Apple’s iPhone will face slimmer margins in the near future.

Now that the dust has settled from Apple’s iPhone 3GS announcement — video camera! compass! better battery life! — it’s time to face facts. Though Apple (AAPL) still leads rivals in style and technology, it’s not the breakaway frontrunner it once was. The new phone is cool and all, but now Apple is looking over its shoulder — and it will have to make some adjustments.

That’s a big change from just a few weeks ago. Back then, the only credible competitors the iPhone faced were a sleek but boring BlackBerry line from Research in Motion (RIMM) and an exciting but chunky G1 from Google (GOOG).

Since then, however, the landscape has changed dramatically. Suddenly Palm (PALM) appears to have a potential hit with its new Pre, and Google is showing off slimmer second-generation (G2) Android phones. (I’ve used both the Pre and the G2, and they’re pretty darn nice.) All of this new competition is good for consumers, but probably not for Apple’s profit margins.

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Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz says she’ll sell, but there’s more to it than that. Photo: Yahoo

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, not one for mincing words, took the stage at the D7 conference in Carlsbad, Calif. on Wednesday and said yes, she is willing to sell Yahoo’s (YHOO) search business or all of Yahoo – for “boatloads” or “big boatloads” of money, respectively.

As always, the tech press ate this up.  TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld, a smart guy and a former colleague, called it “a softening of her public stance,” since when she arrived in January she said Yahoo was not for sale. While he’s technically right – she even said she had softened her position – I see something different in her comments.

I say Bartz still doesn’t plan on selling Yahoo, or even the search business. Why? In reporting on Bartz for a recent feature in Fortune, I got a sense of how pragmatic she is. When Bartz arrived in January, she knew she had to announce that she was there to run the company, not to break it up and sell it, as a way of defining Wall Street’s expectations. But Bartz is also a veteran executive who knows how this game is played. The truth is that in a well-managed public company, shareholders expect that everything will be for sale at a price. So her statement is probably more a statement of her philosophy than a shift in perspective.

Then there’s the matter of how she phrased this. “Boatloads” of money? Come on. That’s not the language of someone who’s looking to make a deal during a global economic bust.

Even though Microsoft (MSFT), the only likely buyer of anything Yahoo’s selling, is a very wealthy company by any standard, it’s in no position to blithely spend boatloads of money on anything these days. When Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer first offered a $45 billion boatload of money for Yahoo many moons ago, he planned to take on debt and mortgage his future profits to finance the deal. Today, with Windows and Office sales struggling in a recession, Microsoft is slashing jobs to boost a sagging stock price and praying that its upcoming Windows 7 operating system gives the company a boost. He’s looking to do a search deal with Yahoo that makes him look thrifty, not generous.

If you have any lingering doubts left about Bartz’s intentions, look at the conditions she set on any sale of Yahoo’s search business. Not only would she require boatloads of money, but also continuing access to all search-related data and the right technology. In other words she wants to “sell” it, but maintain access to the most valuable parts.

This is a great idea for more than just search, actually. It works just as well for real estate. In fact, I would like to sell my home for boatloads of money, so long as the buyer does some renovations and lets me continue to live in it. Any takers? (GOOG)

Cisco CEO John Chambers doesn’t just talk a good game about telepresence, the videoconferencing technology that creates the illusion you’re in a room with someone who’s actually thousands of miles away. He’s planning to install his company’s high-end system in his Silicon Valley home, provided he and his wife can agree on a spot for it. “I figured we could convert one of the kids’ old bedrooms,” since they’ve grown up and left the house,” he says. “She told me, ‘You do that and you’ll be sleeping in there.’”

Though he’s not done negotiating the location, one thing that Chambers doesn’t have to worry about is cost. ­As longtime chief at the networking giant, he can surely afford the installation, which can easily run north of $150,000 per room.

But can his customers? Even as Chambers and rivals such as Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500), Polycom (PLCM) and Tandberg tout telepresence as the perfect tech tool to reduce travel costs and boost productivity, observers have their doubts. Sure, telepresence enables meetings on three or more huge screens, in high definition with pristine audio quality. (CSCO) (HPQ) (PLCM) (T)

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Jon Fortt and Michael Copeland of Fortune weigh in on the latest buzz around Silicon Valley. (AAPL) (GOOG) (MSFT) (YHOO)

On NBC’s Press: Here, I talk with a panel about the latest issue of Fortune, the Fortune 500 list, and changes to the tech landscape. (AAPL) (MSFT) (INTC) (CSCO) (GOOG) (TIVO) (EBAY) (YHOO)

During Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz’s conference call Tuesday to discuss the company’s quarterly results, there was much to discuss: Sales fell 13% and profits sank 78% as advertisers cut back on online spending. And the company confirmed reports of layoffs, saying it would shed about 675 jobs. Yet analysts seemed to care about only one thing: Yahoo’s search business.

