By Yi-Wyn Yen

Santa Claus won’t be coming to eBay this year. The online auction giant reported quarterly sales and profits late Wednesday that met expectations, but gave such a dismal outlook for the holiday season that one analyst suggested Christmas had been cancelled.

eBay reported third-quarter profits of 46 cents a share, or 12% higher than the same period a year ago. Revenues came to $2.12 billion, up $229 million, or 19%, from last year thanks to advertising sales and its PayPal payment service.

But any delight that investors found in eBay’s numbers was quickly doused when eBay (EBAY) delivered some Scrooge-like numbers for the current quarter. Executives noted a sharp spending decline starting in mid-August for both high-priced items like cars and for smaller ones like concert tickets, which are sold through its StubHub subsidiary. The San Jose-based company expects its revenues to decline by 4% in the fourth quarter from the same period a year ago.

eBay also cut revenues for the fourth quarter to $2.02 billion to $2.17 billion. That would make the current quarter, typically the strongest because of holiday spending, eBay’s weakest of the year. Wall Street, which had been warned by eBay last week of slowdown, was expecting revenues of $2.44 billion. eBay now predicts earnings of 39 cents to 41 cents per share for the current quarter, well below Street estimates of 47 cents.

Investors signaled their disappointment, sending eBay shares down 3.5% in after-market trading. Shares are down 53% so far this year.

“Your guidance indicates there is no Christmas,” said Goldman Sachs analyst James Mitchell during the company’s post-earnings conference call with analysts.

eBay CEO John Donahoe tried to convince investors that the impact of a severe economic slowdown was beyond eBay’s control. Donahoe used the phrase “challenging and uncertain times” multiple times during the call. eBay CFO Bob Swan said a stronger U.S. dollar will cut into international revenue and a consumer spending decline will make “growth deceleration that much tougher.”

Swan presented slides to investors that showed spending on the auction site mirroring consumer spending trends offline.

However, some analysts were skeptical that eBay’s problems could be blamed primarily on sagging retail spending. “eBay’s model has been probably hit harder than the average e-commerce company would be,” said Jeffrey Lindsay, Sanford Bernstein’s Internet analyst. “This is a fairly poor performance, but it looks like it’s going to get worse with no improvement any time soon.”

For the first time ever, eBay’s marketplace business, its main revenue driver, fell 1% to $14.3 billion from a year ago. The decline in eBay’s transactions are not a healthy sign of the company’s growth prospects.

A steady decline in eBay’s traffic for the past two years has prompted the company to spend the year trimming costs and restructuring its auction model. eBay recently announced plans to cut 1,000 jobs, or about 10%, of its global workforce. The company is also focusing on items that consumers can buy immediately and offering standardized shipping rates to better compete with Amazon (AMZN), which has been gaining popularity with buyers and sellers.

Donahoe said the company is seeing improvements with its turnaround plan, citing a 3% increase in users for the third quarter. Still, that hasn’t translated into more eBay users buying on the site.

Said Lindsay: “Santa Claus is coming for Christmas, but he’s coming from Seattle - not San Jose.”

By Scott Moritz

Recessions are supposed to be boom times for yard sales and flea markets, so what’s eating eBay (EBAY), the world’s largest bargain bazaar?

Ebay shares hit a new five-year low Thursday as yet another analyst weighed in on the nagging deterioration of the auction giant’s business. Morgan Stanley analyst David Joseph downgraded eBay to neutral, pointing out that there are some troubling trends contributing to the company’s drooping e-commerce market share.

With fears that the credit crisis could throw the economy into a tailspin, Wall Street has been in a bit of a selling mood of late. When analysts point to signs of strain at eBay, investors don’t seem inclined to wait and see.

Foremost among eBay’s challenges, Joseph writes, is buyers’ shifting preference in favor of easy shopping, and away from the auction format. People like features like free delivery, shopping various selections within categories, and conveniences like one-click checkout. As the go-between agent in a transaction, eBay has limited control over these features.

As the analyst notes: Ebay is at a disadvantage in its “ability to compete in buyer experience.”

Given the changing tastes among shoppers, it’s not too surprising that eBay’s market share has dropped to 17% from 19% in the past two years. It’s also not shocking that Amazon’s slice of the business has grown to 5.3% from 3.7% in the same period, according to Morgan Stanley.

Other competitors have edged in as well. Local online swap shop specialist Craiglists has its fans. And while far from a runaway success, net giant Google’s (GOOG) Google Checkout purchasing system is an alternative to eBay’s PayPal service.

