It’s the iPad! It’s going to rock the world! OMG!

by Jeff Dorsch, January 27th, 2010, Wednesday.

Category: Computers / Technology, Consumer Products, Deals, In the News, Media, Online And New Media, People, Trends

Apple Photoshop

We’re coming to you from the Yerba Buena Center in downtown San Francisco, where Apple just introduced the iPad, its amazing new tablet computer!

No, that’s not true. I’m actually live-blogging from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland! And, yes, the skiing is amazing.

Sorry — I’m really in my cubicle at Hoover’s in Austin, Texas. And today I’m blogging about Carol Bartz’s first year as CEO of Yahoo!. We’ll get to the iPad and other big news (after months of waiting, Oracle finally acquired Sun Microsystems today, among other headlines) later in the week.

Yesterday Yahoo! reported its financial results for 2009, and the numbers were good — not great, but better than expected, and full of promise that the Internet giant could be on the road to regaining its prominence.

Analysts, bloggers, and other tech pundits gave Bartz letter grades on her first year at Yahoo!. I won’t resort to that tired form of rating executives, or to a 1-to-10 scale. However, since Bartz is a fellow Baby Boomer and old enough to remember American Bandstand in its heyday, I’ll say she earns the right to call the tune and dance to it, if she likes.

The former CEO of Autodesk and one-time Sun Micro executive described 2009 as “a transformative year for Yahoo!” in the company’s handout on the fourth-quarter and full-year results. Yahoo! not only beat its revenue guidance for the quarter; it also surpassed the expectations of Wall Street. The company’s stock price fell below $16 a share in trading this afternoon. That price is closer to its 52-week high, just over $18, than to its 52-week low, less than $11, so investors are generally buying the turnaround Bartz is implementing.

It’s not very exciting news on this day when the whole world, it seems, is paying attention to the Apple rollout, and a significant portion of Silicon Valley is focused on Oracle’s all-day event devoted to its plans for Sun Micro. Still, good news is often in short supply these days.

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Image by Stuart Caie, used under a Creative Commons license.

Jeff Dorsch (feat. T-Pain) has written about the high-tech industry since Intel was shipping 8088 microprocessors for that newfangled IBM Personal Computer. Yeah, that long ago. He's been at Hoover's since 2003.