The MacBook Air was a top-seller for Apple last quarter, helping to deliver the equivalent of a second holiday season. Image: Apple

iPod growth has stalled. The iPhone is basically doing as expected. So in Apple’s financial results, the real surprise was the MacBook Air.

This time, gadgets didn’t save the day for Apple (AAPL). Even after adding a pink iPod nano to its lineup in time for Valentine’s Day, the company sold just 100,000 more iPods in the first three months of this year than it did a year before. iPhone sales came in 26 percent (or 600,000 units) lower than the holiday quarter, which isn’t a great sign.

Devices like the Razr2 V8 haven’t done enough to raise Motorola’s profile and its revenues. Image: Motorola

CEO Greg Brown says splitting the company will improve Motorola’s focus. Image: Motorola

The year is 2010, and the Motorola brand is hot again. By aggressively retooling its design and manufacturing processes, the independent cell phone business has returned to profitability, grabbed back market share from Samsung and Sony Ericsson, and gained on Nokia (NOK) with low-cost handsets in developing markets like India and China.

Meanwhile, in its separate wireless equipment business, Motorola has outmaneuvered tech titan Cisco (CSCO) in the corporate market, and out-innovated both Cisco and Apple (AAPL) by reinventing set-top boxes that bring the Internet to the TV. Investors are thrilled, and they trace it all back to Motorola’s (MOT) breakup announcement in March 2008.

Sound like a fantasy?

Odds are, that’s all it is – and that’s the downside to the Schamburg, Ill., company’s announcement Wednesday that it will split itself in half in 2009. Though the news is probably music to the ears of activist investor Carl Icahn, who has been agitating for a breakup to boost Motorola’s flagging stock price, it’s difficult to see how two mini-Motos will be better positioned to compete with some of the best-managed competitors in the technology world.

Motorola CEO Greg Brown sees the spin-off differently. “I think it provides a clear sense of our intentions and direction,” Brown tells Fortune. “The independence, improved focus and alignment of individual organizations will facilitate and enable stronger performances.”

We’ve been here before, however. In previous slumps, Moto management hocked heirlooms like the automotive and semiconductor divisions in the name of raising money and gaining focus. Did it work? Well, if trimming divisions were the recipe for its success, Motorola would be thriving by now. Instead the firm has swung from a $3.6 billion profit in 2006 to a $49 million loss in 2007, and the stock is flirting with five-year lows. Motorola’s problem isn’t size – it’s discipline. “Every time they go back to the drawing board, they start talking about selling off businesses, splitting up the company,” says Shawn Campbell, of Campbell Asset Management, who has followed Motorola for years. “They’re running out of things to sell.”

Microsoft has a profitable business building software for the Mac; now it has an eye on the iPhone, too. Image: Apple

Tom Gibbons, head of Microsoft’s Specialized Devices and Applications Group, said the focus would be on extending Office functions onto the iPhone and iPod touch. Image: Microsoft

Don’t think for a minute that Microsoft is ignoring the iPhone. In fact, the software giant is probing the gadget for profit opportunities.

For a little more than a week, a team of the company’s Silicon Valley software engineers has been examining the iPhone software development kit (SDK for short), a set of tools Apple (AAPL) released this month that let outsiders build software for the iPhone and the iPod touch. Microsoft (MSFT) executives aren’t sure yet whether they’ll find worthwhile opportunities to sell iPhone software – but they seem eager to find out.

“It’s really important for us to understand what we can bring to the iPhone,” Tom Gibbons, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Specialized Devices and Applications Group, told Fortune on Monday. “To the extent that Mac Office customers have functionality that they need in that environment, we’re actually in the process of trying to understand that now.”

Though it’s typical to think of Apple and Microsoft as pure software rivals, their relationship is actually more complicated. For more than a decade, Microsoft has maintained a group of engineers whose sole job is to develop software for Apple’s Macintosh operating systems. Most of the engineers in Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit are based in Mountain View, Calif., a few miles from Apple’s headquarters. (They also happen to be quite close to the headquarters of archrival Google (GOOG).)