The weakening economy is having an impact on eBay also. Analysts point out that people are buying fewer items and at lower prices. So with less big ticket sales to add to the total tally, the overall average selling price is falling. And with the slowing sales volume in September, particularly in the U.S., eBay’s growth rate is “under pressure,” according to a Merrill Lynch report Tuesday.

To be sure, eBay has a solid position globally as the marketplace where sellers of cheap goods meet hunters of good bargains. And as a company, eBay is an upstanding financial citizen, with zero debt, $3.7 billion cash in hand, and a cash flow generation rate of $3 billion annually.

But as we saw this week with Monday’s 9% drop in the Nasdaq, even solid favorites in tech like Google, Apple (AAPL) and Research in Motion (RIMM) get trampled when people stampede for the exits.

Worries about eBay’s slowing growth and shifting consumer preferences certainly don’t encourage the highest bids in a market prone to panic.

By Scott Moritz

NEW YORK – A brief hands-on experience with the Google (GOOG) G1 phone gives the impression that after a slew of touchscreen duds from other telcos, Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone finally has a worthy rival.

The highly-anticipated HTC phone for T-Mobile (DT) was unveiled in New York Tuesday, and kiosks with technical experts were set up so media people could run the first Android-powered phone through some tricks. T-Mobile will start selling the phone Oct. 22 for $179 with a two-year contract.

The G1 has a large touchscreen, nearly the same size as the iPhone. But unlike the iPhone, there is a physical keyboard under the slide-open screen. People familiar with the iPhone will find the G1 a little lighter and thicker. The G1, for you ultra-thin fans, is about 3/4 of an inch thick, downright portly compared to the svelte half-inch iPhone.

Navigating the screen is fairly easy and there are several ways to move around. The touchscreen has a swipe capability that allows you to flick up and down or side to side. There is also a small trackball-type button at the bottom of the phone for scrolling.

The 3G network coverage at the show – only 16 cities currently have T-Mobile’s 3G networks – was fast. Google’s homepage loaded in five seconds and Google search results also popped up in five seconds. Sites like CNNMoney and Fortune took about 17 seconds to load. That is a fairly standard 3G speed.

Calls worked, and the sound was clear, for those considering the device as a phone primarily.

It is clear, however, that with Google’s support, Android and HTC have made a solid Internet device that combines web access with technology like GPS and software like Google Maps. Applications like Compass Mode, as Fortune’s Philip Elmer-Dewitt explains, gives you a 360-degree street view, a trick that has been limited to PCs until now.

The phone has so-called push e-mail through its Gmail service. As Fortune reported Monday, T-Mobile was considering a low-tier price plan that would give G1 users free e-mail without a data plan. T-Mobile technology chief Cole Brodman says the company looked at a few different pricing plans, but decided that the e-mail only data plan “doesn’t do the device justice.”

The G1 will have two monthly price options, $25 for data plan limited to 400 text messages or $35 for unlimited data. That’s compares with AT&T’s $30 and $45 data plans for the iPhone.

HTC’s touchscreen has some familiar features, like a shifting orientation if the user tips the phone on its side. It also has a zoom-in function that is done with plus and minus buttons on the screen rather than the two finger pinch or separate approach on the iPhone.

The G1 allows dragging and dropping of pictures and text, a feature the iPhone still lacks. The music player was easy to use and there is a direct link to Amazon’s music store.

Overall, and first impressions being what they are,  the G1 stands well above disappointing touchscreens like Verizon’s (VZ) LG Voyager or Sprint’s (S) Samsung Instinct. And until Research in Motion (RIMM) delivers its touchscreen Storm BlackBerry, T-Mobile’s G1 is the toughest competition yet to the iconic iPhone.

By Scott Moritz, writer

There may be more than money to consider in the Microsoft-Yahoo standoff.

Microsoft (MSFT) has given Yahoo a deadline of Saturday to accept its buyout offer (or, presumably, at least at start serious talks) or risk triggering a hostile takeover battle. Yahoo wants a higher offer — a demand that Microsoft has so far rebuffed.

But the focus on price may be missing a key subtlety behind the impasse.

One possible stumbling block might be Yahoo CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang’s role in a combined company. As displeased as Yang may be by the prospect of joining forces with Yahoo’s culturally-mismatched rival, some observers say he could be open to a leadership role in the merged Internet division.

“I’ve always believed Jerry Yang wants do something bigger with Yahoo,” as opposed to watching it dissolve into the works of a bigger company, says an analyst who has known Yang since Yahoo went public in 1996. ”He’s Jerry Yahoo, that’s really who he is.”

