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2009 semiconductor sales are down from 2008 by nearly record amounts, but they’re improving. That’s the latest word from the Semiconductor Industry Association, which said today that global chip sales rose in September from the previous month–the seventh straight month of gains.

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Now that Palm has finally realized there’s no longevity in forever shipping incremental improvements to the PalmPilot, the company has quite a future ahead of it. Never mind that it faces some particularly long, historic odds. Because according to RBC analyst Mike Abramsky, Palm has the “special sauce”–the means of orchestrating a second act, perhaps even one of Jobsian proportions.

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It took Apple and AT&T 74 days to sell the first million iPhones back in 2007. This year it took just three. No wonder AT&T is crowing about first-day sales. In an all-hands memo to employees this week, the carrier, which sold “hundreds of thousands” of iPhones during its pre-order process, said first-day sales of the 3GS were off the charts. The memo, after the jump.

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“We will enter Asia with the iPhone in 2008…we will one day enter China, we’re not saying when.” Apple COO Tim Cook said that back in March of 2008, and it’s a good thing he declined to offer a more specific timeline. Because here we are, well over a year later, and Apple still hasn’t managed to officially launch the iPhone to China. But it’s getting closer.

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Well, look at that. Floundering though it is, AMD has managed some gains in the semiconductor market. According to IDC, the company’s share of the chip market hit 22.3 percent during the first quarter of 2009, an increase of 4.6 percent over the fourth quarter of 2008. Meanwhile, Intel’s share fell to 77.3 percent, a decline of 4.7 percent.

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The ax is indeed swinging at Big Blue. Following reports that it is preparing to cut thousands of jobs in its global services unit, IBM said Thursday it has begun notifying employees of what it likes to euphemistically refer to as “resource actions.” IBM refused to disclose the number of employees affected, but
Lee Conrad, spokesman for a union group called Alliance@IBM, said at least 1,674 in the company’s Application Services unit will lose their jobs.

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Well, there’s one thing on the rise amid this declining economy: job cuts.

The technology industry was supposed to cut 180,000 jobs in 2008; instead it cut 186,955–up 74.2 percent from the 107,295 job cuts recorded in 2007. That’s the dismal word from recruitment outfit Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which helpfully notes that this is the largest industry workforce reduction since 2003, when tech suffered 228,325 layoffs.

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With IBM quietly contributing another 2,800 or so employees to the next Bureau of Labor Statistics Unemployment report, this seems like a fine time to pay respects to those who’ve gone before them. And there are many. In the past six months, thousands of workers have been right-sized and offboarded. Rebalanced and rationalized. “Smartsized.” Sacked. A quick scan of the carnage.

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Earlier this year Motorola said it would sack 1,500 employees during the fourth quarter of 2008. Apparently, that was a mistake. What it meant to say was that it planned to sack 1,900 employees during the fourth quarter of 2008, as evidenced today by the company’s announcement that it will lay off 400 more employees than originally expected this year.

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If Motorola were a Greek tragedy, we’d be at that point in the narrative where the company is just about to blind itself out of grief–with a pair of RAZRs, of course. Two reports issued today show an already grim scenario for Motorola growing markedly worse.

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