This just in from Fortune’s Scott Moritz:

The latest earnings report from Dell (DELL) suggests founder Michael Dell hasn’t restored the magic to the PC giant. The Round Rock, Texas, computer maker missed fourth-quarter earnings estimates by a penny after the market closed Thursday, on slightly weaker-than expected sales. The less-than-fantastic performance underscores Dell’s struggle against top PC shop Hewlett-Packard (HPQ).

Dell has been attempting to shift its business model from a light inventory online sales stream to a more conventional retail outlet approach. But the problem is, says one investor who is short Dell’s stock, is that “they are taking on the king of the sales channel, and their costs and capabilities are out of whack.”

Adjusting for one-time items, Dell posted earnings of 35 cents a share, up from 30 cents a year ago but not quite enough to meet the analysts’ estimates of 36 cents. Sales in the fourth quarter were $15.9 billion, up from $15.6 billion in the third quarter and above the $14.4 billion level last year. Analysts were looking for $16 billion.

Analysts point to Dell’s modest product growth rates as a sign that the company isn’t swiping much market share from the competition. PC sales grew 11% in the quarter and notebook sales were up 13%. While that’s respectable, there is still a wide disparity between those numbers and H-P’s 50% notebook growth rate.

Gross margins, the take of revenue left after covering the cost of sales, actually widened to 18.8% from 18.5% in the third quarter, due largely to the cheaper costs of supplies like memory and chips. That break on expenses was expected to provide Dell with a little tailwind as it sailed through the quarter. But so far Michael Dell’s strategy to push into big retail stores like Wal-Mart (WMT), Staples (SPLS) and Best Buy (BBY) hasn’t fired up as much revenue growth as Wall Street had hoped.

Dell shares fell 80 cents, or 4%, to $20.07 in after-hours trading.

Tech hard-chargers want in on the e-mail business. Dell (DELL) agreed Tuesday to spend $155 million to buy MessageOne, a small-business e-mail software company that competes with Google’s (GOOG) Postini and Yahoo’s (YHOO) Zimbra. “MessageOne brings to Dell world-class technology and talent that will broaden Dell’s configurable services offerings,” Dell said Tuesday morning. As it happens, MessageOne is run by Michael Dell’s brother Adam - an apparent conflict of interest Dell dealt with in part by hiring Morgan Stanley to offer up a so-called fairness opinion and by having Michael Dell and his wife agree to donate their proceeds to charity.

Elsewhere, there is talk of a Google play for Plaxo, the former LinkedIn rival backed by Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz. The Plaxo deal chatter taps into a Silicon Valley debate that Fortune’s Josh Quittner takes note of: “Who really owns your address book?” Many companies believe you do - but Microsoft (MSFT), surprise surprise, isn’t among them. It has been trying to sell third parties access to Hotmail users’ contact lists, Quittner reports. The company insists that it’s doing so not for selfish reasons but to protect users’ security. Maybe it’s time for a fairness opinion on that practice.

What does Michael Dell have to do to get his company’s stock rising again? On Tuesday morning, Dell (DELL) joined the tech buyback crowd, saying it will repurchase $10 billion worth of its stock in coming months. In doing so, the PC maker joined Cisco (CSCO) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) in feeding stacks of greenbacks into the market for the purpose of shoring up the stock price. Yet Dell shares dropped Tuesday, putting the stock below the level it held back in January before Michael Dell came out of retirement to retake the CEO post.

Shareholders like buybacks because they create demand for stocks that wouldn’t necessarily find a lot of willing buyers otherwise. Such is the case with Dell, which generates plenty of cash but shows few signs of any sustainable growth that might appeal to investors. Dell’s comments earlier Tuesday, in service of updating shareholders on strategic priorities, made clear how little the company has to offer right now.

“We are at the dawn of the connected era and Dell has never been better positioned to meet the needs of the billions of people who will join us online in the coming years,” Dell said in the company’s press release. “By establishing clear priorities for growth in consumer, emerging countries, notebooks, small and medium business and the enterprise, we will deliver the products and solutions customers need to simply connect, communicate and collaborate.”

As Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky pointed out last week, the time to buy Dell will be when the doubletalk ends.