The Mac unit’s work certainly isn’t charity – it delivers millions of dollars in profit for the company with its Mac version of the Office productivity suite. Microsoft doesn’t break out exact numbers, but we can extrapolate: Gibbons said the Mac Business Unit provides about a third of the revenue for the Specialized Devices and Applications Group, which also includes Windows Embedded, Microsoft Hardware, the Automotive Business Unit and Microsoft Surface Computing; the whole group did more than $1 billion in sales last year. So it’s reasonable to guess that the Mac unit provided about $350 million – and since Gibbons said the Mac group was one of the group’s more profitable units, it’s possible that Microsoft made somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million in profit from Mac software.

With the addition of Microsoft Exchange, the iPhone is open for business. Image: Apple

Steve Jobs sent a clear message to the technology world Thursday: Apple wants it to view the iPhone as an opportunity, not a threat.

To drive that point home, Jobs gave up the stage for most of Apple’s (AAPL) highly anticipated software event at its Cupertino headquarters. Rather than hog the spotlight with his legendary presentation skills and personality, he let deputies and partners explain how entrepreneurs can start writing their own software for the iPhone, and how businesses can use the device to seamlessly access corporate e-mail.

Journalists and others wait for the iPhone SDK event to begin. Image: Jon Fortt

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Apple (AAPL) this morning is announcing details about how it will open the iPhone and iPod touch to outside developers. The company has also promised new details about how enterprises can take advantage of the iPhone, putting it in more direct competition with Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile devices.

The event has not yet begun.

Steve Jobs has taken the stage.

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?

On Wednesday, Apple sent this invitation to its iPhone software launch. Image courtesy of Apple.

Apple (AAPL) on Wednesday sent invitations to its eagerly anticipated iPhone event, where it is expected to unveil tools that will allow developers to write software for the device. The company also hinted that “exciting new enterprise features” would be unveiled at the March 6 gathering on Apple’s campus.

Image: Apple

Can Apple regain its status as a Wall Street darling?

So far 2008 has not been kind to the technology trendsetter. With U.S. iPod sales slowing and iPhone hype fading, investors have been seized by worries that the crew in Cupertino isn’t much of a growth story anymore. The stock has fallen 40 percent from its recent highs, losing some $50 billion in market value –and it isn’t clear what could turn things around.

It does seem certain that major relief won’t come from Apple’s (AAPL) newest products. This week’s update of the MacBook laptop line adds speed and memory, but no breathtaking design touches. The super-slim but pricey MacBook Air laptop that CEO Steve Jobs unveiled in January has met with mixed reviews, and won’t provide enough of a boost to make up for the iPod slowdown. And Apple TV, the second incarnation of Apple’s failed attempt to bring digital downloads to the television, doesn’t seem to be attracting an iPod-like following either; on Amazon (AMZN), it’s about as popular as a niche backup hard drive.

So where will Apple go for a sales boost to lift its stock? Perhaps overseas.

Even as U.S. tech spending slows, the market for high-tech gear and the opportunity for Apple to grow, is rapidly expanding in Europe and Asia. To wit: Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Mark Hurd noted last week that emerging markets accounted for nearly half of the industry’s PC shipments at the end of 2007, and well over half of the growth.

Why the bid for Yahoo? Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is prepared to take drastic measures to make sure Google doesn’t shove the software giant out of the ring. Photo: Microsoft

The depth of Microsoft’s online problem became clear 18 months ago, when Google trumped its bid to handle search advertising for MySpace, the popular social networking site.

MySpace owner News Corp. (NWS) liked Microsoft (MSFT) well enough. But it had to go with the money. Because Google (GOOG), the top search engine, could guarantee a larger audience and thus more revenue in a search deal, it won the MySpace account. “They said to Microsoft, ‘Look, if you can get there in revenue we’d prefer to go with you,’ ” said a source familiar with Microsoft’s side of the negotiations. “It came down to a pure economic decision.”

Technology battles often unfold like sumo matches, where the biggest companies win by pushing opponents around – and Microsoft, the world’s largest technology company by market value, has dominated the wrestling ring for years. But in the online world, Microsoft finds itself in the unusual position of small fry, getting shoved aside by Google.