Microsoft stock has crept higher since it sank three months ago on word of its Yahoo bid.

Can Microsoft do it again?

Late last year, investors and analysts were wringing their hands over a tech stock collapse. With the economy starting to slow, investors punished a slew of big techs including Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). Not even hot-growth companies like Apple (AAPL) and Research in Motion (RIMM) were spared.

Then Microsoft reported earnings in January, and the sun came out: $6.5 billion in profit for the holiday quarter on sales of $16.4 billion. And best of all, the forecast was bright. “We actually feel very optimistic,” said Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell. “The next six months we feel very good about.”

HP Chief Strategy and Technology Officer Shane Robison says the reorganization of HP Labs should speed innovation and eventually boost profit margins. Image: HP

Now that it’s an undisputed turnaround story, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) is looking for ways to fuel long-term growth. An important piece of its plan is HP Labs, a group of 600 top-flight researchers who work to develop breakthrough technologies. To better position HP Labs as a growth engine, the company announced Thursday that it will refocus its efforts on five areas: Information explosion, dynamic cloud services, content transformation, intelligent infrastructure and sustainability. (Earlier: Turning an idea farm into a hit factory)

I sat down with HP strategy and technology chief Shane Robison to talk about the research shift, and what it means for the company. Below is an edited transcript of our chat.

Memory prices are bruising profit margins, but CEO Paul Otellini says the chip giant can still thrive.

CEO Paul Otellini spent 2007 restoring investor faith in Intel; thanks to a slow economy and eroding memory prices, he’s got more work to do. Image: Intel

Facing flagging profit margins and a skeptical Wall Street, Intel (INTC) CEO Paul Otellini hosted investors at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters Wednesday. His message: Despite a weak U.S. economy and an ugly memory market, the Internet boom will supercharge revenues at the world’s largest chipmaker.

“We essentially think we can triple the market for our products,” Otellini told a gathering of financial analysts. “And this isn’t assuming that we have a full run of every market; it’s assuming we have a moderate view of success.”

But Intel’s growth story is a tougher sell today than it was a few months ago, which helps explain why the company took the unusual step of hosting investors at its Santa Clara headquarters instead of doing the event in New York as usual. And the tough sell is not just an issue for Intel; since November, when it became clear that the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis could tip the economy into recession, the tech industry in general has been hit hard. Stocks like Intel and Apple (AAPL) that were investor darlings in 2007 have suffered gut-wrenching losses; Intel has shed more than $35 billion in market capitalization, a quarter of its value, since December.

By Jon Fortt and Michal Lev-Ram

Will Apple give up some control over the iPhone in order to court corporate customers?

That’s one of the juiciest questions surrounding a gathering on Apple’s (AAPL) campus Thursday, where CEO Steve Jobs has promised to open up the iPhone’s software secrets to the world for the first time. Apple’s invitation to the event also hinted at new business-friendly features for the device, and Silicon Valley is abuzz about what that could mean. Will the BlackBerry-toting masses be able to trade in the company smartphone for an iPhone?

A moody market braces for a big earnings week. How ugly will it get?

It’s time to face the music.

When leading tech companies offer their earnings numbers this week, Wall Street’s focus won’t be on how healthy their overseas businesses are, or how strong sales were during the holiday season. Instead, with global financial markets in turmoil, analysts will be sensitive to hints that executives are losing their sunny optimism.

Larry Ellison bullied and bluffed. But in the end, this software value meal proved too good to pass up.

A little more than a decade ago, fast-food giants realized they could get people to spend more by bundling burgers, fries and a drink together in a value meal.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison finally got BEA — and another big opportunity to upsell corporate customers. Image: Oracle

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Today’s business software giants are catching on to the same thing. And that, more than anything, explains Oracle’s (ORCL) willingness to pay $8.5 billion for BEA Systems (BEAS) in what would be the third-largest software deal ever.

To understand what BEA brings to the table, let’s take the menu metaphor a little further. Oracle, helmed by deal making CEO Larry Ellison, already sells the industry’s most popular database. And with purchases like PeopleSoft and Siebel, Oracle has been beefing up its selection of applications businesses use to manage employee performance, business expenses, and other functions.

But to entice customers to do all their software shopping with Oracle, Ellison needs to create a full value meal. To achieve that, Oracle needs more of what BEA has.

“For Oracle, this deal is a very big step toward completing our vision of becoming a strategic enterprise software vendor of choice for our customers,” Ellison said. “We’ve demonstrated over many acquisitions that we’ve made the past three years how expanding like this benefits both our customers and our shareholders.”

The benefit that BEA brings Oracle is middleware. Middleware is the secret sauce that helps the jumble of corporate software programs work together, for example allowing a customer service system to access information from the billing program. In the age of the Internet, that kind of linkage is key as companies seek to build time-saving online experiences for their customers and employees.

The market was all set to throw itself a big pity party, and along comes IBM to ruin it all. But it’s too soon to say Big Blue’s sunny report will be enough to breathe life back into tech stocks.

The scrappy chipmaker has plenty of life left – but mistakes have cost it dearly.

AMD’s manufacturing facility in Dresden isn’t yet producing enough quad-core chips to boost the bottom line. Photo: Sven Doering/AMD

If you’d like to beat up on Advanced Micro Devices CEO Hector Ruiz, now would appear to be a good time. Ruiz has won praise for helping the chipmaker mature into a worthy challenger to industry heavyweight Intel, but as he prepares for a Thursday meeting with Wall Street analysts, AMD has the look of a well-used punching bag.

Its stock this year has dropped by half, and in recent weeks it has dipped below $10 per share for the first time since 2003. That price marks a disheartening throwback to the days when PC makers didn’t take AMD’s processors seriously and its market share was weaker at about 15 percent. There’s good reason for the share price collapse: though AMD landed a few good shots in recent years, Intel (INTC) has bounced back with a popular, competitively priced product lineup that’s grabbing back some market share and erasing its rival’s profits.

HP CEO Mark Hurd. Photo: HP

There you have it, tech investors. Hewlett-Packard’s earnings might be the best news you’ll hear for a while.

And the numbers were quite good. The world’s largest PC maker reported fiscal fourth quarter revenue and profit that once again surpassed analyst expectations, thanks to strong sales of laptops and printer ink. HP’s (HPQ) sales to businesses were strong during the quarter, flying in the face of investor fears that CFOs are starting to clamp down on spending as high oil prices and subprime lending woes threaten the broader economy.

Founder and CEO Michael Dell. Image: Dell

Michael Dell’s old game plan was ruthless and effective: Crush competitors by building products at a lower cost, and using the Internet to pass the savings on to value-conscious customers. That strategy made his namesake company a darling of the first Internet boom and the largest computer maker in the world.

But times have changed. In recent years archrival Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) has stolen Dell’s (DELL) global PC crown by using HP’s larger size to cut costs and its retail relationships to grow sales. And while Dell has struggled, companies like Apple (AAPL) are using design savvy to simplify computing experience through devices like the iPod and iPhone.