The worst-kept secret in the tech world is that Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) and Microsoft have been talking again about a potential deal. So everyone wanted to know if Bartz would sell search. But that was the wrong question. A better one: Why would she?

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Preston Feight, chief engineer, uses cloud computing to redesign Kenworth trucks without making huge investments in technology.

Most people don’t spend much time thinking about mudflaps – those strips of rubber behind a big rig’s wheels that repel grime and maybe show a gun-toting Yosemite Sam, warning “Back off!” But by using sophisticated design technology, engineers at truckmaker Kenworth discovered that the little flaps were also a major source of drag. Simply trimming and tapering the flaps will cut about $400 from a typical truck’s annual gas bill.

How exactly did Kenworth solve its mudflap quandary? The company, a unit of $15-billion-a-year truck conglomerate Paccar, took advantage of cloud computing. In Kenworth’s case, engineers rented time on a supercomputer thousands of miles away; that system helped employees root out assorted gas-guzzling design flaws they might have missed had they relied just on computers at Kenworth’s facilities outside Seattle.

Indeed, the engineers used rented computing gear to produce the T660, an aerodynamic truck released in 2007 that ditched the typical bulldog look for a more dolphin-like snout and can get roughly seven miles per gallon. (Don’t laugh. That’s actually impressive for a semi.)

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There was a time when the geeks who keep a company’s tech systems running could get by without knowing the finer details of corporate strategy. You called the chief information officer when you needed a server upgrade, not a strategic plan.

Well, those days are over.

This downturn could mean the end of the sequestered CIO — that rumpled executive who, like Scotty on Star Trek, has limited social skills and usually emerges from the engine room only when something blows up. In these tough times, CEOs are frequently calling tech chiefs out of the wiring closet and into the boardroom, and putting their business skills to the test.

Why? Budget cuts, for starters. The IT department has to tighten its belt while at the same time helping other divisions use technology to slash costs. Some typical questions that cross a CIO’s desk: What if we did those sales meetings as videoconferences instead? Could we shut down the Detroit office and let those folks work from home with wireless laptops? You get the idea.(IBM)

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I’m zipping through the streets of Portland, Ore., in a Lincoln Navigator while a “Knight Rider” episode streams over the Internet to a screen mounted to the car’s dashboard. The technology driving the demonstration? WiMax, the much-hyped wireless standard that promises to deliver Internet to consumers and businesses at speeds up to five times faster than today’s home broadband services.

The good news is that WiMax appears to work pretty well (no latency or jitter as the KITT car was taking down bad guys), making it a potential competitor to telephone and cable companies’ broadband offerings. The bad news is that most American cities may never get post-wired like Portland and Baltimore, the other city now boasting a full-fledged WiMax network.

The reason is that the future of WiMax in the United States depends heavily on a small company called Clearwire, which last year merged its systems with Sprint’s WiMax assets and took in a $3.2 billion investment from a passel of tech and broadband players. But even with billions in the bank – and wireless pioneer Craig O. McCaw as chairman – Clearwire’s survival is far from assured.

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Under Otellini, Intel has beaten back competitors and gotten more efficient. Photo: Intel

If you’re the CEO of Intel, you don’t typically worry about whether the business will make money. In the average day last year, the Silicon Valley giant sold $103 million worth of chips and generated $30 million in cash. Nice work if you can get it, right?

Suddenly, it’s not so nice.

Don’t look now, but the global economic meltdown is burning a hole in Intel’s (INTC) business model. This week CEO Paul Otellini announced that last quarter’s profits tumbled 90 percent to $234 million, and reportedly told employees that he couldn’t rule out the possibility that Intel might actually lose money in the current quarter – it would be the first time that’s happened in more than 20 years. (Intel doesn’t comment on its internal communications.)

When things get this bad, investors justifiably ask whether it’s time to give the CEO the boot. The answer in Intel’s case? Not yet. More