While Comcast (CMCSA) had forecast a slowing of subscriber growth in its second quarter, the decline it’s now seeing is far worse than expected. “It is across all units,” said Roberts. We’re really not seeing a surging of disconnects. We’re just not seeing a surging of orders.”

Is that entirely econalypse-related? Or might it be due to competitive pressure from telcos? Roberts conceded that the market is an “intensely competitive one, but said Comcast has really just been dragged down by the souring economy. “I think there’s a general slowing of consumer expectations….” he said. “There are fewer opportunities to sell things.”

In a regulatory filing today, the company said it has asked shareholders to approve a plan to offer employees the opportunity to swap underwater stock options for restricted stock. “Like many companies, we have experienced a significant decline in our stock price over the last year in light of the current global financial and economic crisis,” eBay explained in its argument for implementing the plan. “Because of the continued challenging economic environment and the uncertain impact of our efforts to change our business, we believe these underwater stock options are no longer effective as incentives to motivate and retain our employees.”

And this may well be the case. That said, you’d think that the widespread and fast-mounting job losses in the tech sector would be enough to keep most folks still collecting paychecks coming in to work. Nice gesture, though.

Sacked.

A quick scan of the carnage.

• 8,000 whacked at Sprint (S)
• 6,000 let go at Royal Philips (PHG)
• 1,100 sacked at AMD (AMD)
• 4,000 adjusting to new economic realities at Motorola (MOT)
• 3,000 laid off at Seagate (STX)
• And a few hundred at Oracle (ORCL), as well
• 1,900 declared redundant at Dell (DELL)
• 5,000 losing their jobs at Microsoft (MSFT)
• 1,000 managers and 5,000 contractors pink-slipped at Alcatel-Lucent (ALU)
• 1,500 gone at Yahoo (YHOO)
• 12,000 released into the wild at AT&T (T)
• 600 cut loose at Adobe (ADBE)
• 6,000 aligned with the global economic climate at Sun (JAVA)
• And at Nortel (NT) 1,300 positions cut on top of the 1,200 previously announced

Grim isn’t it? Sad thing is, this is just a simple snapshot of what’s been happening in tech. According to the Department of Labor, employers in the states shed 524,000 workers in December, 2.6 million in all of 2008. That makes the last year the worst for layoffs since 1945, when 2.75 million jobs were lost. And that’s frightening, because according to some experts, we’ll get no respite in 2009. “We are very early in the cycle,” Peter Morici, a professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland told BusinessWeek, adding that we’ve so far only seen a sliver of the job losses to come. “We are going to see the fury of the Old Testament for what we have done to the economy.”

Maturing wireless markets and a miserable economy have forced the company’s hand, and come Jan. 1, it will cut 450 jobs in production, sales and marketing and sack 130 or so more in R&D. General “workforce adjustments” will see an additional 35 employees released into the wild.

This period of “change” and activity renewal is the second announced by the Finnish company in the past year. The first resulted in some 2,300 job losses in Germany.

[Image credit: Someecards]

And it will hurt some Internet companies more than others.

“Should the economy run into a recession, this would be only the second downward economic cycle for the Internet. Each Internet company is at a different phase of its evolution,” Aggarwal added. “We believe that a possible recession will be felt harder by those companies that have been delivering extremely high organic growth rates, have high operating leverage, or are approaching minimum operating scale levels in 2008-2009.”

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