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H-P has alienated some longtime customers by planning to abandon a home-grown chip and switching to chips from Intel Corp. for all of its servers. For example, Oakwood Healthcare, a big Detroit hospital system, is increasingly using IBM servers for new applications. "H-P is like GM saying, 'Buy Oldsmobile, even though we're getting rid of it,' " said Brian Perlstein, Oakwood's chief information officer.

"We've seen very good growth," Kevin B. Rollins, Dell's new CEO, said in a conference call. In contrast to H-P, Mr. Rollins said sales to U.S. corporate customers rose 20% while Europe and Asia each delivered revenue gains of 28% or better.

"We did not see any dropoff" in demand toward the end of the quarter, as other tech companies cited, Mr. Rollins said. He said Dell's results reflect "better execution" than rivals.

A tepid recovery in corporate spending on technology is aggressively segregating high-tech's strong and weak franchises. The results were on clear display yesterday, as Dell Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. detailed continued growth and new hiring, while Hewlett-Packard Co. stumbled badly and fired three top executives.

Combined with recent cautious comments from Cisco Systems Inc., National Semiconductor Corp. and a host of business-software companies, the announcements highlighted how the tech recovery first glimpsed a year ago may already be faltering.

One troubling sign: rising inventories of semiconductors, which are at the heart of all high-tech devices. Chip makers say they expect inventories to return to normal by September. But Tuesday, Kulicke & Soffa Industries Inc., a maker of semiconductor-packaging equipment that was among the first companies to feel the tech slowdown in 2000, slashed its three-week-old revenue forecast for the quarter ending in September by 19%.

The gloomy outlook has dashed hope among tech executives and investors that the sector will soon return to the supercharged growth of the late 1990s. Pummeled again yesterday, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index is down 12.5% for the year, and 19% from its peak in late January. Google Inc.'s initial public offering, initially hailed and subsequently buffeted by questions and skepticism, took another blow yesterday with the news that an interview by the company's founders with Playboy magazine contains statements that might run afoul of so-called quiet-period rules, raising the possibility that Google could be forced to delay the offering.

Demand for high-tech goods remains good by many measures. World-wide shipments of personal computers rose 15.5% in the second quarter, according to market researcher IDC. Spending by U.S. companies on hardware and software increased 15% in the second quarter, compared with a year earlier, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.

Still, those numbers don't live up to the optimistic outlook of tech investors at the start of the year. The technology sector's very size has made it more difficult for some hot new product or service to boost demand significantly, as the Internet did in the 1990s. Indeed, technology markets have become much more sensitive to the macroeconomic factors, such as oil prices and interest rates, that shape demand for other products.

Technology is "becoming a cyclical sector," argues Apjit Walia, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, referring most specifically to semiconductors.

Or, as Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison put it to a roomful of Wall Street analysts last month: "This is the recovery. Enjoy it."

In this tougher environment, the strong generally are getting stronger and the weak are getting weaker. In corporate computing, that means Dell, IBM and EMC Corp. are doing well, while H-P and Sun Microsystems Inc. struggle. In business software, Oracle and Germany's SAP are outdistancing smaller vendors such as Siebel Systems Inc. and PeopleSoft Inc. In networking, Cisco is adding to its already strong market share. In computer services, IBM and Accenture Ltd. are thriving, while Electronic Data Systems Corp. regroups.

"There is a bifurcation in the market," says Brooks L. Gray, an analyst at Technology Business Research, Hampton, N.H.

H-P's troubles were rooted in its unit that makes computer servers and storage devices for corporate customers, which suffered from a botched software installation and aggressive discounting. The unit posted an operating loss of $208 million on revenue of $3.4 billion, contributing to a surprising earnings shortfall.

Chief Executive Carly Fiorina called the blunders "unacceptable" and promised that the unit would return to profitability in the current quarter, ending in late October. Nonetheless, H-P lowered its financial targets for the quarter. In a terse memo issued a few hours after the disappointing results, Ms. Fiorina announced the departures of three executives, including Peter Blackmore, head of the company's sales arm to businesses.

The three executives found out late Wednesday and early Thursday that they were getting fired, and exit packages haven't yet been nailed down, said a person familiar with the situation.

For the three months ended July 31, H-P said net income increased 90%, to $586 million, or 19 cents a share, from $297 million, or 10 cents a share, in the same period a year ago. Excluding costs for amortization and other items, H-P had earnings of $846 million, or 24 cents a share. Measured by that same yardstick, Wall Street analysts had been expecting earnings of 31 cents a share, according to Thomson First Call. Revenue increased 9%, to $18.9 billion, from $17.3 billion.

Ms. Fiorina said that H-P had figured that its new software, from SAP, would cause three weeks of disruption; instead it caused more than six weeks of disruption. In addition, European sales suffered from aggressive discounting, a poor transition to a new central-claims process and problems with compensation for resellers. Ms. Fiorina also said H-P's storage division wasn't well-positioned, forcing it to lower prices. Together, these factors caused a $400 million revenue shortfall, she said.

But analysts said H-P is increasingly caught in a squeeze between Dell's low prices for basic corporate computers and IBM's increasingly innovative high-performance computers. Both rivals have been gaining market share against H-P since its acquisition of Compaq in 2002.

