So it’s official, Meg Whitman is to leave after 10 remarkable years (sullied by some mishaps of late.) As Youssef Squali, an analyst at Jefferies, puts it: "She will be remembered as one of the best CEOs of the dotcom [period], who made it successfully through the bubble and the nuclear winter."

This also means a broader reshuffle. Rajiv Dutta may have been passed over for the top job (see note below) but he’s clearly been made John Donahoe’s number two with the new title of executive vice president and Donahoe’s old job of running the marketplace division. One-time contender Bill Cobb is out, and will retire from the company at the end of the year.

Meanwhile Donahoe has decided to reset the bar, with a prediction that eBay’s revenues will grow by only 12.5 per cent this year. That is shocking - revenues were up nearly 30 per cent in 2007. It suggests that much more is going on than a tinkering with eBay’s fee structure, a move that had already been in the air, and that the fundamental model on which eBay has functioned is now under scrutiny. After three years trying to revive the marketplaces business - with only modest success - Donahoe seems to have decided that something far more drastic is needed.

Update: extra details revealed on the analyst call this afternoon showed the slowdown isn’t quite as severe as it seemed. Leaving aside the effects of the falling dollar and acquisitions, revenues in 2007 grew only 21 per cent. But this is still a big adjustment to the eBay model. As eBay lowers its listing fees (and sees the volume of listings rise), much rides on a better search engine to sift out the best goods at the best prices from the sellers who give the best service. Promises from eBay in the past to improve the quality of search have been a disappointment.

"The subtext of this show is that the internet has won."

So declared Intel executive vice president Sean Maloney when I met him for breakfast at the ungodly hour of 7am in Las Vegas today.

To which the obvious response is: Well, up to a point.

As at other recent Consumer Electronics Shows, bringing internet services and content into the consumer electronics realm has been a big talking point at this years’ event. Sharp and Samsung showed off TVs that can draw content straight off the internet, no PC required. Microsoft added some more partners for its Xbox Live video marketplace.

Yet given how big the expectations -and the hype - have been, this seems very little to brag about (and anyway, doesn’t viewing weather forecasts from USA Today on your Samsung TV somehow feel very 1992?)

Robbie Bach, Microsoft’s top consumer honcho, was putting a diplomatic face on things when I met him later. He pointed out that the big TV networks are all trying out ways of distributing shows online, even if they can’t agree yet on a business model, and the movie studios are releasing more titles, even if they generally still feel safer for now with the familiar video-on-demand model rather than download-to-own.

Privately, other senior tech industry executives I’ve spoken to in the last couple of days have been far more sceptical than him. According to one, all the heat surrounding the Blu-ray / HD-DVD format war shows that Hollywood is looking the wrong way: it should instead be rushing to build an online distribution business as fast as it can, before it is overtaken by the same fate that has befallen the record labels.

It seems fitting that the biggest buzz at this year’s show has surrounded Pansonic’s 150-inch TV and Sony’s ultra-thin OLED screen (the same model that went on sale in Japan late last year, though in only very limited numbers.) Perhaps you’re too cheap to pay $2,500 for an 11 inch TV, but these are still the dream screens that the consumer electronics industry believes you should be aspiring to. Only, don’t ask whether they come with a USB port on the back.

The consumer electronics industry’s big annual bash in Las Vegas got off to its usual start on Sunday evening - a speech from Bill Gates, boss of a company that still often seems to be struggling to locate its own consumer gene.

Gates’ CES speeches (this will be his last) are a useful reminder of just how many eggs Microsoft has in the consumer basket. No matter if HD-DVD has all but lost the next-gen DVD format war, Microsoft is also pushing ahead fast with Xbox Live Marketplace, a venue for selling downloadable video (some cynics, in fact, claim that this is where its real long-term interest lies and it only ever saw HD-DVD as a diversionary tactic to try to stall Sony’s Blu-ray.)

To coincide with CES, Microsoft issued a deluge of fresh data about its consumer businesses. But what do all the numbers really add up to?

Windows Vista. 100m licences in the first year. This compares with 67m licences in the first year of XP - but then, there are many more PCs around now. Consumers certainly didn’t take quickly to Vista. The new Aero interface was meant to produce a "wow" effect but that was quickly drowned out by problems with incompatible device drivers, insufficient machine memory, and other glitches. With a de-bugged service pack release due soon, though, Vista’s early bad press should eventually fade.

