Politicians and corporations behaving badly: that's one theme that emerges from the latest secret State Department cables released by WikiLeaks.

The new revelations don't measure up to the seriousness of the alleged massacre of civilians by U.S. troops in Iraq that I delved into over the weekend. But they are still very much worth noting.

A cable from 2008 titled "Mayawati: Portrait of a Lady" reports that the chief minister of India's Uttar Pradesh state (the country's most populous) once dispatched an empty private jet to Mumbai to procure her favorite brand of sandals:

Mayawati's full majority victory in May 2007 UP State Assembly elections left her beholden to no one and has allowed her to act on her eccentricities, whims and insecurities. When she needed new sandals, her private jet flew empty to Mumbai to retrieve her preferred brand. According to Lucknow journalists, she employs nine cooks (two to cook, the others to watch over them) and two food tasters.

At a press conference today, Mayawati called the report "wrong, baseless, and disgusting." She also asked that Julian Assange be put "into a mental asylum."

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Buying Skype would give Microsoft a potentially valuable communications tool as it tries to become a bigger force on the Internet and in the increasingly important smartphone market.

Microsoft said it will marry Skype's functions to its Xbox game console, Outlook email program and Windows smartphones. The company said it will continue to support Skype on other software platforms.

The sellers include eBay Inc. and private equity firms Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz.

About 170 million people log in to Skype's services every month, though not all of them make calls. Skype users made 207 billion minutes of voice and video calls last year.

Most people use Skype's free calling services, which has made it difficult for the service to make money since entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis started the company in 2003. An average of about 8.8 million customers per month, or just over 1 percent of the user base, pay to use Skype services.

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From Bloomberg:

Consumer PC shipments dropped 8 percent in the quarter, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein said. Netbooks -- the cheap laptops that became popular during the recession -- plunged 40 percent, partially because of defections to tablet computers, he said.

When Steve Jobs debuted the iPad 15 months ago, critical appraisals were all over the map, from effusive to dismissive, but I don't think even the most gaga fanboy predicted that in little more than year the tablet would have meaningfully reshaped the entire personal computing industry.

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Nokia Corp., the world's largest maker of mobile phones, said Friday it plans to use Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Phone software as the main platform for its smart phones in an effort to pull market share away from Apple's iPhone and Android, Google's software for phones and tablets.

The move marks a major strategy shift for Nokia, which has previously equipped devices with its own software. Analysts said the deal was a bigger win for Microsoft than Nokia, whose CEO Stephen Elop in a leaked memo this week compared his company to a burning oil platform with "more than one explosion ... fueling a blazing fire around us."

Nokia said the partnership would "deliver an ecosystem with unrivaled global reach and scale." However, it warned that the new strategy would also bring "significant uncertainties," and said it expects profit margins to be hit by strong competition from rivals.

Nokia's share price plunged 9 percent to euro7.43 ($10.11) in afternoon trading in Helsinki.

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So much for that idea. Ozzie's departure, announced today in a weirdly low-key manner, shows that Microsoft is still struggling to define itself for the Internet era.

Ozzie was the company's Chief Software Architect, a position held previously by Bill Gates after he stepped down as CEO. It was an ideal fit: Ozzie's technical talent and vision for what we could do with technology were extraordinary. At Microsoft he headed up an effort to move the company toward the era when software was more online than not, a sea change for a company that had for its entire existence been all about what amounted to packaged goods.

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Microsoft's Xbox, of course, has featured disc-less streaming since 2008. The company signed an exclusivity clause with Microsoft, forcing out Sony and Nintendo of the online movie sector. Or so they thought. In a move to circumvent the legal restrictions on software sharing, Netflix provided a similar service on the PS3 and Wii but one -- and here's where Netflix got creative -- that required a disc. Different software, no legal bind. The discs were provided for free, and instantly, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings' dream of being "on all the game consoles, all the Blu-ray players, all the Internet TVs" was jumpstarted.

