A big Google-Apple partnership next week? Bet on it.

I don't typically join the gaggle of folks trying to guess what Steve Jobs' next move is going to be, but for once I can't resist. On Monday Jobs is taking the stage at Apple's worldwide developers conference in San Francisco to do what he does best - tell us all about Apple's latest products and reinforce his place as the most charismatic CEO on the planet. He'll probably announced a new Ipod, tell us more about the iPhone etc etc. One announcement I'm almost sure of, however : A far reaching, cloud computing partnership with Google. Both companies have been hinting about it for months, and it makes perfect sense.

Cloud computing is the hot new thing in the world of technology right now; Apple is a complete laggard; and it knows it needs to fix it. Apple makes beautiful hardware, but it hasn't improved on .Mac, its cloud based storage offering, in years. You get 1GB of storage on .Mac for $100. That's laughable in an era where you can get double that for nothing.

Meanwhile, Google runs cloud based hardware and software better and cheaper than anyone in the world right now. How does it make money? By getting as many people as possible looking at advertising alongside search and other various software offerings. Imagine all the traffic from the following: You buy a Mac and you automatically get a free Google account.

And the hints from Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO and Apple board member and from Apple boss Steve Jobs point squarely in that direction. Schmidt said in April in an interview with me that he envisioned just such a relationship eventually. "We're a perfect back end to the problems that they're trying to solve," Schmidt told me. "They have very good judgment on user interface and people. But they don't have this supercomputer (that Google has), which is the data centers. What they have is a manufacturing business that's doing quite well."

Jobs' response to .Mac's whithered state? In response to a question last week he actually agreed, adding "stay tuned." said "I couldn't agree with you more and we will make up for lost time in the very near future."