In spite of its weak security, poor performance, and woeful standards compliance, a lot of people are still using Internet Explorer 6 as their Web browser of choice. A large part of this user base seems to be made up of corporate users. According to Stuart Strathdee, Chief Security Adviser at Microsoft Australia, one of the reasons for this continued usage is that companies have found a virtue in one of the browser's biggest flaws: it doesn't work properly with social networking sites like Facebook.

Rather than using a secure browser and creating corporate—or firewall—policies to block unwanted time-wasting sites, companies are depending on the browser's increasing obsolescence to render the sites unusable. This allows IT managers to keep users out of YouTube without having to actually confront the users they are supposed to be supporting; it's the sites' fault that Internet Explorer 6 doesn't work, not the IT department's fault for foisting that legacy browser on its users.

With major online Web services like Gmail and Google Docs increasingly choosing to ignore Internet Explorer 6, however, this strategy could start to backfire. And, given Internet Explorer 8's improved performance and security, Microsoft customers are advised to upgrade and find some other way to keep the pleasures of Farmville at bay.

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Apple reached a major milestone Wednesday when the company's market capitalization surpassed that of Microsoft for the first time since 1990, making it the number one technology company by market cap. In the last several years, Apple has been firing on all cylinders with the launch of the iPhone and iPad while growing its Mac business to record sales. Apple's meteoric rise in stock value over the last couple years put its market cap ahead of Microsoft, whose stock has been slipping recently. Apple's good fortune could have been good for Microsoft's balance sheet, however; the software giant could have made almost $5 billion in profit had it held on to its AAPL stock for a little longer.

Microsoft's market cap rose sharply throughout the 1990s, peaking at around $556 billion at the beginning of 2000. Apple was most often referred to as "beleaguered" during that dark decade, barely rising above a few billion in market cap before Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1996. Before launching the iconic iMac in 1998, however, Steve Jobs made a deal with Microsoft to help Apple weather some tough times while it worked on launching a series of new products and returning to profitability.

Microsoft's Hohm website, an online service designed to make it easier for people to figure out how energy efficient their house is (and how to make it better), has become a great deal more useful with the new addition of real estate data. Now, anyone in the US can enter their ZIP code and get an instant, if approximate, evaluation of their house's efficiency.

These evaluations use a combination of public housing record information and weather data to come up with a score. More dedicated users can sign in and describe their house's appliances and construction to get a more detailed assessment of their energy usage, and advice on what changes to make to reduce energy bills.

This is all well and good, but the value of the site remains low for most US residents. Although residents of parts of California, Washington, and the Midwest can connect their utility providers directly to Hohm, providing more accurate monitoring, for most the option is unavailable.

The real meat of the project is in the data collection and analysis; among other things, it's a showcase for Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, which is used to collate and crunch all the numbers people feed into it.

Hohm is also envisaged as being a key component in a smart grid, where devices will report their power usage (giving Hohm more data to analyze) and make decisions based on its recommendations. Energy companies will also be able to use this data to influence pricing and output levels.

In spite of increasing awareness and concern over energy usage, however, practical deployments of such smart grid technology are still some way off. And without the data such devices will provide, the value of Hohm is greatly diminished—for most people, it won't tell them anything they didn't already know.

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The news of the departures of J Allard and Robbie Bach from Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division has been met with a remarkable breadth of opinion. Bach and Allard were both instrumental in the development and marketing of the Xbox console.

Bach led Microsoft's Home and Entertainment Group, which encompassed the Xbox, Games for Windows, and Microsoft's consumer-oriented hardware and software products. In 2005, he was made president of the newly formed Entertainment & Devices (E&D) division, which spans four areas: the Interactive Entertainment Business, responsible for Xbox, Xbox 360, Games for Windows, Zune, and Windows Media Center; the Media Platforms Business, which includes MediaRoom and PlayReady; the Mobile Communications Business, covering Windows Mobile/Windows Phone, Kin, and related software and services; and the Specialized Devices & Applications Business, which covers Microsoft Hardware, Surface, Office for Mac, and Windows Embedded.

Back in February, Microsoft released public specifications for PST files, the databases used by Outlook for storing and archiving e-mail. To these specifications, Microsoft has now added a pair of developer-oriented open source projects: the PST Data Structure View Tool for cracking open PSTs to browse inside them, and the PST File Format SDK, a cross-platform C++ library for working with PST files programmatically.

