Yahoo's earnings announcement was ghastly in two ways. The bad news: Its revenues were flat and earnings down 64 percent. The worse news: It is only cutting 10 percent of its workforce, or 1,500 employees, which will reduce expenses by $400 million. The cuts are not nearly deep enough. Yahoo is forgoing immediate pain for a prolonged period of uncertainty, as investors continue to abandon the stock and employees expect further layoffs down the road.

This is what we've been reduced to: Guessing at how much Apple will underestimate its forecasted December-quarter earnings in today's earnings call. No one actually believes Apple's "guidance." For years, it's been shown to lowball the actual number so it can surprise Wall Street, a maneuver that no longer surprises anyone. This has reduced Apple's quarterly earnings call to an exercise in which its chief financial officer pretends he's not lying, and bank analysts pretend they believe him. No wonder Apple CEO Steve Jobs avoids the charade altogether.

Downturn? What downturn? Strategically placed sources are whispering that MySpace is likely to hit $1 billion in annual revenue, a jump from its $850 million in revenue last year. The milestone is impressive since MySpace is joining the $1 billion club in only five years, a year faster than Google. Facebook, meanwhile, is just too cool to worry about revenue or releasing products. [VentureBeat]

Not too cold, not too hot: Google's third-quarter earnings have come in at a level that will neither feed the ongoing panic nor calm people's jitters. Shareholders are enthused, though, with the stock up to $380 in after-hours trading. Look for the stock to drop as soon as Larry and Sergey start talking about their latest irrelevant side projects which will never make any money. (Google's homepage now supports widescreen widgets! If you're an investor, you'll wish I was kidding.) Here's the release, if you want to dive into the numbers:

You rarely see a photo of John Donahoe, eBay's Dennis-the-Menace lookalike CEO. But today's a good day to pull him out from under Meg Whitman's shadow. The auction deathstar's Q3 net income was $492.2 million, or 38 cents a share. Much better than last year, when chirpy little upstart Skype — a Whitman acquisition — forgot to destroy AT&T and instead cost the company a billion bucks. (Photo by AP/Ron Edmonds)

Intel's revenues for the most recent quarter were flat, but its profits were up 12 percent on expense cuts. (Read: layoffs!) Intel CEO Paul Otellini says the company expects to "outpace" its competition. Right: That would be AMD, the chipmaker which is trying to shed its chipmaking facilities. Outpacing AMD is like running a three-legged race against a double amputee. [WSJ]

The world's largest computer services company pre-announced Q3 earnings with profits beyond analysts' forecasts. Even the Nasdaq is up on the news. Quick, ask your parents for that iPhone now.

"Financial issues are going to affect both business spending and consumer spending, and particularly ... spending by the financial services industry," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told reporters at a news conference in Oslo earlier today. That's a reversal from his claim last week that tech sector worriers were probably watching too much CNBC. On the last day of the sales quarter, the always-bouncy Ballmer was refreshingly blunt: "Whatever happens economically will certainly effect itself on Microsoft." (Photo by AP/Erlend Aas)

"Nearly half of consumers are delaying purchases due to uncertainty in the economy, while 42 percent are planning to decrease their usage of credit cards," Lazard Capital analyst Colin Sebastian wrote this morning. Don't make too much of it yet: Lazard's lowered Amazon.com earnings estimates only a sliver, from $1.58 to $1.55 per share for 2008. Annual revenue for 2009, likewise, is lowered only a quarter-billion from $24.75 billion to $24.50 billion. That's 250 million bucks to you and me, but not much to Bezos and company. (Photo by AP/Ted S. Warren)

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told a meeting of Silicon Valley civic leaders yesterday that despite Wall Street's woes, the tech sector continues to thrive. "Our industry is not immune to what goes on in the global economy. And yet as I travel, given the current circumstances, people still see a certain buoyancy in the market," Ballmer said. Microsoft doesn't report its quarterly earnings until next week.Perhaps catching himself before he ran afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ballmer made sure to tell reporters he wasn't meaning to preview the numbers with his comments. "We are one week from the end of the quarter, so I have nothing all that interesting to say," he joked. One company we know he wasn't referring to: Blackberry maker RIM, which investors killed yesterday after it posted disappointing sales.

