Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says the company is consistently beating Google in online productivity and communications applications, a market where the Redmond company’s Office 365 service is going head-to-head with Google Apps.

“If you look at it, when it comes to enterprises moving to the cloud, the first thing people tend to look at is productivity and communications,” said Ballmer at the Web 2.0 Summit yesterday, when asked about Microsoft’s progress in cloud computing. “We are winning, winning, winning, winning, winning. Doesn’t mean the other guys don’t win a couple, but man, we’re successful.”

The “other guys” are Google the vast majority of the time, Ballmer said.

That comment about cloud computing, at the 11-minute mark in the video above, is one of several remarks making headlines following Ballmer’s appearance.

Later, for example, interviewer John Battelle of Federated Media asked Ballmer if Microsoft would ever build its own Windows Phone, departing from its strategy of solely supplying the operating system and applications. Ballmer said Microsoft is “focused on enabling hardware innovation broadly through our industry.” (18:30 in the video above.)

Was he sidestepping the question on purpose, perhaps signaling that Microsoft is thinking about building its own phone? I didn’t get that impression from watching the video, but others did. Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet has more on the topic.

Battelle also asked Ballmer if he was glad Microsoft didn’t buy Yahoo for $44 billion. (Yahoo’s market value is now $19.5 billion.) “Sometimes, you’re lucky,” Ballmer said, but he pointed out that the bid was made before the economic downturn, and he said there’s “a lot of great things at Yahoo” and he’s “very proud to call them a partner.” (Exchange starts around 9:20 in the video.)

Asked about Google Android phones, Ballmer called the user experience inconsistent and difficult to learn. “You don’t need to be a computer scientist to use a Windows Phone. I think you do to use an Android phone,” he said. (21:00)

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