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

Related articles by Zemanta

• Microsoft CEO, Yahoo Chairman Meet in New York
• Yahoo: Bartz’s ‘Gut Instinct’ Is To Keep Search Biz; Separately, Exits UK Contextual Ad Market
• Carol Bartz wants to “kick some butt”
• Microsoft’s quest to beat Google (Richard Waters/Financial Times)
• Yahoo stock: Still not worth it

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.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Ballmer tries to breathe life into Yahoo! deal
• Yahoo’s Depressing Backup Plan
• Jerry Yang’s Advice To Microsoft – Buy Yahoo
• What Yahoo Must Do to Survive

I got my hands on a new Vista laptop yesterday and I have to say I was impressed. I had to set it up from scratch, the only thing which went wrong was AVG, in the end I gave up and installed Avast. Aside from that it was quite a smooth experience. It was quicker to set up than an XP machine and had no trouble detecting the wireless signal I use.

It was Vista Home Basic running on a 1GB Dell Vostro 860 and it was as fast as XP running on a similar spec machine. I think it is slightly slower to hibernate and restart but not noticeably. The interface is nice, generally familiar to an XP user and the search function works well. From the outside it looks like an enhanced version of XP.

Adding applications was simple, aside from my AVG problems everything I tried (Acrobat, Flash, Firefox, OpenOffice 3) worked first time without any glitches. It is a good OS and I’m surprised it gets all the bad press. Perhaps this is because I waited for SP1 and bought it with a new machine so I didn’t see all the infuriating errors. That said in a straight comparison with Leopard I think it stands up well and bear in mind I am running a Mac Pro with 4GB RAM to compare it.

The recently announced Windows 7 suggests MS is going back to quicker iterations of its OS with less fanfare. Looking back we could view XP, XPSP1, XPSP2, Vista and VSP1 as essentially iterations of the same OS in the way OSX has had Tiger, Leopard and so on. I think this is a good sign as Microsoft’s traditional strength is writing competent software, not doing jazzy PR.

Pic: WVS