Larry Ellison's database peddler saw profits in the most recent quarter jump to $1.08 billion, up 28 percent from the same period last year. As recently as 2006, Oracle got 12 percent of its revenues from banks, brokers, and insurers. Some of its best customers are bankrupt, while others are merging, a move which usually leads to cuts in tech spending. And yet so far Oracle seems unscathed by Wall Street's debt-driven crisis. Even so, free advice for Oracle's New York City sales office: Try the soft sell for a change. [WSJ]

Damn it feels good to be a gamer: The Financial Times has calculated that Nintendo will make $1.6 million per employee in 2008. That beats Goldman Sach's 2007 record — impressive when you consider Goldman's average salary was $660,000 per year, versus only $90,900 for Nintendo. (Photo by Geek on Stun)

Google is celebrating its tenth birthday this month — so how is it doing compared to Microsoft, which is a ripe old 33? Microsoft is still the big dog, earning three times the revenue in the last year. But Bill Gates and company had only booked $140 million in revenue by its tenth year. Google employees are also punching above their weight, booking $1 million per head to Team Redmond's $672,000. If Google figures out how to make money on anything besides search advertising, the $99 billion market value differential might evaporate in time for a bar mitvah in Mountain View. [NYT]

The New York Times Company's total revenue dropped 10 percent in July, to $235.9 million. Total Internet revenue, which now makes up 12 percent of the Times's roughly billion-dollar annual business, was up 2.6 percent — which only looks good compared to the rest of the newspaper industry. [PaidContent]

Napster — or rather, the pathetic music store which picked up the famous file-sharing service's brand — reported a drop in quarterly revenues to $30.3 million, despite the launch of an MP3 store. Subscribers fell from 760,000 to 708,000 in a quarter's time. Here's Napster's latest commercial, obviously not effective at drumming up business. [PaidContent]

In a statement filed with the SEC late today, Google stated that its 2005 purchase of 5 percent of AOL "may be impaired." Analyst guesstimates of AOL's value peg it at about $10 million, or half the value at which Google bought in. It's a blow to Google, but not a big one — a couple hundred million in paper value lost, to a company that takes in more then ten billion a year. The investment still met its primary goal: Cockblocking Microsoft. [AP] (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

Time Warner beat second-quarter earning estimates, posting revenues of $11.55 billion against Wall Street's guess of $11.45 billion. But AOL, the company's online division, which is strangely coveted for acquisition by both Yahoo and Microsoft, didn't do nearly so well, reporting a 15 percent revenue decline to $1.05 billion. A shrinking Internet-access business is mostly to blame for the drop, but execs said AOL's online-advertising division didn't help much either. It grew only 2 percent, primarily on the strength of ad sales on third-party websites. AOL's owned-and-operated websites lost revenue. In good news for shareholders, the company did not have any news to report about improper vote counting at the company's last shareholder meeting.

Sprint Nextel just can't stop the bleeding, losing $344 million and 901,000 subscribers last quarter. This was actually better than Q1, when they lost $505 million and 1 million subscribers. Qwest — communications provider to Bill Gates country and the rural Midwest — meanwhile earned $188 million, which was a 24 percent drop compared to $245 million in the same quarter the year before. Qwest also only signed up 31,000 high-speed Internet subscribers. [KansasCity.com, Reuters]

News Corp. reports earnings tomorrow — but no one's worrying about how many copies of The Simpsons Fox sold on Blu-ray. Wall Street's worries are centered on how ads are doing on MySpace. After months of denials, a Fox executive has conceded the obvious to the Wall Street Journal: Google's keyword-pegged ads are bombing on MySpace. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said as much in discussing his company's results, but MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe was quick to deny a problem at the time. With Fox Interactive's parent company, News Corp., reporting quarterly results tomorrow, we suspect the Fox source let the bad news leak early in an effort to mix a hint of optimism in the story. The result:Instead of a deeper look at why the Google-MySpace partnership is failing, the Journal produced an explainer on MySpace's nearly-year old "hyptertargeting" ad product — the one that, according to the Journal, enables MySpace to double the amount it charges advertisers by categorizing users "into more than 1,000 'buckets,' including rodeo watchers, scrapbook enthusiasts and Dancing With the Stars viewers." Concert organizer Live Nation and shoemaker Adidas bought some inventory and walked away pleased, the story tells us. One problem: like all behavioral targeting technology, "hypertargeting" faces increased scrutiny from Congressmen on a privacy kick. Another problem: targeted or no, many marketers don't believe MySpace users pay any attention to ads while they're cruising each other's profiles.

Nortel Networks lost $113 million last quarter. Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski told analysts that orders for CDMA cellular gear — both in Norta America and through a deal with South Korea's LG Electronics — didn't meet expectations. In CEO-speak, "The macro environment in the U.S. and the U.S. carrier spend continues to be challenging."