Tech news is like a house of horrors these days. Everywhere you turn, you see something else frightening.

Like Thursday morning - you could be trying to digest the outlook from Intel (INTC), which late yesterday slashed its revenue forecast for the fourth quarter from $10 billion or so to $9 billion. The company says there is "significantly weaker" demand for PCs in every part of the globe. While absolutely nothing is wrong with Intel as a business -- it still supplies chips for 80% of the world's PCs -- its stock is at a 12-year low.

You have to salute Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang for even showing up and submitting to questioning on stage before more than 1,000 tech industry heavyweights. He's had one of the tech industry's most highly-visible terrible years. And just hours before he took the stage at Web 2.0, Google pulled out of the joint advertising deal with Yahoo.

So I was in the audience watching Yang, and he seemed pretty combative about what's happened -- yet never managed to be all that clear about where Yahoo is heading and why he should lead the company he co-founded 15 years ago.

Motorola's (MOT) news keeps going from bad to worse. The company announced a $397 million loss and 3,000 more job cuts as sales fell 15%. 

The once-great company has been unraveling the past couple of years, as I detailed in a story for Portfolio. The new executive team of Greg Brown and Sanjay Jha was supposed to turn around the cell phone division and eventually split it off from the rest of Moto, but things have only deteriorated under the co-CEOs and the split is nowhere in sight.

Interesting, in his comments about the cell phone division, that Jha talked about how Motorola designers have focused too much on making "bright shiny objects" and instead need to make devices that work easily. While working on my Moto story, several sources noted that the iPhone has helped usher in an era in mobile devices that plays against Motorola's culture. Moto is a good hardware engineering company. It's a terrible software company.

Who knew a stinkin' cloud could get get so crowded. But here comes Microsoft (MSFT) stomping into cloud computing, instantly taking up space like a 300-pound guy in a middle seat.

But this whole thing is getting confusing, especially since cloud computing seems to be a bunch of different markets, not just one. IBM, for instance, announced Blue Cloud a year ago. It's aimed at big corporate customers that want to offload some data center operations to IBM -- and really, IBM has been doing that for years. Blue Cloud just sounds like a way to brand it.

After all the analysis of Apple's earnings yesterday, after jaws got hinged back into place after seeing iPhone sales numbers, after everyone heard Steve Jobs' voice and was convinced he's not about to go knocking on heaven's door -- one moment in the conference call stood out.

Jobs said Apple (AAPL) has $25 billion in cash, no debt, and is ready to innovate and steal market share from competitors struggling through tough economic times.

Lots of buzz on the Web about Motorola's eventual Android-based touch-screen phone, but Motorola (MOT) has been talking about it openly for a while. Apparently Motorola has come far enough along to talk specifics with carriers, but the phone isn't supposed to be out until the second quarter of 2009, putting Moto's phone at least 9 months behind the first Android phone -- forever in cell phone years.

Right now, there seems to be at least one tech company that is incredibly positioned to take advantage of the crappy way we all feel about the economy -- and that would be Taiwanese computer maker Asus.

No one can accuse Nokia (NOK) of being timid. The world's biggest cell phone maker got beaten up in the third quarter, seeing profit fall 30%. But the company says it took a short term punch for long term gain. While competitors were dropping prices to steal market share, Nokia refused to play that game -- instead keeping prices firm but competing on quality and capabilities of its phones. That decision knocked about a percentage point off Nokia's global cell phone market share -- which seems to worry analysts more than Nokia.

Make sure the lifeboats are ready. Cue the band to play on the poop deck. Google (GOOG) will report quarterly earnings today, and if they're disappointing, the Internet sector will be going down like a toy boat in a flushed toilet.

Some analysts are already pushing down estimates. Others are holding tight and thinking the stock -- already down 45% this year -- will bounce back up into the 500s. In the midst of the financial meltdown, CEO Eric Schmidt told the world that Google should be fine. Wall Street isn't so sure. Google closed yesterday at $339.17, down 6.5% on the day. 

Amid the gloom of the financial markets, it's easy to forget that regular people all around the world still have a lot of good reasons to go out and buy a computer. Gartner Group's numbers show that worldwide PC  shipments grew 15% in the third quarter. While the U.S. grew by a hair, most of the growth came from Europe, the Middle East and Africa -- but that's still good for the U.S. The top two PC makers globally are U.S. companies: Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Dell (DELL).

Let's also hope that Gartner analyst Mika Kitagawa is proven right. She says that the strongest PC segment -- mobile PCs -- will grow 20% the next three quarters vs. the year before. So in the teeth of the economic crisis, Gartner is predicting strong growth for laptops.

Back during the stock crash of 1987, I was in the thick of coverage for USA Today. And once the smoke cleared, we all found something to blame that let the greed and poor judgment of the broader population off the hook: program trading. 

IBM has a habit of being a beacon during economic calamity. Of course, its earnings yesterday helped everyone feel for at least a moment that the world wasn't coming to an end. But that pales in comparison to IBM's feat during the Great Depression. Hopefully, we'll see more of the same from the company.