Xbox 360. 17.7m sold to date. A good headstart in the next-gen console race. But the Wii shows no signs of slowing down, and the apparent defeat of HD-DVD gives the (Blu-ray enabled) PS3 a much-needed boost.

Xbox games. 1.6m copies of Mass Effect sold in the first six weeks, and plenty of buzz among Xbox’s core users. Finally, a game to stand alongside Halo?

Zune Social. More than 1.5m registered users. That’s not a bad start for the social networking play that is meant to do for the Zune player what Xbox Live is starting to do for the console. That’s no replacement, though, for actually selling the hardware. Tellingly, there were no numbers on how many Zunes were sold over the holidays.

Beijing Olympics. 3,000 hours of exclusive online video from NBC will be powered by Microsoft’s Silverlight. That will be a great showcase for a technology that is fighting it out with Adobe’s Flash player. However, the joint NBC/ MSN site for the Olympics will carry adverts that are sold and served up by NBC, so no success here in extending Microsoft’s online advertising reach.

… it would crash repeatedly for no obvious reason, refuse to restart until you rebooted the engine, then lock you out until you simultaneously pulled the handle, turned the key and yanked on the radio antenna.

OK, so this was originally a joke told at Microsoft’s expense, but it also points to a truism about a development process widely favoured in the Valley: ship products before they are ready, then rely on rapid improvements to bring them up to scratch. Now it seems that Silicon Valley upstart Tesla Motors is doing its level best to keep the old joke alive.

The electric car company set up by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk (we profiled him earlier this week) has been struggling for some time to produce an advanced transmission for its hotly anticipated sports car. Rather than put off the launch of its first vehicle yet again, it has now opted for a familiar Valley alternative: a beta version.

This is how new Tesla CEO Ze’ev Drori explains it in a blog post this week:

To help speed delivery of cars, we will begin production in 2008 with an interim transmission design. These transmissions will meet high standards for reliability and durability, but the car will not meet the original performance spec for acceleration, reaching 60 mph in 5.7 seconds instead of the promised 4 seconds. When the final transmission is ready, we will retrofit all cars, at Tesla’s expense, to meet the promised performance specifications.

Valley luminaries like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who top the Tesla waiting list, shouldn’t mind - they know all about putting out products before they are ready (In fact Google Product Search, formerly known as Froogle, is still in beta after more than five years, which must go down as some sort of record.)

Wal-Mart has the shelfspace to make or break a new DVD release, but its attempt to take that power to the Web has just bombed. The mega-retailer quietly closed its video download store in the run-up to Christmas. So underwhelming was the service that its failure is only just getting noticed.

Leaving aside Wal-Mart’s own particular failings, this is another sign that the movie download business has been going nowhere fast. Earlier this week we reported that Apple’s iTunes store will soon be trying out a new approach, offering movies from News Corp’s 20th Century Fox studio for rental.

A second feature of the Apple/ Fox deal looks even more intriguing: besides slotting it into a DVD player, people who buy a traditional movie disk will also be able to rip a (DRM-protected) copy of the movie to their iTunes collection, then watch it on an iPod. For Apple, this is a great way to suck more content into the iTunes ecosystem from what remains the dominant channel for movie distribution. For Fox, it’s a great way to add more value to a DVD ("Watch this film on your TV and your iPod!")

This all highlights once again the lack of appeal for mainstream consumers in movie downloads. Even those who feel comfortable plugging into an online service and paying full DVD prices are left with a digital file that they’ll have difficulty transfering to the TV screen. Without significantly lower prices, it’s an idea that seems to be struggling.

There’s a natural tendency in US business, when things go wrong, to reach for the lawyers. Now, the tech industry can also reach for the regulators.

Microsoft’s momentous loss before the European Court of First Instance in September always seemed likely to open the flood gates for other claims. As we wrote at the time, PSI, a mainframe computer maker that had already been battling Big Blue in the US courts, was an obvious candidate to turn to Brussels for redress.

That has now happened. PSI accuses IBM of "refusing to supply interface information relating to mainframe computers and refusing to license third parties." Opening up the mainframe platform, were it ever to happen, could have big repercussions for IBM, whose profits are still reputed to rest heavily on the technology most closely associated with its name.

Like last week’s complaint against Microsoft from browser maker Opera, this one is really asking the European regulators to test the limits. Does the EC want to get into the business of prising open all (dominant) closed technology platforms? Where does it draw the line? It’s hard to see Brussels wanting to take this fight to many new fronts, but that is where the logic of the Microsoft ruling points.

