If you’re under 25 and use Twitter, you’re not the source of the site’s tremendous growth. While we recently questioned the findings of a largely anecdotal report from Morgan Stanley written by a 15 year old, Nielsen has now produced figures that confirm the trend: young people don’t Tweet.

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A research note written by a 15-year-old, who was not born when former UK chancellor Nigel Lawson dismissed London analysts as “teenage scribblers”, has become the talk of middle-aged media executives and investors.

Morgan Stanley’s (MS) European media analysts asked Matthew Robson, one of the bank’s interns from a London school, to describe his friends’ media habits.

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Wow, an actual, honest-to-goodness, venture-backed software IPO.

We’re getting one today.

SolarWinds Inc. (SWI), an Austin-based provider of network management software, on Tuesday priced an IPO of 12,116,279 shares at $12.50 apiece. The company is selling 9 million shares in the offer, with selling holders–including various officers of the company and several venture investors–offering the rest. The selling holders will sell up to an additional 1,817,441 shares to cover over-allotments.

The banks on the deal include J.P. Morgan (JPM), Goldman Sachs (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS), with Jefferies & Co. (JEF), Thomas Weisel (TWPG) and Ladenburg Thalmann as co-managers.

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A coming flurry of pending product launches could give a lift to sentiment on Microsoft (MSFT), Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Holt asserted in a note today.

In something of an update of his recent upgrade on the stock, Holt repeated his view that the company’s shares should benefit in the months ahead from a cyclical recovery in demand, product cycle momentum and improving margins as we head into calendar 2010, asserting that none of those factors are reflected in the current stock price.

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Amazon.com (AMZN) is absolutely on fire. The company posted Q1 results that blew away estimates, with EPS of 41 cents a dime ahead of the Street, as both gross margins and operating margin expanded in the face of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Not only are consumers continuing to migrate shopping to online from offline, but Amazon continues to gobble up share: Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker notes that Amazon’s U.S. business has grown at least 18 percentage points faster than overall e-commerce for eight consecutive quarters. Throw in better-than-expected demand for the Kindle–annoyingly, the company won’t give any specific data on sales of the device–and you have a recipe for an investor lovefest.

And when I say the stock is on fire, I don’t just mean today. AMZN is up about 67 percent year to date, and a whopping 145 percent since the stock’s November low.

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It’s been clear for a couple of months now that few people are buying PCs–and that those who are buying are extremely cheap. On Monday, a report from Morgan Stanley gave the latest estimate of how declining prices and frugal consumers will affect the industry over the next couple of years. The findings aren’t encouraging.

After a visit to Asia to assess the industry, a group of Morgan Stanley analysts led by Kathryn Huberty concluded that the PC market is worse than they initially thought. They lowered their estimate for 2009 and 2010 PC sales. Earlier, Ms. Huberty had predicted that global PC sales would drop 10 percent this year from last year; now, she’s estimating PC revenue to decline by 24 percent.

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Morgan Stanley analyst Richard Ji this morning cut his rating on Sina (SINA) to Equal Weight from Overweight. He also cut estimates: for 2008, he now sees $1.38, down from $1.41, and for 2009 he now expects $1.41, down from $1.69. For 2010, his forecast is $1.67, down from $2.11.

Ji is concerned about softening of China’s advertising market, and he thinks Sina is more exposed to the slowdown than other China Internet portals. He notes that the company generates about 70 percent of its revenue from online ads, versus 40 percent-plus for Sohu and mid-teens for Tencent and NetEase. He also notes that the company had created an Olympics channel, generating extra inventory; but that (for obvious reasons) that channel has ceased to exist.

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The Street continues to ratchet down its expectations for Google (GOOG) ahead of the company’s third-quarter earnings coming up next Thursday.

While continuing to recommend the stock, analysts at both RBC Capital and Bernstein Research today trimmed both their earnings estimates and price targets for the Internet search giant. That follows similar moves by analysts at Stifel, Morgan Stanley, AmTech and Collins Stewart.

RBC Capital’s Ross Sandler maintains an Outperform rating, but today cut his price target to $500 from $600. For 2008, his EPS estimate is now $19.14, down from $19.45; for 2009 he now sees $21.24, down from $23.46. The move, he writes, is “based on the deteriorating macro environment.” (I bet you sure are surprised to hear that.) He says search is holding up better than other forms of online advertising, but that “no company is immune to cyclical factors.”

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There’s new selling pressure on eBay (EBAY) this morning, after Morgan Stanley’s David Joseph cut his rating on the stock to Equal Weight from Overweight.

“Seller checks and proprietary data indicate that trends deteriorated more than expected in Q3 amid eBay’s ongoing transition in its core marketplace, greater economic sensitivity and poor demand,” he writes in a research note today. Joseph writes that he now expects greater deceleration in global gross merchandise volume in Q3 than previously expected, with a possible year-over-year decline in the U.S. And he also cautions that eBay faces a “challenging holiday season.”

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Apple (AAPL) shares are down sharply Monday morning after analysts at RBC Capital and Morgan Stanley cut their ratings on the stock.

RBC Capital’s Mike Abramsky cut his rating on the stock to Sector Perform from Outperform; his price target on the shares is now $140, down from $200. He cut his FY 2008 EPS estimate to $5.26, from $5.28; for 2009 he goes to $5.75 from $6.07; for FY 2010 he’s now at $7.38, down from $8.03. Abramsky says his new more cautious stance reflects “a worsening consumer spending environment.” He says a recent survey RBC conducted with research firm ChangeWave found a drop in the number of consumers intending to buy Macs: 29 percent intend to buy Mac laptops in the next 90 days, down from 34 percent in August, while 26 percent intend to buy a Mac desktop, down from 30 percent. Abramsky says that is the biggest decline in those measures in 2.5 years.

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In a sweeping call on tech hardware stocks, Morgan Stanley’s Kathryn Huberty and Scott Coleman cut price targets on earnings estimates for a host of hardware and telecom equipment companies to reflect the strengthening of the U.S. dollar and a slowdown in global demand. They cut estimates on 21 companies, reducing 2009 revenue by an aggregate 3.1 percent and profits by 5.6 percent. They now see “less than normal seasonal growth” for global PC and handset shipments in both the second half of this year and all of 2009.

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I wrote Friday about the daunting math that Microsoft suddenly faced if it didn’t significantly boost its stake in Yahoo. In short, though Yahoo insiders and generally supportive institutions control less than 40% of Yahoo’s outstanding shares, they easily control a majority of shares likely to be voted in a hostile proxy contest. Average Joes rarely vote in such fights, boosting the power of the pros. Why Microsoft’s bankers at Morgan Stanley didn’t figure this out sooner–or why CEO Steve Ballmer didn’t listen–is one of the intriguing tales that may yet be told. As of the opening bell Monday morning, however, the math changes immediately …

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