Yahoo has been exploring other options, including a possible tie up with the AOL division of Time Warner (TWX) and an advertising partnership with rival Google (GOOG) to help outsource some of its ads and trim costs. But almost any type of hookup between the No.1 and No.2 online ad giants seemed fraught with antitrust concerns.

Without a better offer in sight, Yang and the board will likely have to sit down with Microsoft over the weekend and negotiate. If Microsoft told Yang that he would play a top role in the combined company, it might sway the Yahoo founder, says the analyst, who did not want to be identified.

“He’s already a billionaire,” adds the analyst, referring to Yang. “What he wants is his brand to be massive. When the history of the Internet is written it will feature names like [Amazon (AMZN) chief Jeff] Bezos, [Google CEO] Schmidt, Page, [AOL founder Steve] Case. Yang wants to be there.”

Stay tuned.

By Josh Quittner

Er, what recession? Online retail giant Amazon beat the Street Wednesday reporting $207 million in net profit for the fourth quarter. That’s a 112 percent increase over the $98 million the company hauled in during last year’s holiday season. Amazon (AMZN) also reported revenue of $5.67 billion beating estimates that were generally in the $5.4 billion range.

The company reported record sales, record operating profits and its fastest annual growth rate since 2000. That news wasn’t altogether surprising. Last month, the company also reported the busiest day ever at Amazon and even bested eBay (EBAY), for the first time, claiming a record number of visits to its site in December. Nor was it surprising that the stock took a pounding after hours: Yet again, Amazon’s gross margins were closer to 6% than the 10% analysts wanted to see.

What is surprising — if you haven’t been paying attention, that is — is that, on a day when the Fed cut prime by another 50 basis points, Amazon is genuinely upbeat about the future. The Grand Plan is working. Indeed, Amazon anticipates 31% to 38% sales growth in the current quarter — the meltdown in the economy notwithstanding.

So what gives?

Amazon is a hit with consumers for the same reason it sometimes disappoints investors. Jeff Bezos famously refuses to manage quarter to quarter. His time horizon is more decade to decade. He wants to build a business that lasts, and the only way you do that is by thrilling your customers. He’s sung the same song since Day One of his long march: “Our focus has always been to be extremely competitive and to give customers the best prices and be very sharp at that,” he told analysts yet again yesterday.

“Focusing on the customer experience” is a mantra Amazonians chant endlessly, to an almost annoying degree. When reporters on Wednesday asked CFO Tom Szkutak questions about the world’s dire economic outlook and how that will affect consumer spending in the months ahead, he characteristically answered: “We’re focused on what’s best for the customer and improving the customer experience.” And: “We’re all about making sure we offer a great value proposition for customers.” And so on and on and on. It was effective: The press conference lasted 15 minutes because it was clear that nothing new would be divulged here.

It’s not that Szkutak was dodging the questions, exactly. The thing is, questions about the future don’t really compute to these guys. Amazon’s long-term game has always been about three things: Selection, price, and convenience. And when Bezos was laying down big bets (over the howls of Wall Street) in the late 1990s, building hugely expensive distribution centers around the country (and then the world) it was to ensure that the most logical, cost-effective logistics system would be in place when the customers finally arrived in number. That’s hell on margins for a while. But it brings in customers. And that — if it works long term — creates what Bezos Wednesday described as a “flywheel effect:” More customers means more sales and more sales means that Amazon gets to enjoy greater pricing power over its suppliers. Lower sales means more customers and the cycle begins anew.

Said Bezos: “Lowering prices is easy. Being able to afford lower prices is what’s difficult. We’ve been working on that for many many years now — and expect to be working on that for our entire corporate existence.” Today’s numbers show that Amazon’s customers, at least, have figured that out.

By Stephanie Mehta

In his first-ever keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show Tuesday, Comcast  CEO Brian Roberts seemed to be saying content is king. (Not what you’d expect from the nation’s largest distributor of pay television.)

Roberts, who was joined by radio personality and “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest for part of his speech, told the Las Vegas audience Comcast (CMCSA) is embarking on a strategy to make a vast library of professionally produced video content available through its “on demand” channel. “Project Infinity plans to give consumers the best and most content they will find on demand anywhere — more HD, more sports, more movies, kids’ programs and network TV,” Roberts said.

The announcement was a shot at satellite television operators DirecTV (DTV) and Echostar (SATS), which have been pledging to deliver 100 channels in high definition. (DirecTV says it now broadcasts some 85 national channels in high def.) Comcast doesn’t offer as many so-called “linear” channels in high-definition, so it isn’t surprising Roberts is touting new two-way technology that will enable it to deliver high-definition video programming on demand.

