By now, reporters and analysts who cover Yahoo have come to expect (and dare I say, delight in) CEO Carol Bartz’s colorful figures of speech and the occasional f-bomb drop during conference calls.

So Bartz’s tame delivery of Yahoo’s second-quarter earnings on Tuesday was a bit of a surprise. We know the 60-year-old is recovering from knee surgery, but was this even the same Bartz? The one who threatened to “dropkick to f–king Mars” employees who leak information to reporters? Or the one who asked the press to give Yahoo some “friggin’ breathing room” as the company figured out its next move? (Here’s a list of Bartz’s greatest hits).

By comparison, Tuesday afternoon was a bore, as Bartz stuck to a straight script. What’s more, she actually went so far as to compliment Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine that’s been pulling market share from competitors.

I think actually Bing is a good product. It actually extends sort of the experimentation around search and how people use it instead of just thinking like a standard blue link. I think they have done a good job. Unfortunately, it is only a month into it so it is pretty hard to understand whether it is just curiosity driving what is happening or they are actually going to gain share. I think Microsoft should be given kudos for Bing. I think they have done a nice job.

That’s got to be the in-the-works search deal talking, right?

Get ready for another big week of earnings, with Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo the highlights (at least in our world).

Interestingly, talk about both Microsoft and Apple has been pretty positive ahead of their quarterly results, despite the rancid economy. When it comes to Apple, whose stock has been among the best performers in tech this year, the chatter is about the new iPhone, which it launched in June to big fanfare.

“I think the key is that core consumer demand is there,” Hudson Square Research analyst Daniel Ernst said in a recent Reuters story. “There are lines for $400 phones. Clearly they’re well positioned, and when the PC market comes back, we believe they’re going to take significant share.”

As for Microsoft, quarterly results may not be so hot, but the company is lately benefiting from some upbeat buzz. Investors appear excited about the roll-out of Windows 7, talk has resurfaced about a possible deal with Yahoo (which also reports this week), and its search engine, Bing, seems to be making headway against Google.

Here’s how Todd Lowenstein, a portfolio manager at HighMark Capital Management, summed it up in another Reuters story. “There’s been a sentiment shift,” he said. “They’ve turned the corner in a lot of their businesses.”

We’ll know soon enough if so much optimism is justified. We could be witnessing a sea-change in technology, after IBM and Intel’s positive reports. But, then again, are we expecting too much? Are Microsoft and Apple setting up investors for disappointment? And what about Yahoo? Could negative comments from the web company about advertising prove a major setback?

Pay close attention. This is no week for the beach.

Keep an eye on:

• AOL’s Tim Armstrong is all over the media today, offering up bits like this in a series of interviews about the web company: “Advertisers are going to be driving to Internet Road and AOL is a major property on Internet Road.” (Reuters)

• The Boston Globe’s biggest union will vote today on a new contract — and it looks like it may be another close one (NY Post)

• Harry Potter shows no signs of slowing down, even at his age (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)

Some tech links to start the week:

I am seriously considering changing my byline to Zing, what with all the media attention a certain search engine is getting.

The New York Times looks at the ups and downs of turning brands into verbs. The jumping off point is Bing, Microsoft's effort at verbal one-upsmanship over Google, Twitter and over generic daily activities. The software giant must alter deeply ingrained computer habits to succeed. In the meantime, my original questions about Bing remain.

The more substantial news this week would be if Microsoft finally inks a search and advertising partnership with Yahoo Inc. It's not easy to overcome deal speculation fatigue -- it's been a year-and-a-half since Microsoft sought to acquire Yahoo outright, and a year since it dropped back to Plan B and sought out a more limited partnership deal. Boomtown reported Friday that Microsoft is down to a few short strokes away from signing.  Henry Blodget makes the point that Microsoft may have to pay up far more than the $1 billion it was offering a year back for such a deal.  Closing a deal now suggests renewed desperation on Microsoft's part after the paltry gain it received from Bing in June market share statistics for U.S. web search.

Beyond the personalities and the history that have kept Yahoo and Microsoft apart, there is the little matter of an advertising recession  that will delay any short- or medium-term rebound in either company's online advertising fortunes. AOL Chief Executive puts any resurgence in online advertising out to 2011 in an interview published by Reuters on Sunday.

