Carl Icahn, the famous activist investor, resigned from the Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) board of directors Friday.

This comes just over a year after he scored the position, following the seemingly endless talks the company had with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) over the possibility of a takeover. Icahn told Yahoo that he was resigning effective immediately because Yahoo! didn't need an activist investor on the board at this time.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) will be spending $100 million to market its new ... nothing. The internet pioneer who wants out of the tech biz and solely into the media biz (sounds like the Terry Semel days) will spend that sum over the next 15 months to gain new customers to its plethora of web properties and keep them there as long as possible (and charger advertisers appropriately).

What is new about this? From initial review, nothing. Yahoo! has always wanted to gain customers to its extensive internet collection and keep them there. What's so compelling a change that it's worth $100 million? So far, nothing this writer can determine. Just using Microsoft Corp.'s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Bing search services across all its properties is surely not a compelling reason.

Since coming on board Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) early this year, Carol Bartz has wasted little time in making changes. Part of the strategy is to get the company more focused.

So, it looks like Yahoo! is in the process of selling its small business unit. All in all, it's a good asset, with web hosting, domain name services, and merchant accounts. The deal may also include the HotJobs division.

Here we go again. Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) may need to look at combining their companies and search efforts over a year from when a combined "Microhoo" was first put on the table. Current Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz tossed the latest gold coin into the fountain by saying this week that "boatloads of money" would be the only possible way Yahoo! would look at teaming up with Microsoft would happen.

Bartz danced around the issue and minced words a bit by answering that "You know, if there's boatloads of money and there's the right technology and there's the right information we'd have, sure. But you know, there's two parties in all of this and the other party needs to have a boatload of money, and ... the right technology and give us the right data, and so forth. So it's that simple."

Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO), a web portal whose colleagues include Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) AOL, reported Q1 numbers after the bell on Tuesday. According to an earnings preview done by colleague Mark Fightmaster, Wall Street was counting on something along the lines of 8 cents per share. Well, on a non-GAAP basis, Yahoo! earned 15 cents per share. Not bad.

Unfortunately, Yahoo! made three pennies more on the same adjusted basis in last year's similar quarter. Furthermore, revenues, adjusted for currency effects, dropped 8%. Oh, and one more thing. Free cash flow decreased over 60%.

Late Tuesday, The New York Times reported that Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is preparing a significant round of layoffs, according to sources close the matter. The sources indicate that several hundred employees could be affected by the upcoming job cuts, which would be YHOO's first under new CEO Carol Bartz.

A Yahoo spokesman declined to comment, but reports indicate that the payroll cuts could be announced next Tuesday, April 21, when the Internet portal is scheduled to release its first-quarter earnings results. Since she first joined the company in January, Ms. Bartz has made it clear that serious restructuring efforts would be necessary to repair Yahoo's struggling business.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz may be starting to give Yahoo!'s mobile offerings the attention they deserve after former CEO and company co-founder Jerry Yang treated mobile like an "isolated startup." Although Yahoo!'s presence in the mobile internet market has been respectable recently, that doesn't mean that it's been completed integrated with Yahoo!'s nonmobile universe.

Instead of taking its brands and products to the mobile web and handset application arena, Yahoo! has developed very cool but isolated products for the mobile universe. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), on the other hand, has taken its enormously-popular web-based products and has ported them better and better to the mobile web.

Carol Bartz, the new CEO of Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO), has no qualms about executive transparency. During an appearance Tuesday at the Morgan Stanley Tech Conference in San Francisco, Bartz confessed that she doesn't use Yahoo's mapping functionality. "I use Google Maps," she admitted. Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen tried to defer the potential PR problem by explaining that Yahoo Maps has been placed on the back burner, since it's so expensive to invest in the product.

Yahoo Maps isn't the only weakness Bartz noted. Though she said it's "very clear" that Yahoo needs to dive into the social networking arena, the CEO floated the idea of a partnership with an existing company, rather than the launch of a brand-new product. "I do not believe we can invent the next Facebook," she explained.

Yahoo, Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) has crept up in the last five months insofar as internet search market share gains. Although the gains have been small from a percentage perspective, the fact that competitor Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has lost a half of a percentage point recently at least is giving Yahoo! some hope. Google still stands way above the competition when it comes to internet search market share at 63% compared to Yahoo!'s 21%.

Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO), which competes with Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), and Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) AOL, reported Q4 stats after the bell on Tuesday. They were pretty dismal, but expectations were bea t. Revenues dipped by 1%, and earnings per share on an adjusted basis were $0.17. According to Wall Street's view, Yahoo! was only supposed to earn $0.13. A four-penny beat on the bottom line is a pretty good thing.

Or is it in this case? I would argue it's no big deal. I mean, we are talking about Yahoo! here, and there's a new CEO on the job, Carol Bartz. She replaced the disaster known as Jerry Yang. Considering that there's a new regime, you can't really rely on this beat as a proper indicator for what's to come.

Not only is new Yahoo!, Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz considering thousands of layoffs from her new corner office, she may be having a hand in freezing wages at the company in 2009. Yahoo! is making a move that's all too common in recent months as public companies continue handing out pink slips and freezing wages. Even President Obama took this route with some federal staffers this week.

Yahoo!'s 14,000+ employees stand to be pared down as the company strategically cuts costs across the board in an effort to prop up its sagging stock price and ring in more profit. Even so, the internet bellwether is expected to see an EPS decrease in the double digits when it reports earnings for its Q4 period next week. And then there's the specter of Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) re-approaching the company in an effort to buy its search assets or something else, now that co-founder Jerry Yang is no longer in charge.

While Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) just can't seem to actually have a "bad" quarter yet in its public history, Yahoo! has had plenty of missteps and with this salary freeze, it's having to do what it has to do in this economy. Yahoo! has already lost some key executives in recent years to other companies, the company is laying off employees and freezing wages, and its main competitor is kicking its butt. New CEO Bartz has her hands full already.

Newly appointed Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) Chief Executive Carol Bartz reportedly is considering firing 3,000 workers to cut costs, according to a tip received by 24/7 Wall St.

The rumor, which has not been confirmed, makes sense. Shares of the Internet portal are down more than 40 percent over the past 52 weeks amid investor concerns about the poor advertising climate and lingering resentment over management's failure to make a deal with Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT).

According to 24/7, Bartz's early look at the company shows that she needed to reduce Yahoo's staff of about 12,000 or take out as much as $850 million (a figure which the blog says may be wrong. "Bartz will make sharp cuts whether a search deal with Microsoft is completed or not," the blog said..

Fourth quarter earnings are set for Jan. 27. Indications are that they will be miserable. Earnings are expected to be 13 cents per share (or as low as 7 cents) compared with 15 cents a year earlier, according to Thomson Reuters. Revenue is expected to fall 2.1% to $1.37 billion.

Given the expected decline in advertising sales, those estimates may be optimistic. The question is not if there will be job cuts but when.

Yahoo! They found someone for the gig. Former Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK) CEO Carol Bartz has reportedly accepted the top job at Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO), according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required.)

Industry watchers have considered Bartz a leading contender for the CEO spot left vacated by co-founder Jerry Yang for a while now. But filling the job proved contentious... and difficult. Seems nobody wanted the task of trying to turn around the troubled company's fortunes. While it enjoys rich content and traffic, this early internet player has also been beset by internal and external troubles for years. Much of its executive and technical talent has left for greener pastures.

Bartz, 60, is a well-regarded tech executive. She presided over Autodesk from 1992 through 2006, during which the company saw robust growth. She served as Chairman, president and CEO of the company, and remains on as its executive chairman.

Bartz has had stints at many tech firms over the course of her career. She was an executive at Sun Microsystems Inc., (NASDAQ: JAVA), Digital Equipment Corp., and 3M (NYSE: MMM). She also sits on a number of boards, including the board of Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO), with predecessor Jerry Yang.

Inside sources are telling (subscription required) The Wall Street Journal that Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) could make a decision on a new CEO as soon as next week. Former Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK) CEO Carol Bartz is mentioned as a candidate. No additional names are publicly available right now, although the company is believed to be leaning toward bringing in someone from outside the company.

Ms. Bartz still serves as chairman of Autodesk, where she was CEO from 1992 to 2006. Here's what makes her an interesting possible choice: since the beginning of 2005, shares of Autdesk have lost about one-third of their value. Given the tremendous amount of trouble that Yahoo has had in providing shareholders with returns over the past few years, you'd think they'd want to bring in someone fresh off of a winning streak of shareholder value.

At 60 years old, Ms. Bartz also seems like a strange choice for leading the company into the new era of the internet where more nimble rivals like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) are taking market-share.

Still, it's possible that Yahoo insiders see her as a possible short-term solution to get the company back on stronger footing, and perhaps prepare it for a sale.

I think most Yahoo shareholders are probably hoping for something more exciting.