In addition, Roberts said the company was boosting its library of movies on demand (not necessarily all of them in HD).

Comcast also announced the launch of Fancast.com, a website aimed at helping consumers find, organize, view and even purchase video entertainment. The site is a sort of mash-up of entertainment database IMBD.com, online retailer Amazon, TVGuide and some of the fun, Web 2.0 apps one can find on Facebook.

One reason Roberts might be emphasizing content is because the distribution business is out of favor with investors right now. Comcast’s stock is trading near its 52-week lows, as are the stocks of Charter Communications (CHTR) and Time Warner Cable (TWC), which, like Fortune, is controlled by Time Warner (TWX).

In a recent interview, Roberts explained how cable can keep rivals from the satellite and phone businesses at bay. Content was the last thing he mentioned, but clearly programming is not an afterthought. “We have to innovate, have an open architecture and interoperate between cable companies, and our customer service has got to continue to reach new levels of excellence,” Roberts said. “We also have to have the most content, which we clearly do. Put together, we have a winning strategy.”

By Josh Quittner

One of the rallying cries of the Web 2.0 movement, during its sensational rise over the past five years, is openness. Open systems (Linux, Wikipedia, any phone you can hack from T-Mobile) are good. Closed systems (Windows, The Wall Street Journal Online, any locked-down cell phone you buy from Verizon) are bad.

The basic idea is that the Web itself, that Shiva of the business world, is built on HTML and Javascript — code that’s as open and free from any one company’s control as, say, the United Nations. Smart companies are Zen-like: They give away the store and yet manage to make fortunes. Google, (GOOG) which opens up everything from its data streams (Google Maps, for instance) to the bidding process for advertising keywords is the typical example. Google is Web 2.0 and Yahoo, which has had a tortured time trying to accommodate itself to the new social web, is considered very Web 1.0 — and on the ropes because of it.

Amazon.com has always embraced openness. Launched in 1994, it’s a classic Web 1.0 company by definition. And yet it’s also at the forefront of the social web. It allowed its customers to write reviews of products before anyone else, its enormous affiliate program lets everyone sell its products and it was among the first to make its APIs (application programming interfaces) available to developers.

So it was fun, therefore, to watch some of the smartest Web 2.0 thinkers make sense of Amazon’s (AMZN) move to a closed, proprietary world last week with the launch of its e-book reader, Kindle. This was a rollout that, on first blush anyway, made the Microsoft Zune look downright innovative in its openness. (At least you can play MP3s on the Zune. For free.)

What’s going on here?

Here’s my guess: Emboldened by Apple’s (AAPL) success, some of the most innovative companies in the tech world are starting to shift back toward closed systems.

Apple, of course, is about as closed a company as we’ve ever seen. It is what makes the company great and what makes it a horror show. It’s why people love and hate it. On the one hand, Apple products are typically so far beyond those of the competition, a visitor from another planet might think that the former is made by humans and the latter by monkeys. (A techie pal, upon picking up his new iPhone some months ago, waved it at me and gushed, “This is like something from the distant future.”) On the other hand, virtually nothing about Apple is transparent and open, from it’s ghastly press relations to the way it handles customer complaints. The recent incident with the tech pundit Robert Scoble is a great example. He downloaded an Apple update to OS 10.4 and couldn’t restart his computer. I had exactly the same problem when I updated my laptop last week. So did many, many other people, judging from the thousands of views at the relevant area of Apple’s own support site. Yet, talk to Apple support and they deny there’s even a problem. It’s about as open as North Korea.

And yet, its success speaks volumes. The stock is up over 100% during the past 52 weeks. The company maintains such tight control over the products it sells you that you aren’t even allowed to use them in unauthorized ways. Remember the whole episode when some people tried to unlock their phones, Apple updated its software and bricked the rebel phones? Talk about closed systems…

Steve Jobs has become something of the alpha pack leader of the CEOs in Techland. While many people point to the similarities between Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates — affluent suburbanites, both dropped out of Harvard to pursue their big-picture tech dreams — its clear that Zuck’s role model is Jobs. (Zuck uses a Mac, dresses in his own Jobsian uniform, and tends to make grandiose statements about launching movements whenever Facebook holds an event.) While Zuckerberg’s most famous move was opening up Facebook to developers (”Today, we’re starting a movement…”) so far, he’s resisting Google’s call to create a truly open platform. Developers writing applications for Facebook must use its own proprietary language, called FBML. Google, and the rest of the OpenSocial alliance of competing social networks, use HTML and Javascript.

And really, why should he? Just because it’s open?

