It’s that time of year, here’s mine:

1. Kiva will break $100m in loans
2. Microsoft will buy Facebook
3. Google will buy Delicious
4. Microsoft will buy what’s left of Yahoo
5. Jerry Yang will leave Yahoo for good
6. Steve Jobs will step down as Apple CEO
7. Social networking will crack its business model
8. Google’s share of online advertising dollars will fall

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Carol Bartz is Yahoo’s new CEO, and its last. To remain as an independent company Yahoo needs not only a great leader but a great innovator. By appointing Bartz the Yahoo board has signaled it is getting ready for a sale once the market picks back up. I can’t see a 60-year old wanting to hang around too long so Bartz will whip Y into shape, sell it and retire.

To my mind Bartz comes into the ‘manage decline more efficiently’ category of CEO. There is no suggestion in her background that she is a great innovator, her qualification for the job seems to be that she whipped a chaotic Autodesk into shape. Yahoo is certainly chaotic but I suspect Bartz’s job is to bring order in readiness for a sale rather than put it back on its feet, a task which is close to impossible. Charles Arthur picked up on the key phrase in her remarks “I believe there is now an extraordinary opportunity to create value for our shareholders”.

Fairly early on she will start to rationalise the business, getting in cash for valuable yet peripheral assets and selling off a lot of Yahoo’s startup acquisitions. Flickr could go and it would not surprise me to see Yahoo lose Delicious in this fire sale and with Joshua Schachter now at Google that is its most likely destination. She is certainly decisive to carry this off in short order, Bartz was not shy in applying the boot to Sue Decker’s behind. Despite Jerry Yang’s protestations I expect he will formally depart as ‘Chief Yahoo’ once he realises Bartz’s objective is to gut the company ready to be sold.

Arthur points out that Yahoo made “$660m on revenues of $6.97bn”. I wonder how many of its 15,000 contribute to that seven billion dollars. Bartz will not take long to find out and it would not surprise me to see that number cut in half inside a year. That should deliver a short term boost to profits enough to attract a buyer. Once that process is complete Yahoo will go looking for a buyer. The most likely candidate is still Microsoft and they will be attracted by a lower price and willing suitor this time round. An additional benefit to MS is that that can sit back while Bartz does all the dirty work then be seen as the benign saviour rather than moustache twirling villain.

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Despite my hiatus I could not let this news pass. Jerry Yang has finally resigned as CEO of Yahoo bringing an end to a disasterous tenure in which he spurned a $33 per share offer to acquire the company only to see it sink to $10. Now this is not all Jerry’s fault, every stock has taken a battering since the summer, but it is mostly his fault. Every move he has made has been hedged around with vacillation and uncertainty because, in short, he is not a leader.

The real reason Yahoo is doomed is that it hasn’t really changed since 1994. Admittedly Google hasn’t really changed since 1996 but Google was built around a genuinely brilliant insight from Larry Page which spelled the end for the portal strategy of which Yahoo was the prime exponent. They may not have set out to do it like MS did with Netscape but make no mistake Google killed Yahoo.

The bottom line is Jerry Yang was never cut out to be a CEO. And like anyone stuck in a job they are not suited to the best thing to do is pack it in. I bet Jerry never felt so relieved as he did yesterday, what Yahoo needs now is someone who thrives in adversity.