In this week ramping up to the holidays, good cheer–unsurprisingly–was hard to find. 2008 may well be remembered as the year the econalypse stole Christmas.

Yahoo (YHOO) was bereft of cheer, for sure. BoomTown covered its long-dreaded layoffs and published Jerry Yang’s complete memo to Yahoo staff about the painful process, which began on Wednesday. Ex-Yahoos from all corners of the company declared their preferences (and vented) to BoomTown about the as-yet fruitless search for a CEO to replace Yang, who laid himself off last month. But wait–Digital Daily pointed out a singular moment of misplaced cheer–akin to fiddling while the proverbial Yahoo burns–as the company, uh, celebrated the holidays with a bafflingly lavish year-end party last Saturday–four days before its massive layoffs began.

Digital Daily covered a lot more bad news this week–even some for Apple (AAPL). Belkin, historically the largest exhibitor at January’s MacWorld, announced it won’t be at the convention this year. In addition, registrations for the annual Macfest are down 20 percent since last year. Fairchild became the latest in a long procession of semiconductor companies to lower estimates in the face of dwindling demand, and IPO activity dropped 50 percent in 2008, according to Ernst & Young’s year-end Global IPO Update. What’s that word? Oh yeah, schadenfreude. In a cold bit of circumstance, almost any company can feel a little bit better by comparing itself to Nortel (NT), which lost an astonishing 97 percent of its value this year.

MediaMemo wrote about CBS’s (CBS) appointment with the piper–it spent $1.8 billion on CNET last year, and started paying the consequences this week. The re-org of the entire CBS Interactive group is laid out in Quincy Smith’s memo to its staff. Hulu was hurting this past week, too. Its traffic dropped sharply in the absence of Tina Fey/Sarah Palin viral videos. There was at least one happy anomaly in this week’s news, though: Microblogging site Tumblr brought back memories of the heady early days of Web 2.0, announcing a $4.5 million-dollar round of funding from Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital.

On the Mossberg front, Walt is on a holiday break, but Personal Technology is not. Nick Wingfield sat in for him this week with a column about digital projectors, which are getting smaller and more portable. And in anticipation of Mac-themed holidays for Windows PC users, Katherine Boehret discussed reliable methods of getting data from a PC to a Mac.

In the ensuing weeks, the App Store earned its share of detractors–many of them software developers whose products were pulled from the store without warning, most notably the “I Am Rich” app, which sold (briefly) for $999.99. Last week an independent programmer discovered a line in the iPhone OS that looked suspiciously like a “kill switch” Apple (AAPL) could use to cripple programs remotely. Jobs confirmed the “kill switch” in a story by Nick Wingfield earlier today in The Wall Street Journal, and explained that it serves as a last line of defense against malicious applications.

Jobs goes on to happily announce to Wingfield that in 30 days, users have downloaded more than 60 million programs. Though most are free, sales averaged $1 million a day, totaling about $30 million for the month.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my career for software,” Jobs said. “Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time,” he told Wingfield. If sales continue to grow, that is. But Apple keeps only 30 percent of the proceeds for the stuff that isn’t free. This covers costs for now, but isn’t a long-term revenue strategy.

Certainly the company aims to use the software to sell more iPhones and iPod Touch devices, in much the same way iTunes fuels sales to all of Apple’s iPod-related devices.

It’s not clear where the whole game lies yet. Platform-driven phones are a new market. “We think, going forward, the phone of the future will be differentiated by software,” says Jobs. If there’s a way to make the software pay on an ongoing basis, and at a better rate than 30 percent, the App Store could definitely become a $1 billion marketplace.