Weekend news and notes from the Microsoft beat ...

Apple has reached another symbolic milestone in its resurgence, surpassing Microsoft in quarterly revenue for the first time. The score on the top line: $20.34 billion to $16.2 billion.

However, Microsoft still leads on the bottom line, thanks in large part to Windows, Office and other traditional software businesses with high profit margins. Microsoft reported profits of $7.12 billion for the quarter. Apple, which gets most of its revenue from hardware sales (PDF), reported $4.31 billion in profits by comparison.

Despite beating Wall Street's expectations for the quarter, Microsoft's earnings weren't enough to convince Goldman Sachs to change its outlook on the Redmond company. The firm, which previously made headlines for downgrading Microsoft's shares to a "neutral" rating, told clients in a note that the company remains challenged by "long-term structural headwinds including the rise of new mobile platforms that threaten Window’s dominance and (will) likely eat into core PC growth.

Microsoft's Silverlight interactive technology and development platform received barely a mention during the company's keynotes at the Professional Developers Conference this week, and it sounds like there's good reason. Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet.com quotes Microsoft Server & Tools chief Bob Muglia saying that the company's "strategy has shifted" to focus more on HTML5 as a way of running applications across platforms.

Microchip technology company Canesta Inc. confirmed late yesterday that it has reached an agreement to sell its products, technology, customer contracts and intellectual property to Microsoft for an undisclosed sum. The New York Times had reported the news earlier in the day. Canesta's technology allows devices to sense objects in a room in three dimensions, which is expected to help with Microsoft's push into natural user interfaces, such as the Kinect motion-sensing control system for Xbox 360, launching next week.

A report by Moody's this week cited Microsoft among U.S. companies that are continuing to hoard large sums of cash in the face of the uncertain economy. The company's balance of cash and short-term investments rose to $44.1 billion as of Sept. 30, up from $36.8 billion three months earlier, even as it spent $4 billion to repurchase its own shares during the September quarter.

And on a lighter note, Microsoft's Channel 9 developer community site is back with another gory and funny Halloween slasher movie spoof. This year's installment has a great title: "The Killer App."