The ‘"is" at the beginning of Facebook’s status updates (as in, "Joe Bloggs is at work") has long been the social network’s equivalent of Apple’s one-button mouse: A nagging design feature that makes sense to a small group of devotees but infuriates nearly everyone else.

Facebook originally conceived of the status update as a way for users to relay timely messages like "Sally is at the gym" or "Billy is heading to the concert," rather than more general statements like "Billy likes U2." Users never really saw it that way, though, and their efforts to circumvent the dreaded "is" resulted in a long list of grammatical and stylistic shenanigans.

As recently as six weeks ago, the unofficial word was that the "is" wasn’t going anywhere. But on Thursday, advocates for self-expression (and fans of the English language generally) woke up to an early Christmas present: The "is" is now optional.

Facebook’s decision to bow to users over the status update followed a retreat over the site’s controversial Beacon advertising system last week. Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, "is eager to show that Facebook takes user feedback seriously."

LinkedIn, the business networking site, on Monday gave the world the most detailed glimpse yet of its forthcoming application platform, which will be rolled out over the next few months.

Seeking to capitalise on the success of Facebook’s platform strategy, LinkedIn’s platform will do two things: First, like Facebook, it will allow outside developers to build applications that live inside the LinkedIn site. Second, it will allow outside companies to embed LinkedIn data in their own applications. The results could be interesting, as Eric Eldon of VentureBeat writes:

With this platform, it’s easy to imagine LinkedIn data appearing within Salesforce and Oracle business software, along with these [companies] creating modules that feature information from their software within LinkedIn. The result of this sort of integration: You’d automatically see valuable business connections as you’re working.

Because of its exclusive business focus, successful applications on LinkedIn may have difficulty gaining traction on other social networks where users place a greater emphasis on games and entertainment. Still with 16m business users, LinkedIn is already a big and potentially lucrative market in its own right. With Facebook rumoured to be working on ways for users to distinguish between social and work relationships, and with individual companies examining ways to take advantage of social networking technologies to encourage better communication between their own employees, further distribution opportunities may not be far behind.

(Maija Palmer in London writes:)

Indian IT services companies have been trying to break into the European market for years. Despite their patient pitching for contracts, and small strategic acquisitions, potential customers in countries like France and Germany have been reluctant to embrace their offshoring models. Many industry observers have been expecting the Indian companies to make a big acquisition - like buying Atos Origin - to establish themselves. Now however, it looks like there could be another way - football.

Satyam, one of India’s five largest IT outsourcing companies, has signed a multimillion dollar contract to sponsor the FIFA World Cups in 2010 and 2014. It is the first time the company has sponsored any sports event on this scale.

Rama Raju, co-founder and chief executive, says the World Cup gets a better audience than the Olympics and could be particularly powerful in building awareness in Europe, which accounts for around 23 per cent of Satyam’s revenues.

The company is even considering drafting in Zinedine Zidane to help woo the recalcitrant French.

It’s seems worth a shot. Even at multiple millions of dollars, the FIFA strategy is a lot less risky than buying and - more to the point - trying to integrate Atos Origin.

Gangs of professional cyber criminals may be targeting a computer near you. That is just one of the messages contained in this week’s year-end wrap-up from F-Secure, the IT security specialists. F-Secure says their virus lab detected more than 500,000 pieces of malicious code this year, up from 250,000 last year.

But the trade in viruses, trojan horses and other sneaky programmes isn’t just getting bigger - it’s also getting more sinister as gangs of organised computer criminals have come to dominate the trade in viruses, worms, and other computer bugs. As F-Secure writes:

There was a great deal of volume seen during 2007. Malware authors are producing variants in bulk. Genuine innovation appears to be on the decline and is currently being replaced with volume and mass-produced kit malware. But while new techniques weren’t developed — the existing techniques were refined and adapted for much greater effectiveness. There are some very dangerous faces in the big crowd.

Like their cousins, the spammers, this new breed of cyber-criminal is drawn not so much to the technical challenges of writing malware, but to the financial returns. Hence their newfound interest in Apple, whose growing market share this year has made it a target of professional hackers. With the launch of Apple’s iPhone, one can only expect the shenanigans to continue as hackers look for ways to target it and other internet-enabled mobile phones.

All this is set to add up to a lot more work for the virus researchers whose job is to keep on top of the hackers’ latest exploits. "The situation is getting worse for sure," says Patrik Runald, an F-Secure researcher. "I see the next couple of years being a test of endurance."