In Rebuilding Yahoo, Bartz Has Some Tools That Still Work Well

a major transformation of Yahoo

But there may also be hope, now, that maybe some products that may have languished might get some positive attention inside the company.

In a blog post, titled, "Getting our house in order," Bartz proclaimed: "I'm singularly focused on providing you with awesome products. Period. The kind that get you so excited, you have to tell someone about them. Whether on your desktop, your mobile device, or even your TV."

A few have already been in the works at Yahoo, though they haven't always gotten a ton of press.

Consider Zimbra, the maker of desktop and group collaboration software. Zimbra's software shows very nice promise and, if technical improvement continues on its products, could provide competition for Microsoft and Google in an area its competitors have demonstrated is very strategic.

Another potential strength comes from its Web 2.0 development team - - which has given birth to, among other things, Yahoo Pipes. Pipes provides a very powerful, elegant mashup tool with an ease-of-use that neither Microsoft nor Google have been able to match.

There is still an awful lot of loyalty that can be won on the client side of technology - - especially in productivity and social networking areas - - and Yahoo may be a couple of subtle, but deft, moves away from scoring big there. Pipes, for example, is a nifty tool for combining feeds from any number of social networking sites like Twitter or Flickr (which Yahoo also owns.) But they don't appear to have always gotten the attention they could.

Combined with the Yahoo Open Strategy (YOS), which is geared toward making Yahoo's entire universe friendlier to developers, these are tools that allow the company to becoming increasingly relevant to innovators at a time when innovation will likely be the key to returning to a growth economy.

It is on Bartz' mind, too. In her last conference call with financial analysts, Bartz noted the potential: "And just as MySpace was extremely hot and then (momentum) moved over to Facebook, who knows what's going to come next and who knows whether Yahoo! can grab that property and be successful. So we have a lot going on. We are dabbling at it with YOS and other things."

It's not clear precisely how much revenue Pipes or Zimbra have brought to Yahoo to date, since the company doesn't break out its numbers that way in quarterly earnings reports. But when the market finds out "what's going to come next," they are tools that couldn't hurt.