UBS has published its quarterly survey of corporate technology spending intentions. The study of 100 U.S. and European CIOs finds these buyers slightly more optimistic about their budgets during the second quarter than they were earlier this year.  Among the more interesting findings:

• U.S. spending appears to be improving while European discretionary IT spending is declining.
• IBM and HP/EDS will take the lion's share of any increased spending by CIOs on computer service, while Accenture, CSC and Indian software services companies all stand to see far less.
• Only a handful of software companies can expect to see increased net spending in the next 12 months: Microsoft, SAP, Citrix and Oracle , to a far lesser degree. Out of favour are technologies such as security, software as service and voice recognition.
• Dell saw a big gain among buyers more likely to spend with it.  The Q2 survey showed 21 percent of buyers more likely to buy, up from 12 percent in Q1. UBS pins this increase on Dell's willingness to slash pricing.

The biggest surprise is the gulf emerging between the U.S. and Europe over plans to upgrade to the next version of Windows 7, due out in October, UBS finds. More than half of Europeans have no plans to upgrade to Windows 7, while closer to a quarter of U.S. buyers have yet to make plans. (Click to enlarge graphic)

(Images: Microsoft, UBS Research)

Media companies report their quarterly results during the next few weeks, time that should help us determine the state of advertising. Has it stabilized? Is it growing? Or is spending still trending down?

Google, which kicked off earings yesterday, probably isn’t a great bellwether. After all, it was held up better than almost any other media company during the recession. Still, the largest U.S. Internet search engine hasn’t been completely immune. Revenue was up in the second quarter, but only by 3 percent.

Google executives told analysts and investors on a conference call that they believed their business had begun to stabilize, but were unwilling to predict when a broader economic recovery would prevail.

A number of analysts were unconvinced that Google has overcome the worst of it. (Just look at the stock, which was off 3 percent right after the report).

As Signal Hill analyst Todd Greenwald wrote in a report today: “Management noted that the business “stabilized” in the quarter and that the worst of the crisis was behind them. While we agree that the overall environment did improve, we remain concerned by the dramatic deceleration in Google’s core business, and believe that future quarters may slow down further.”

What is bad for Google is probably terrible for the rest of the media business. Look at NBC Universal, for instance. Parent General Electric reported that the media division’s profit fell by 41 percent.

Where does it go from here? Media executives will likely paint the brightest picture possible in the coming weeks — just as they did last quarter. Then, nearly every one of them said during conference calls that advertising had steadied and spending was set to start picking up. Now, three months later, we’ll be able to judge the accuracy of those statements for ourselves.

Keep an eye on:

• Harry Potter is still huge. The movie brought in $104 million in worldwide during its first day in theaters, setting a new record (Reuters)

• And brace yourself… Kara Swisher reports that “unless there is some major glitch, there might finally be a search and online advertising deal struck between Yahoo and Microsoft.” (All Things Digital)

(Photo: Reuters)

The battle to build the best Internet search engine gets plenty of press.

But with the economy in the doldrums, the Internet giants are also engaged in a heated race to improve their advertising offerings.

Yahoo and Google, the top two search sites in the US, are rolling out new features and services designed to grab a bigger slice of the advertising dollars that businesses spend to hawk their wares.

On Monday, Yahoo unveiled a self-serve display advertising service which allows companies to create their own online ads.

The service is aimed at small, local businesses that aren’t served by the Yahoo sales team and the account managers that cater to larger advertisers. According to Yahoo, businesses using the new self-serve ad product can choose from more than 800 display ad templates to run across the Yahoo network of Web sites, and opt to pay on a per click or a per impression basis.

Meanwhile, Google plans to begin testing a new type of ad unit to better showcase products in the sponsored links that appear alongside search results.

According to an email that Google sent out to advertisers, posted on blogoscoped.com, the ads will feature product pricing and a product image.

A Google spokesperson confirmed that the company plans to test a method of showing “richer” product information in ads for shopping-related search queries. The test will only be visible to a small number of US users.

Last month Google lifted restrictions on placing trademarked terms in marketing copy of the text-based ads that appear alongside its search results, a move Google said would improve the quality of its ads.

Why all the activity? Internet companies are being forced to work harder for their money,  with spending on web ads under pressure. Once unthinkable, total online ad spending in the US actually declined 5 percent year-over-year in the first quarter. That was the first drop in online advertising since 2002, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Isn’t today the big big day for the transition to digital television? You can be forgiven for forgetting — in fact that’s just how the Obama administration wants it.

Ill-prepared back in February, when the U.S. was supposed to go all-digital all the time, the government decided to push back the switchover date by four months. Experts tell the Los Angeles Times that the delay should help avoid major problems, although about 2.8 million people could be left out in the cold when they try to turn on the tube.

The smart folks over at RPA, the advertising agency based in Los Angeles, put together of list of the markets that are best prepared — and those that aren’t. It cited data from The Nielsen Co, which has been studying preparations for the transition.

The best prepared areas, in order: Providence/New Bedford, Oklahoma City, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Ft. Myers/Naples and Hartford/New Haven. And the least prepared: Albuquerque/Santa Fe, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Sacramento, Seattle/Tacoma, Austin, and Los Angeles.

