Though the company’s fast-declining fortunes might suggest its endgame is either buyout or bankruptcy, things aren’t quite so dour–not according to Rubinstein, anyway. The commercial success that has so far eluded Palm isn’t unobtainable, he says, it’s just, you know…a bit farther off than than the company and its investors would like.

“I believe Palm can survive as an independent company,” Rubinstein told the Financial Times. “We have a plan that gets us to profitability.”

Sadly, Rubinstein didn’t provide much detail about the plan beyond the just-you-wait-and-see promises we’ve heard from him before. “[We're working] fast and furious on new handsets,” he said. “We do have a strong pipeline of products in the future.”

Rubinstein also noted that Palm (PALM) would consider licensing its webOS mobile operating system to other companies, given the right circumstances. “Of course we would licence webOS because obviously the more scale we get the more the benefit there is to us.”

Obviously.

But this, too, is something we’re heard from Rubinstein before. And without any insight into how such licensing deals would be structured or who might be interested in them, it’s tough put much faith in them.

To me, these claims, and some others made in this “upbeat” MarketWatch interview, read like simple posturing–the CEO of a foundering company positioning it for a sale with some always-look-on-the-bright-side-of-life proclamations. Conjure a vision of new killer handsets and lucrative licensing deals, do your best to breathe some life into the stock and hope for a good price when you’re finally up on the block.

Maybe I’m wrong. We’ll see.

The telecom equipment company’s shares are down sharply this morning after it reported Q4 results and trimmed its 2010 outlook.

For Q4, the company posted an adjusted operating profit for the quarter of 271 million Euros, about in line with Street estimates, Marketwatch notes. But revenue of 3.9 billion euros fell 20 percent, as carrier spending sagged and the company lost market share. The company also turned more cautious on 2010, asserting that while the sector should recover, it is too early to have a firm view on potential margin expansion. ALU now sees adjusted operating margin for the year of one-five percent; old guidance was for five percent.

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The atmosphere last Friday night at the Crunchies, an awards show hosted by three popular and often competing tech blogs–TechCrunch, VentureBeat and GigaOm–was downright buoyant, especially compared with last year, and had hints of IPOs in the air.

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That’s what Sony says it is trying to do with News Corp. and some of its publications. The partnership the two companies announced today won’t be nearly enough to make Sony’s Reader line competitive. But it does point in the direction both companies would like to head.

Dow Jones (which owns this Web site) will sell a version of its flagship Wall Street Journal for the Reader devices, as well as a “Wall Street Journal Plus” package that includes a second mini-edition of the paper to be published at the end of the day. Also on offer: A Reader-tailored version of the Marketwatch finance site and a subscription to the New York Post.

Sony (SNE) will have the only e-reader that sells the Post and the second edition of the WSJ. But that’s about it as far as exclusivity goes. The regular Reader version of the Journal looks to be the same one Amazon (AMZN) is already selling at the same price: $15 a month for the basic edition.

And even if you’re one of the people who loves to read a print paper on a handheld device, most of these offers don’t make a lot of sense for an e-reader.

The Post is a tabloid that’s pretty much designed to be consumed, then tossed away, in the course of a subway ride–and if you want to get it for free on the Web, you can do that too.

You can also consume all of Marketwatch for free on the Web, where it makes much more sense to do so, since that the site provides constant updates on…the market.

And given the Journal’s increasing emphasis on speed and breaking news, you’d think its paying subscribers would want the freshest copy possible. But the Sony Reader version is completely static.

So this is pretty much a symbolic deal, right? More or less, Sony CEO Howard Stringer told a press conference this morning. The big picture, he says, is that devices like the Reader are both a growth business for Sony and an opportunity for content owners to charge for stuff that has been free on the Web.

“The sense of losing control of our content is on all of our minds,” says Stringer, whose company is famously both a hardware manufacturer and an entertainment provider. “We’re trying to preserve the value of content in both movies and music and newspapers.”

That dovetails with News Corp.’s (NWS) big-picture plans, which CEO Rupert Murdoch has been has been hollering out at every opportunity: Pay up.