I know about this because I wrote a book about the guy who built IBM, Thomas Watson Sr., titled The Maverick and His Machine. (Earlier this week, blogger Ed Cone picked up on the connection between IBM then and now.)

Whether we freely admit it or not, the decision to buy a certain cell phone is a complicated equation that involves the phone's capabilities, its carrier, its price -- and the phone's image. At the high end, especially, a cell phone signals something about your identity -- the way driving a certain car signals your identity. 

Over the past five years, a few different phone makers have jostled for the image of offering THE cool phone. Motorola (MOT) had the RAZR, but that faded. Palm's (PALM) Treo took the spot for a while. For the image of "serious business person," RIM's (RIMM) BlackBerry captured and held the top cool spot through most of the past five years.

Nice to wake up to news of global market crashes, eBay laying off 1,000, and AMD spinning off its plants to an Abu Dhabi investment company to stay alive. (Cue Sarah Palin: Time to blame Obama for "American dependence on foreign chips!")

Over in Web land, one majorly depressing thought is seeping into executives' brains: "Does this mean Internet advertising will shrivel?" Because if it does, there is going to be carnage. 

What's it going to take to stop Google (GOOG) in search? It's not apparent right now.

Yahoo (YHOO) Search is never going to do it, because Yahoo essentially offers the same kind of search and same kind of results as Google, and Google has become a habit while Yahoo has not. No matter how Yahoo markets itself, it is destined to be Avis to Google's Hertz; Pepsi to Coke; Frazier to Ali -- or in a worst case scenario, Newark to Manhattan.

More government regulation of financial markets? Fugetaboutit. The real question about financial markets going forward might be whether we're willing to let the markets run themselves. In other words, will we humans let machines take charge of the global money game? Because at some point soon, they will be able to run it better than we can.

Back in 2001, I had a conversation in Toronto with a quite-prescient Thomas Homer-Dixon, who had just published a book called The Ingenuity Gap. His basic premise: Humans are building systems as complex as weather, and human brains can't keep up. People can no longer understand and control the globally-networked technology we're creating. Amazingly, one of the examples he used that day was the global financial system - proclaiming that a meltdown was coming that no one would understand or know how to stop.

I can't imagine that anyone who has proclaimed MySpace Music (owned by News Corp. (NWS)) to be the future of the industry has actually tried to use the site.

I've been trying to use it. I really have. I do believe that its business model is on the right track. Buying individual songs makes no sense. Unlimited streamed music is where things are heading -- either by subscription, or free with ads.

When many observers of the tech scene hear "Xerox PARC," they tend to think -- oh yeah, those guys who let Steve Jobs steal their operating system for the Mac and otherwise invented a lot of cool stuff that never paid off for, well, Xerox (XRX). 

Which is, actually, all true. But there's more. The legendary lab has been in the news lately because Microsoft (MSFT) bought a search technology company called Powerset for an alleged $100 million. Powerset was built on technology licensed from PARC. The lab has also won some attention in the past week for unveiling a way to print documents so the ink disappears in a day, allowing the paper to be reused. Sure, a lot of people want to keep printouts, but if it's, say, a restaurant menu that will change tomorrow -- this could save a lot of paper.

As the world seems to march toward downloaded or streamed digital music, SanDisk (SNDK) yesterday unveiled a new physical medium for music. It's called slotMusic, and it's basically an album on a thumbnail-size microSD card. Four of the major music labels -- Warner (WMG), Universal, Sony, EMI -- are supporting it with MP3, unprotected music. So you'd go into a Wal-Mart (WMT), pay about $10 for the card, and slip it into your cell phone or any other gadget with a card slot. SanDisk says it will be almost as simple to use as putting a CD in a player. The MP3 songs can be moved around or copied anywhere. And you can write to the card, adding more of your own music into whatever storage space is left.

I talked to SanDisk executive Dan Schreiber about slotMusic. Unable to imagine the iPod generation wanting anything to do with going to a store to buy music on anything made of atoms, I asked if this is aimed at, like, old people. "Some of it is an age thing," he said. "But it's about instant entertainment. Downloads continue to thrive, but not everybody wants to spend half their day curating playlists." He added that slotMusic "tested well with young guys who liked the gee-whiz factor." Although, I always take those kinds of results with a grain of salt. Young guys can think a lot of things are gee-whiz...for about five minutes. Whether they'll actually buy it or not is a whole different question.

I've been talking today with several people in tech circles about Morgan Stanley (MS) and Goldman Sachs (GS) converting to bank holding companies, and the Wall Street crisis in general. What does it mean for the technology industry? As investment banks, Morgan and Goldman had much greater leeway when it underwrote tech IPOs or put together mergers. As commercial banks, they will have many more restrictions on those roles.

Overall, the tech folks don't seem hugely alarmed. Tech IPOs have been essentially dead for the past couple of years anyway. The change for Morgan and Goldman definitely makes them deader, but start-ups long ago stopped thinking about IPOs and have turned instead to either building sustainable independent businesses or selling out to the Googles (GOOG) and Ciscos (CSCO) of the world.