interoperability represents the wedge the company will need to use if it hopes to supplant the status quo with its own products.

I have questioned, and probably will continue to question, Google commitment to enterprise penetration with various services it has posed for such services. The company's bread just isn't buttered on that side right now. It's possible that a strategy of diversification would be wise and perhaps that is what they are pursuing, but it will take quite a bit more evidence to convince me. How they make use of this acquisition will play a large part in that.

Commonly used by telemarketers and call centers, predictive dialers is a computerized system which dials batches of telephone numbers in an automatic manner and connects agents to prospective clients. A variety of predictive are available in the market ranging from smart, hosted, software to hardware dialers.

One of the biggest advantages of predictive dialers is that it saves time and enables agents to connect to larger base of clients without having to manually dial the numbers. Other benefits include increase in productivity, reliability in communication and performance across agents and enhanced monitoring and control.

Companies involved in B2C businesses use predictive dialers as they allow more customer contact time. Predictive dialers are expected to gain popularity in the future as the technology is expected to penetrate across SMB's and even SOHO operators.

CEO Steve Ballmer has claimed as much in a speech yesterday at the University of Washington, stating "This is a bet for the company. For the cloud, we're all in."

In light of some of the much noted "software+services" waffling that the company seemed to be so invested in when cloud computing first became a hot topic, it's a difficult claim to credit. Is this just typical Ballmerian hyperbole, or has the company genuinely changed tacks? It's not an idle question for CIOs. "Alignment" is not something that only happens inside your company, it's also something you must find with your vendors to ensure they are and will continue to be the right partners for your business. If Microsoft isn't really committed to cloud computing, then it would be dangerous to rely on them if that's a direction you are trying to go.

From conversations with Microsoft staff I know that at all levels in the company the threat of cloud-based service delivery to their traditional business models looms large, and I sympathize with the plight they face in transitioning between the two eras. So it's not impossible that the great ship is turning, that Ballmer is genuinely planning to bet the company on cloud computing.

If you look at some of the specific claims he makes, though, it seems his definition of cloud computing is a bit more fuzzy than mine. It's difficult, after all, to credit at face value his claim that three-quarters of Microsoft staff are already working on cloud computing, a number set to increase to ninety percent next year. You'd have to accept that everyone working on Windows and Office are in fact building "cloud" services, and that certainly doesn't jibe with my understanding of those products or cloud computing in general. It seems more likely that Ballmer is simply using the trendy, amorphous, marketing version of the term. Which is a shame, because Microsoft's previously outlined strategy seems to me to make good use of the cloud while still supporting and delivering their popular on-premises software. Mary Jo Foley has a more detailed take on the folly of muddying this message. The absurdity of it, in my view, is that it's simply unnecessary for Ballmer to make such claims. Microsoft isn't a leader in cloud computing, but it doesn't need to be; the software plus services strategy seems likely to appeal to many of its current customers and to build on its existing strengths. Microsoft is a strong company with a lot of extraordinarily smart people and some solid products. There's no need to pretend that it is something different.

The next question for anyone doing business with Microsoft is why exactly Ballmer felt a need to do just that. Is it just over-simplification of its actual strategy, as Foley suggests? Or is the company legitimately trying to move even harder and faster toward cloud platforms now?

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