But there’s also a more practical side to the deal for News Corp., which wants to distribute its stuff on as many platforms as possible–and extract better terms than it gets from Amazon and its Kindle platform.

In November, Murdoch said his company was getting up to $6.50 for each $15 Journal subscription it sold via Amazon (AMZN), but noted that this isn’t enough. News Corp. and other publishers have also carped that Amazon keeps valuable customer data for itself.

The Sony deal offers better terms, said Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson, without getting into specifics: “I think you can assume that we’re getting a better deal and that our concerns about customer information have been addressed.”

Here’s the internal memo from Journal Editor-in-Chief Robert Thomson:

From: Thomson, Robert
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2009 11:25 AM
To: WSJ All News Staff; Newswires_USERS
Subject: Boston

Colleagues,
Today we told our team in Boston that we are closing the bureau in its present form. The economic background to the closure is painfully obvious to us all. An investigative function will remain in Boston, but the core reporting team will be disbanded, though all nine reporters affected will certainly be able to apply for openings elsewhere on the paper. Coverage of the Boston mutual fund industry will switch to the Money and Investing team and we are creating an enhanced New York-based education team.

Any such decision inevitably stirs apprehension and uncertainty, but there are no plans, nascent or otherwise, to close any other U.S. or international bureau. Meanwhile, the Newswires bureau and the MarketWatch team in Boston will remain at their present staffing levels.

That there has been truly great reporting under the generalship of Gary Putka out of Boston over many, many years is not in doubt. But we remain in the midst of a profound downturn in advertising revenue and thus must think the unthinkable.

Robert

“In 2004, as you may recall, we launched a slim version of PlayStation 2, a defining moment for that console, helping us to really expand the user base of PlayStation 2 further,” Sony Computer Entertainment Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai said at the Gamescom videogame trade show in Cologne, Germany. “Today is that day for PlayStation 3.”

And so, starting Sept. 1, the PS3 will be available for $299. That’s still well above Microsoft’s (MSFT) Xbox 360, which retails for less than $200 and Nintendo’s Wii, which sells for $250, but it’s a hell of a lot better than $399. And analysts say it will almost certainly spur demand for the console. “People were expecting this to happen. [Sony] had to do something,” MKM Partners analyst Eric Handler told MarketWatch. “This will bring some new customers to the fold.”

Indeed. But how long can Sony sustain such market share gains, when Microsoft and Nintendo are almost certainly mulling price cuts for their platforms as well?

Gone are the days of the silly clock-speed race, the megahertz myth, “performance per watt” war and the great AMD (AMD)-Intel dual-core PR shootout. Now Intel wants us all to know that while it’s still “inside” our PCs, it’s outside them in a variety of other ways as well. “Many people take for granted what we as a company helped drive,” Intel spokesman David Dickstein told MarketWatch. “We’re hoping that we’re not just known as a microprocessor company, but as a move-society-by-quantum-leaps company.”

Well, JMP Securities analyst Patrick Walravens’s assessment of Oracle’s business these past few months was about as wrong as wrong can be, wasn’t it? In early March, Walravens predicted the company’s February quarter would be an abysmal one. “Our due diligence suggests that the February quarter was, in some respects, the worst Oracle has experienced in over 15 years,” he said. “The tone of the commentary from our industry sources regarding new license revenue is the worst we have ever heard.”

Two weeks later the company posts better-than-expected results for that quarter and announces a dividend–its first ever. So much for Walraven’s worst-quarter-in-15-years prediction.

So what did the analyst have to say for himself in light of Oracle’s report? “It surprised me in almost every way,” he told MarketWatch. “[It] doesn’t square with what you hear from people in the industry.”

Well, it certainly doesn’t square with what we were hearing from you, Patrick…

Well, JMP Securities analyst Patrick Walravens’s assessment of Oracle’s business these past few months was about as wrong as wrong can be, wasn’t it? In early March, Walravens predicted the company’s February quarter would be an abysmal one. “Our due diligence suggests that the February quarter was, in some respects, the worst Oracle has experienced in over 15 years,” he said. “The tone of the commentary from our industry sources regarding new license revenue is the worst we have ever heard.”