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Microsoft clearly wants Internet Explorer 9 -- available on beta as of this morning -- to send those memories to the junkyard. This is an all new, very different Web browser. In fact, ZDNet calls it the most ambitious browser release in the company's history. The biggest difference, though, is in what you don't see. Microsoft obviously paid attention to competitiors such as Chrome and Safari and removed as much clutter on the browser window as it could. Internet Explorer 9 strips itself of toolbars, search boxes and -- gasp! -- the familiar blue "E" logo. As a result, IE9 is much faster than its predecessor, according to Engadget's review. 

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The Russian government has deployed the latter tactic, the New York Times reports today, by using a law against copyright infringement to go after dissidents. That's bad enough. What should sicken Americans is that Microsoft is complicit in this campaign, according to the newspaper:

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The story is getting plenty of pickup, even though other Wall Street financial institutions have had similar rules in place for years. There's something funny about the castration of tough-talking traders, although some of us are laughing through our tears as we contemplate the imposition of Emily Post rules of e-mail etiquette on the one hand while we learn that Goldman is already taking steps to circumvent the new rules of bank reform on the other.

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The sales push announced Monday marks Google's latest attempt to siphon customers away from rival Microsoft Corp., whose Office suite of e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet and other programs is widely used by government agencies and businesses.

Google is hoping that more federal, state and local government agencies will feel comfortable buying its online applications now that they have the U.S. government's seal of approval. The Federal Information Security Management Act certification means that Google's system for running the online programs is considered reliable enough to store most electronic data handled by U.S. government employees. The clearance doesn't cover classified information.

It's the first time the U.S. government has certified a bundle of software programs delivered over the Internet, a trendy concept known as "cloud computing."

Google has been trying to promote cloud computing as a way for businesses and government agencies to reduce their technology expenses. At the same time, Google is hoping to reduce its financial dependence on Internet advertising, which generated virtually all of its $13.6 billion in revenue during the first half of this year.

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Later that day, Microsoft reported its quarterly earnings -- $16.04 billion in revenue and $4.52 billion in profit -- handily beating the numbers reported earlier this week by Apple (and remember, that was the best quarter ever for Steve Jobs and Co.)

So what happens? The stock price declined on Friday. A share in Microsoft? 25 bucks. Apple? 259.

There are some obvious reasons why investors aren't excited about Microsoft, with the company's abysmal showing in smart phones leading the list. But still, $4.5 billion dollars in profit in a single quarter is a healthy performance, by any standard. If even that kind of bottom line keeps the sword of Damocles hanging by a thread over Steve Ballmer's head, I might almost find myself feeling a little sorry for the guy.

Almost.

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The way it works is, basically, anyone who wants to can post whatever they want, and Republicans will use their comments in town halls and campaign manifestoes this fall. So far, the site has mostly been notable for two things. The first is strange comments: "Congressmen and women should wear Saran Wrap to work" was featured on the site's "Transparency/Open Government" section on Thursday morning, and the featured idea under "Constitutional Limits" was, "We should apologize to King George III. He was mentally handicapped, and he couldn't help but horribly mismanage the government." The second, of course, is the fact that taxpayer dollars are funding the whole thing. The site is being paid for out of the GOP leadership budget, despite its dot-com (not dot-gov) name.

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Apple's move comes as the company's iPhone, and now its iPad tablet computer, take on more of the personal computing tasks once handled by computers running Microsoft programs.

Market cap is the dollar value of a company's outstanding shares. During afternoon trading Wednesday, Apple Inc.'s shares rose to $248.47, pushing its market cap up to about $226 billion.

Microsoft Corp.'s stock slipped to $25.49, for market cap of about $223 billion.

The only U.S. business with a higher market value is Exxon Mobile Corp. The oil company's market cap is about $281 billion.