What's more, H-P appears to be shifting toward lower-profit businesses. H-P's personal-computer unit, which has gross margins -- profit before operating expenses -- of 8% to 12%, is growing faster than its servers and storage business, which typically has gross margins of around 40%, for example. And within the server business, H- P's growth is mainly coming from the lower-profit products.

"There's evidence of structural issues at H-P, so we can't say all of the earnings miss is due to one-time factors," said Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein & Co.

H-P has alienated some longtime customers by planning to abandon a home-grown chip and switching to chips from Intel Corp. for all of its servers. For example, Oakwood Healthcare, a big Detroit hospital system, is increasingly using IBM servers for new applications. "H-P is like GM saying, 'Buy Oldsmobile, even though we're getting rid of it,' " said Brian Perlstein, Oakwood's chief information officer.

Techtel Corp., an Emeryville, Calif., market-research company, says a poll of corporate technology buyers in late June and early July showed that demand for H-P server and storage products was flat, while demand for products from IBM, Dell and Sun was rising. "The demand for H-P isn't falling off a cliff. It is just stagnant while everybody else is growing," said Bill Schaub, a Techtel vice president.

The server and storage unit has long been the most troubled business in H-P's diversified portfolio. Under Mr. Blackmore, who headed the division after H-P's 2002 acquisition of Compaq Computer Corp., the group slashed its work force and killed product lines. The unit lost money until late 2003, and since then profits have been anemic amid several restructurings. Top managers in the group have been leaving, including Howard Elias and Mark Lewis, who both jumped to EMC, and Mary McDowell, who joined Nokia Corp.

H-P's other units generally reported good results. The imaging and printing division posted an operating profit of $837 million on revenue of $5.6 billion. The PC unit generated operating profit of $25 million on revenue of $5.9 billion, reversing a loss from a year ago. H-P's services business had an operating profit of $309 million on revenue of $3.5 billion. And H-P's software unit reported a narrower operating loss of $45 million on revenue of $223 million.

H-P's stock plunged on the results. In 4 p.m. trading on the New York Stock Exchange, H-P shares fell $2.57, or 13%, to $16.95.

Dell, meanwhile, reported a strong fiscal second-quarter profit and forecast continued gains in the current period amid rising market share. The world's largest PC maker said profit for the period ended July 30 jumped 29% to $799 million, or 31 cents a share, from $621 million, or 24 cents a share, in the year-ago period. Revenue rose 19.7% to $11.71 billion, from $9.78 billion.

"We've seen very good growth," Kevin B. Rollins, Dell's new CEO, said in a conference call. In contrast to H-P, Mr. Rollins said sales to U.S. corporate customers rose 20% while Europe and Asia each delivered revenue gains of 28% or better.

Server-computer shipments rose 31% and notebook PCs climbed 28%, the company said. Dell's sales of servers and storage devices rose to a record 22% of quarterly revenue, and Dell estimated that it gained 1.5 percentage points in market share for servers during the quarter.

Dell forecast continued increases in sales and profits in the fiscal third quarter ending Oct. 29. It projected a 27% increase in earnings on an 18% rise in revenue.

"We did not see any dropoff" in demand toward the end of the quarter, as other tech companies cited, Mr. Rollins said. He said Dell's results reflect "better execution" than rivals.

Mr. Rollins said the operating gains at the Round Rock, Texas, company came from being more selective in which contracts it pursued. Dell said sales of higher-margin server-computers and notebook PCs were stronger than low-margin desktop and consumer-PC shipments.

In after-hours trading, Dell shares rose 82 cents, to $33.94. In 4 p.m. trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market, Dell shares fell 45 cents to $33.12.

Mr. Rollins chastised investors who sold off tech shares this week for failing to distinguish among tech businesses. "The markets should not value every company, every technology, the whole sector the same way all the time," Mr. Rollins said. "To paint the entire industry with one brush would be ill-advised for investors."

IBM, which last month reported a 17% increase in second-quarter profit, yesterday boosted its outlook for new hiring this year to 18,800 jobs world-wide, from 15,000 previously. A spokesman said the hiring, which would leave IBM with more than 330,000 employees by the end of the year, up from 319,000 at the end of 2003, is consistent with the company's view that the computer and services markets continue to expand.

Elsewhere, however, signs of a slowdown in the technology sector keep cropping up. Analog Devices Inc., a Norwood, Mass., maker of specialized chips used in cellphones and other devices, yesterday blamed "an unusually high level of cancellations" for fiscal third- quarter results at the low end of its expectations. Chief Executive Jerald G. Fishman said customers "appear somewhat more cautious in the short term."

National Semiconductor, which makes similar chips, on Tuesday projected that revenue for its first fiscal quarter ending in August would decline by 4% to 5% from the period ended in May. National had previously expected revenue in the quarter to be flat to up 3%. The company, which gets about half of its revenue from selling to chip distributors, said those customers had turned more cautious about their business prospects.

But contract chip makers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and United Microelectronics Corp. recently reported strong July revenue gains of 31% and 60%, respectively. The companies, which are typically among the first to feel an industry slowdown as customers trim orders, said they expect production to remain strong in the second half.

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Don Clark and William M. Bulkeley contributed to this article.