Two weeks later the company posts better-than-expected results for that quarter and announces a dividend–its first ever. So much for Walraven’s worst-quarter-in-15-years prediction.

So what did the analyst have to say for himself in light of Oracle’s report? “It surprised me in almost every way,” he told MarketWatch. “[It] doesn’t square with what you hear from people in the industry.”

Well, it certainly doesn’t square with what we were hearing from you, Patrick…

Or at least, meet the placeholder Web site. The real one should launch in mid-March, says Greg Mason, who came to CBS via CNET and is overseeing the operation. He’s hired Eric Schurenberg, the former managing editor of Time Warner’s (TWX) Money magazine, to handle the editorial, which will focus on personal finance rather than general business news.

Mason is hiring additional folks in advance of the launch, including on-air talent; he wouldn’t divulge total staff size but I played the higher/lower game with him and I get the sense there will be something like a dozen people hired for the site.

Obviously, it’s an interesting time to be launching a finance-oriented site, and more on that in a minute. But what’s also interesting about MoneyWatch is that it’s a project dreamed up after CBS (CBS) bought CNET last summer for $1.8 billion. And it’s the first significant example of the broadcast network and the Web site integrating their operations, at least on the content side.

Right now, you can see the occasional CNET staffer showing up on CBS–I happened to glimpse Natalie Del Conte showing off flat-screen TVs for a bemused Harry Smith this morning–but not much more than that. And CBS folks don’t really contribute at all to CNET. But MoneyWatch talent is supposed to be a regular and important contributor for all of CBS’s news operations, as well as its radio stations.

Moonves never promised much editorial synergy when CBS bought CNET–it was really about adding a big piece of Web ad inventory to complement his old media assets. It will be interesting to see if there’s much to gain from an integrated operation here.

So: Why launch a personal finance site when everyone’s finances are being obliterated? Because that’s when everyone is acutely interested in personal finance, Mason argues. “Admittedly, it’s a little countercyclical,” he says, but argues that “CBS kind of figures that the economic crisis will be one of the big stories for the next 18 months.”

Fair enough. But there is plenty of competition out there chasing those same stories. Every major business news site has a personal finance component, and there are plenty of standalone personal finance Web sites out there already–and their traffic hasn’t increased during the meltdown.

The one exception here seems to be something called WalletPop, which is owned by AOL and which I’d never heard of prior to writing this story. Mason hadn’t heard of it, either, but somehow its traffic spiked up last summer, and it now commands more than 10 million uniques a month, per Comscore (SCOR).

Here’s a traffic chart that includes WalletPop vs. competitors SmartMoney.com, Kiplinger’s and MainStreet.com (click to enlarge):

And one that doesn’t:

And then there’s the bigger question: Even if you can get eyeballs, what do you do with them after that? As I’ve previously noted, at least one survey of finance Web sites estimates that revenue is down by as much as 30 percent this quarter, for mostly obvious reasons.

But let’s tackle one thing at a time: Convincing consumers to pay attention to money stuff instead of hiding in a dark room and rocking back and forth (that’s my strategy, at least) will be tough enough. Maybe by the time MoneyWatch figures out that trick, the ad market will have crawled back.

One of the first things Carol Bartz said when she made her public debut as new Yahoo CEO was that everyone should give the company “some friggin’ breathing room.”

Some heard “frickin’,” while others heard “frackin’.”

Whatever the exact invective Bartz used, the tough talk was presumably designed for maximum impact to impose a definitive I’m-in-charge-here leadership style that had been sorely lacking at Yahoo for a long time.

Bartz has been employing the creative curse word a lot of late, trying to shape up Yahoo as Tom Hanks–playing the grumpily drunk but effective coach Jimmy Dugan–did to the Rockford Peaches in “A League of Their Own.”

But she is certainly going to need a lot more than that kind of mental mojo to get the company going.

And, more importantly, to convince Wall Street that she can cure what has been ailing Yahoo (YHOO) as it announces what will likely be a dismal fourth-quarter earnings report tomorrow.

