This just in from our spies at the Google shareholder meeting: Eric gave a presentation and talked about cloud computing and illustrated it with a picture of Legos stuck on a picture of a cloud. Great stuff.

What I think is much, much weirder is Squirrel Boy’s recent joint appearance with Sam Palmisano at an IBM Business Partners conference. (Photo at right.) Gist of it was that IBM and Google would work together on cloud computing. I asked Eric about this and he was like, “Of course we’re not doing anything with them. It’s all for show. They paid me to get up on stage and pretend that they’re relevant.”

Eric says when they were backstage Palmisano brought up the subject of the Microsoft Yahoo merger and said he thought there were great opportunities to leverage synergies and achieve efficiencies by gaining scale and exploiting opportunities — but he couldn’t understand why Microsoft would try to acquire a Chinese company in the first place. “You know I once saw that CEO, that Jimmy Yang fellow, speak at a conference and I must tell you, I was impressed,” Palmisano said. “He speaks very good English. Say, do you play any golf? We should get out on the course sometime.”

Photo: Burt Hammer, Hammer Agency.