The SDK project is not yet finished; presently it only provides read-only access to PST data, though write support is planned. Both tools are released using under the Apache License 2.0. This means that they can be incorporated into proprietary, closed-source projects, as well as other open source projects.

PST files represent a big hurdle for anyone wanting to switch away from Outlook. There are many millions of gigabytes of mail stored in PSTs, but no robust way to access them from anything that isn't Outlook. With many people unwilling to give up massive e-mail archives, they're left with no option but to stick with Microsoft's e-mail client.

Though the core Office document formats are now XML-based open standards, alleviating such lock-in issues, Outlook has continued to use a complex database format for storing mail, making interoperability difficult. With the documentation and these software projects, the days of being locked into Outlook could be coming to an end.

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Microsoft Thursday released the beta of BizTalk Server 2010 and the release candidate of Windows Server AppFabric, two products that help developers produce scalable applications and services. These products form key elements of Redmond's plans to enable cloud-like scale-out capabilities to privately hosted and deployed systems.

BizTalk Server 2010 is the latest release of Microsoft's enterprise service bus product, used for integrating and connecting disparate enterprise applications. It makes it easier for applications to access each other's data, even when using different formats and data stores.

Ever since Google announced its purchase of video codec company On2 in August 2009, there's been an expectation that On2's VP8 codec would someday be open-sourced and promoted as a new, open option for HTML5 video. An open VP8 would offer comparable quality to H.264, but without the patent and royalty encumbrances that codec suffers.

Last month, this speculation seemed confirmed, with inside sources claiming that Google would announce the open-sourcing of the VP8 codec this month at the company's I/O conference.

Today, Google, Mozilla, and Opera announced the launch of the WebM Project. The goal of the project is to develop a high-quality, open-source, royalty-free video format suitable for the Web. WebM video files do indeed use VP8 for their video compression, coupled with Vorbis audio compression. The video and audio data will be combined into container files that are based on the open-source Matroska container.

A raft of updates for Microsoft's Windows Live products are due to arrive over the next few months. In April, the company described the next version of the Windows Live Messenger instant messaging platform. Now it's Hotmail's turn in the limelight.

The new Hotmail is being promoted first and foremost as a more efficient way of managing e-mail. The new "Sweep" feature is designed to make it easier to manage all those messages that aren't quite spam—mailing lists and marketing mail that we did sign up for or opt in to—but equally aren't what we're really interested in.

These low-value e-mails can be swept away, leaving the stuff we actually care about—messages from our contacts and social networks, current conversations—easy to find. In conjunction with spam filtering, for killing the messages that we don't want at all, this should make inboxes much easier to manage.

The new Hotmail will also allow a monstrous 10GB of attachments per e-mail. E-mails of up to 200 attachments of 50MB each will also be possible. Fortunately, the entire 10GB will not be sent as an e-mail. Instead, the attachments will be uploaded to SkyDrive, and the e-mail itself will only contain links.

Microsoft explains that e-mail is one of the most widely-used ways of sharing photographs. This is in spite of e-mail's unsuitability to this task; most mail services place strict limits on the size of messages that can be used, and e-mailing a picture to a dozen people means that they all have to download it whether they care or not.

Building an image gallery on SkyDrive and then distributing links to that is a neat solution to the problem. It makes the e-mails themselves small and manageable, without requiring anyone to adopt a new workflow; it will still look and work as if they were regular attachments.

Pictures sent in this way, along with movies from YouTube and Hulu, or photos on sites like Flickr and SmugMug, will show up seamlessly embedded into any messages viewed from the Hotmail Web interface, so Hotmail users won't need to switch to other sites to interact with media sent to them.

This integration also extends to Office documents. Any Office document can be opened, edited, and shared, right from the inbox, using the Office 2010 Web Apps. These too will be integrated with SkyDrive, so files can be edited and shared from SkyDrive as well.

Hotmail will also offer an interesting new authentication scheme. When using untrusted machines where keyboard logging is a risk (such as at Internet cafes or in airports), Hotmail users will be able to elect to be sent a one-time password to another mail account or a cell phone. This password can then be used to provide access to Hotmail once. Even if recorded by a keyboard logger, the one-time password will be of no value. In conjunction with the always-on SSL that the new Hotmail will offer, this should greatly improve the e-mail system's security.

We first heard about the new Hotmail when details were prematurely published last month. It's a substantial overhaul of the platform, with much stronger integration between mail, messaging, file storage, and now Office applications. The new Hotmail should start rolling out some time in the next few months; as yet, however, there's no public launch date.

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