It could be a good weekend if you own an electronics store in Tacoma.

Keep an eye on:

• Yahoo has hired a new finance chief to help turn right the company — former Altera and General Electric executive Tim Morse (Reuters)

• Scribd gets a boost as Simon & Schuster agrees to add its 5,000 e-book offerings to the site (paidContent)

• Twitter may be struggling to figure out how to make money for itself, but it is already helping Dell chalk up millions of dollars in sales (Reuters)

(Image: Reuters)

Yahoo might not invent the next killer Web product. But the company wants surfers to be able to use  online applications, or “widgets,” without leaving the Yahoo kingdom.

In a blog post on Friday, Yahoo introduced a variety of new widgets from third-party Web developers that can be fused directly into Yahoo products.

The average person in the United States visits 85 sites a month, said Tapan Bhat, Yahoo’s senior vice president of integrated consumer experience in a blog post. “That just sounds exhausting. So we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we can ease the pain of site-hopping to help you do more things at once,” he wrote.

There’s a PayPal application that can integrate into a user’s Yahoo mail, as well as apps from personal finance service Mint.com and blogging tool WordPress which can be weaved into a person’s MyYahoo start page. Nearly 20 new widgets are now available for use in various Yahoo products, including a handful of apps for Internet enabled-TVs.

The move to open up Yahoo’s Web properties to widgets was actually begun during the reign of Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder who was replaced as CEO by Carol Bartz in January.

Friday’s announcement marks the first batch of widgets from marquee companies to be released under Bartz, who has repeatedly stressed that the key to Yahoo’s revival is in improving its diverse family of products.

Of course, Yahoo still has a lot of catching up to do with social network Facebook, which says it has more than 52,000 applications currently available in its Application Directory.

(Photo: Reuters)

Microsoft launches the first wave of the publicity campaign for its new search engine Bing tonight, with a prime time ad linking the recent financial chaos with small animals tapping on keyboards. At least that’s what it looks like:

The reasoning is questionable, but Microsoft won’t care as long as it gets people talking about its new product — which is fully available from today at www.bing.com — and ultimately gets them to utter the word ‘bing’ as a verb.

The first spot, made by ad agency JWT, is called ‘Manifesto’ and will hit in the middle of top shows such as CSI:NY tonight.

The worst-kept secret in tech was finally made public as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer lifted the wraps off the company’s new search engine: Bing.

The revamped engine, intended to take a bite out of Google’s dominance, is being rolled out over the next few days, with a full launch next Wednesday.

Here are a few screenshots to tide you over until then.

(Updated with more quotes)

If you're losing the game, time to change the playing field. Yahoo is counting on exactly that.

Ari Balogh, Yahoo's chief technology officer and product development czar, would be among the first to admit that Google reigns supreme in the search space.

"Search the way we know it, with 10 blue links, Google has clearly won that game. Saying anything other than that is just not stating the fact," he told the Reuters Global Technology Summit.

But Balogh says that doesn't mean Yahoo is giving up. Inviting comparisons to the automobile industry, now infamous for bankruptcy, ballooning debt and clunky design, Balogh says innovation in search is only just beginning, and it's too early to declare a winner yet. Ford and its Model T was once the pre-eminent mass-consumer vehicle, but today the once mighty Detroit giant -- the only one of the surviving Big Three that doesn't appear to be flirting with corporate failure -- has to fend off the likes of Toyota and Hyundai.

What's important to understand though is this really is like the auto industry in 1910....At that time, in 1915 or 1920, it sure looked like it was going to be Ford.

Because of the rapid innovation that's going on, because if you look at that search page, it is an anachronism. When has advertising ever been so ugly in the last 10, 15 years? When has the onus of sorting through a pile of stuff, that much of a pile of stuff, ever fallen on people to do themselves?

There is a long way to go.

So what will the next generation of search tools look like? Balogh says:

There will always be a search kind of like the 10 blue links, but how important that's going to be in the 3.0, 4.0 versions of where the Web's going really remains to be seen.

I believe search is going to be far richer. Search is going to be about getting that relevance in that intent flow -- whatever it is you're trying to do. And there's a whole other round or two to go in the search game and that's where we intend on playing.

Where else is Yahoo lacking? In social networking, Balogh says. But Yahoo is now ramping up both its look and its usability, focusing on helping users connect with news, with other people, and otherwise get things done.

That will entail remodeling its front page continuously, launching new features from fantasy sport applications to programs that aid movie selections, and making them useable on both the cellphone and the computer. The first features will be trotted out in the summer, Balogh says.

"We're going for the long play here."