Analysts undaunted by Google's stock price decline, writing it off to unusually high expectations for the company Despite a drop in Google Inc. share price after its Wednesday earnings announcement, investor confidence in the IT sector appears to be high as earnings season winds down.Google’s announcement came in the wake of strong results by its online rivals but as usual it outshone them — at least, in the eyes of analysts. The company reported net income of US$997 million, or $3.18 per share, for the quarter ending in December. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial had forecast $2.92 per share. Several major brokerages including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. and RBC Capital Markets Inc. raised their already-high share-price forecasts on the company.Company shares plunged however, dropping $19.75 to close at $481.75 Thursday. Analysts shrugged this off, ascribing the decline to unusually high expectations for the company. While the company dominates online ad sales, the tremendous amounts of cash it is burning in R&D and acquisitions — mainly its $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube Inc., announced in October, may have investors nervous, analysts pointed out. “Google continues to invest for the long term, and while that may temper results in the near term, we believe it is the right thing to do for the business” wrote UBS analyst Benjamin Schachter in a research note.Dell Inc. shares dropped Thursday after its late-Wednesday announcement that Michael Dell would be taking back the CEO reins from Kevin Rollins, who had been in that role for two and a half years. The company also announced that it now expects its fourth quarter fiscal year 2007 results to be below the average of Thomson Financial estimates for both revenue and earnings per share.Dell has been hit with a hardware price squeeze and has lost its edge as rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co. have matched or bettered the company’s logistics and supply-chain management techniques. Earlier this month, IDC reported that Dell’s shipments in the U.S., more than 50 percent of Dell’s sales, were down 17 percent for the year as HP overtook the company as the world’s leading PC supplier. Dell shares dropped by $0.42 to close at $23.80 Thursday. Despite the concerns about Dell and Google, investor confidence in IT remains high. Though a few major IT vendors, such as Cisco Systems Inc., have yet to announce quarterly earnings, strong results from eBay Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc., Yahoo Inc., and EMC Corp. over the past few weeks suggest that several sectors within the wider IT market will enjoy at least moderate growth this year.The tech-heavy Nasdaq, which slumped earlier this month on warnings from chip makers and a few software vendors, has been rising lately, and Thursday gained 4.45 points to close at 2468.38. Technology Industry