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But in light of the lively discussion inspired by my Microsoft post, I thought readers might be interested in the farewell e-mail penned by J Allard, one of the newly departed Microsoft executives after yesterday's corporate shakeup, and the guy, as I noted yesterday, who was most instrumental in getting Microsoft focused on the Internet.

Allard is classy and passionate, and I especially liked this passage, where he talks about his initial recruitment to Microsoft:

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J Allard was the guy who got the Internet at Microsoft; his infamous January 1994 memo "Windows -- the Next Killer App for the Internet," made an undeniable business case requiring Microsoft to get serious about the Net. What happened next was a remarkable display of nimble corporate reorientation. Microsoft was caught flat-footed by the cyberspace explosion, but once Bill Gates and Co. decided to focus, the company was unstoppable. Microsoft blasted Netscape out of the dot-com water, and entrenched itself everywhere on the Web. Resistance was futile.

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The free Web mail service soon will be switching to a new approach that Microsoft hopes will give Hotmail an edge over rival offerings from Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc.

The upgrade, expected to be available in July or August, will automatically sort incoming messages into different categories devoted to users' key contacts and Internet social networks. It will also provide previews of incoming photos, videos and other material without having to open an attachment or click on a link.

Other tools are being added to make it less cumbersome to send photos, videos, documents and other attachments to e-mail recipients. Another tweak is supposed to make is easier to sync Hotmail on mobile phones.

It's all part of the most extensive overhaul to Hotmail since Microsoft bought the service 12 years ago, said Chris Jones, a Microsoft executive who is overseeing the renovations.

"Our service wasn't doing the best job that it could," Jones said during a Monday preview of the makeover.

The new features are supposed to enable people to spend less time managing their inboxes and more time enjoying and digesting what's in the messages.

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A debate that has been swirling around these parameters for months exploded with renewed vigor last week after a close look at the new terms embedded in the license for the iPhone's software development kit (SDK) revealed that Apple now prohibits the use of cross-platform third-party programming tools for the creation of new iPhone apps. Critics immediately compared the command-and-control tactics to the worst excesses of Microsoft's glory days, and charged Steve Jobs with betraying a core value of the Internet. You know, that one that gives us the right to do whatever the hell we want to, any time we want.

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If Rupert Murdoch can get enough cash from Microsoft to compensate for what his media properties would lose in advertising dollars by cutting off the flow of Google-directed traffic, then maybe the deal makes business sense for him. But it seems to me that the move would also be a bonanza for any major news organization that does not close off its content to Google -- like, say, Bloomberg, or Reuters, or the New York Times.

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Cloud computing refers to the model in which your data is stored online, in some vast server farm -- instead of on your desktop. Gmail or any other Web-based app is an example of the cloud computing model. Increasing numbers of us don't give a second thought to the idea of storing our photographs on Flickr or our documents at Google Docs and so on. But when a disaster of Sidekick proportions occurs -- your contact and calendar info, photos, etc., all gone with apparently no hope of recovery -- the calculus changes dramatically. It is, as InformationWeek's Eric Zeman dubbed it, "a code red cloud disaster." Sidekick users are furious, and T-Mobile is scrambling to make amends, and the very future viability of the Sidekick in the hotly contested smartphone market is in serious jeopardy.

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Time's Lisa Abend has a good overview of the contretemps touched off by Ikea's decision to switch from Futura, a classic font created by the Bauhaus-influenced German typeface designer Paul Renner in the 1920s, to Verdana, a Microsoft product designed to look good on computer screens.

The protesters claim Verdana is ugly, dumbed down, and an insult to Ikea-fan sensibilities. But in a tough economy...

From Time:

So why would Ikea make such a change? The very ubiquity of Verdana seems to be part of the font's appeal. Freely distributed by Microsoft, the typeface allows Ikea to use the same font in all countries and with many alphabets. "It's more efficient and cost-effective," says Ikea spokeswoman Monika Gocic. "Plus, it's a simple, modern-looking typeface."

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