“I’ve been passively abused for a year now by Yahoo management and I am in no mood to be aggressively abused by them, unless there is some concrete strategic plan soon,” said one major investor.

Well, the abuse might continue a little while longer, as Bartz gets the dubious honor of delivering what most expect to be even weaker results and perhaps worse guidance for the upcoming quarter.

That’s why, if BoomTown were to guess, to focus attention away from the bad news, Bartz seems like the type to unveil some sort of meatier plan this week, including cost cuts and some serious trimming of Yahoo’s businesses.

Bartz has, in fact, been meeting with most top execs over the last two weeks, with no entourage (except her assistant, Judy) and little formality, asking a lot of questions and apparently trying to gauge executive talent.

One exec told me that he expects this will result in a lot more management turmoil over the next few month, with multiple goodbyes–with some departing due to their loyalty to former CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker, some due to not having the perseverance to live through a wrenching turnaround effort and some due to the fact that they should simply be let go.

Not surprisingly, some inside Yahoo relish this, while others do not.

“Carol has been cutting through the BS like a knife,” said one Yahoo insider, who admires her forthright manner.

Said another who does not, calling it too brash: “She is like a buzzsaw who just wants to cut without knowing a lot of what the impact will be.”

(Ironically, Buzzsaw is an “on-demand collaborative project management solution” offered by Autodesk, the software company that Bartz ruled for 14 years until 2006.)

She certainly has to get up to speed. While her hands are clean, with the weak economy and continuing internal turmoil, Yahoo’s financial quarterly report tomorrow is going to be a mess.

According to estimates from MarketWatch, Yahoo will report about $1.4 billion in revenue, up two percent, earning 13 cents a share for the quarter. That’s down from last year’s 15 cents and down further from the year before’s 19 cents.

That’s not exactly the direction one would hope for.

Display advertising, which is Yahoo’s dominant business, is expected to show the worst performance, with its search business stronger.

Still, search is not exactly considered to be Yahoo’s buoy in tough times or for the future, which is why analysts will likely focus on Bartz’s thoughts on a search deal with Microsoft (MSFT).

The last time she was asked at a Yahoo all-hands meeting, Bartz noted that her “gut” told her that selling might not be such a good idea. Of course, this was said exactly as Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock was meeting with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to discuss such a deal.

Other questions high on the list should be about cost-cutting, defining what Yahoo’s core business is and, of course, what she will do about the long discussions her predecessors had been having with Time Warner (TWX) over merging with its AOL online unit.

One thing that everyone I have talked inside Yahoo has said is that Bartz has been asking a lot of questions about all this and more since she arrived.

This is a good thing.

But while she asked–let’s be honest, demanded–some breathing room, after tomorrow is out of the way, the only thing investors and employees will want is some answers, and quickly.

Until then, here’s that great video scene from “A League of Their Own” about no crying in baseball:

Whitman has been increasingly active in the Republican party since retiring from eBay in January. She initially spent her time helping raise money for Mitt Romney, her former boss at Bain & Co., in his failed presidential campaign. More recently, she has been helping run Sen. John McCain’s presidential bid. She was a contender for the VP slot before McCain selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

On Tuesday night, Whitman all but announced her candidacy for governor of California at the Commonwealth Club.

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Ironic because in Silicon Valley–the capital of early-technology adopters and the bleeding-edge users of all things geek–actual sightings of the device are quite rare.

Most of the digerati around here are still obsessed with Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) latest 3G iPhone, which still draws lines wrapping around the block. By contrast, the Kindle is so scarcely spotted that whenever tech analyst Rob Enderele uses his, little crowds tend to gather around him.

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At least that is what investors learned by reading the New York Times, in an odd culmination of events that started last week, after Apple (AAPL) reported its second-quarter earnings and an analyst gently asked about Jobs’s health on the conference call.

Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer’s reply that Jobs “has no plans to leave Apple” and that his “health is a private matter” did nothing to assuage investors’ fears that the legendary CEO could be ill again, based on his gaunt appearance at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June and renewed media speculation last week.

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