Apple is successful because Apple is Jobs. And Jobs believes in an almost pathological control. That is, after all, how a visionary gets results.

Will that work for Amazon and Facebook?

In Amazon’s case, if Kindle flames out, it’s not a big deal. The project is an ambitious experiment, and as Tim O’Reilly points out, even if the device itself fails, Bezos could well have jump started an industry that Amazon, with its enormous collection of e-books, is perfectly positioned to dominate.

Facebook, though, is at a more critical juncture. If it stays closed and starts to stultify as a result, members could easily pack up their tents and move to the next big thing. But if it manages to fight off OpenSocial? Look for more closed systems.

Don’t these people know the economy is in the tank? Amazon (AMZN) today reported one of its best quarters ever, with revenue growing 41% and profit quadrupling from a year ago.

Nonetheless, Wall Street punished the online retail giant after hours, partly because Amazon reported diminished gross margins. (One good reason to think that was a blip, not a trend: Amazon sold 2.5 million copies of Harry Potter VII, which had wafer-thin margins. What the boy wizard giveth, he take awayeth.) The news out of Seattle was pretty good today, and Amazon is predicting, in the words of CFO Tom Szkutak, “our best holiday season ever.” With consumers in a dither about the housing meltdown in general and Chinese toys in particular, how is this possible?

Company executives yesterday say that Amazon is firing on all cylinders. Szkutak said that Amazon has more stock in stock, and lower prices, than at any time in the company’s history. He also added one more factor, which ought to confound the critics: Amazon Prime, the company’s membership program that, for a $79 annually, guarantees free two-day delivery on anything you buy. The critics had said it would never work. But it is working—Szkutak said that enrollment doubled year over year. It was recently rolled out in Japan where the uptake is just as healthy. And it will only become more efficient.

As founder and CEO Jeff Bezos claimed during an analysts’ call today, for Prime, “the opportunity on the cost side is a very large one when we have sufficient scale.” The bigger it gets, the cheaper it is. Huh? Bezos: “The opportunity is to modify the fulfillment center network so its optimized for faster delivery. As you can imagine, a fulfillment center optimized for two-day delivery looks very different from one optimized for standard delivery.”

I can’t imagine that, exactly (OK, I can: A giant warehouse filled with speed freaks zipping around on rocketpacks, perhaps.) But I believe him.

The other day, my wife was fiddling around with a new bit of software that scrapes all our credit card data and shows us the appalling ways we spend money. Our number 3 expense? Amazon. Thanks to Prime, we made 15 purchases over the past several months. Why not? Shipping is free. For the record, number one was groceries, and number 2 was the vet. My dog, Otto, has a slipped disk. No, I didn’t believe it either. If only Amazon provided medical care for over-weight dogs.

Quick bit: Asked whether Amazon’s new, MP3 store, which sells music at 99-cents a download, was eating into sales of CDs, Bezos said: “We haven’t seen any evidence of that. (But) I think it’s way to early to know if you would see evidence of that.”

Amazon (AMZN) will have to pull off another amazing quarter when it reports earnings today to prove to Wall Street that it’s still the hottest tech stock in town.

The Seattle-based online retailer’s stock has jumped by 130% since it reported its standout first-quarter earnings back in April. Investor enthusiasm has been buoyed by the company’s cutback in technology spending and move into digital services like Tivo downloads as well as by the success of Amazon Prime, a service that offers unlimited free shipping to premium members. Amazon’s shares closed at $91.29 on Monday.

The consensus among analysts is that Amazon’s pricey stock is near its saturation point. What’s up for debate is how much higher the price of its shares can go. Analysts expect Amazon to earn 18 cents per share on $3.14 billion in revenue when it reports its third-quarter earnings after the market closes today, according to Thomson Financial.

Two straight blowout quarters caused Amazon’s stock to more than double in value in the last six months. But some analysts question if the valuation is getting out of hand and outpacing the company’s fundamentals.

Bear Stearns analyst Robert Peck said that the share price was already at its limit. “Amazon will have to reaccelerate tech spending in order to support growth and remain competitive, given the spate of evolving technologies on the web,” he noted in his latest report.

Analysts will be paying close attention to assessing the company’s operating margins, its third-party sales and the growth of web services. Lazard Capital Markets’ analyst Colin Sebastian says third-quarter margins could be slightly lower than analysts’ expectations because of sales of the final Harry Potter book, which it sold at a deep discount.

“It’s a very different situation when it was $45 a share,” says Sebastian. “It didn’t really matter where Amazon’s profitability was coming from as long as it happened. At this price, we’re going to have to see progress from all sides.”