So we're coming up on a year of Carol Bartz's tenure at Yahoo.  Bloomberg reports that she gives herself a B minus so far. 

B- or B+, whatever.  The fact that she and Yahoo are around for her to give herself grades at all is the most significant grade to be had. 

Cisco has acquired Rohati for an undisclosed amount and brought this team of former Cisco folks back into its embrace.  Their head-to-head battle is now over. 

When we look at the team still at Rohati we see mostly engineers, which may explain the many product awards they've won.  However, there is a conspicuous void in the VP Sales slot.  Understandable perhaps as they had Shane Buckley as CEO up until four months ago.  His background is sales, and he certainly could have been playing the role.  Rohati did briefly have a VP Sales though, a fellow named Colin Bastable.  He was only there four months in late 2008, but his description of the solution is less than complimentary. 

Tessera anounced Monday that CEO Hank Nothhaft was also taking over the Chairman slot.  Interesting to see them bucking the trend toward seperating the roles.  Hank's track record shows that he's a savvy executive, but these really are two different jobs.  There are good arguments on both sides of the split or not split question, but lately the split camp has been in the ascendant.  I wonder what is different about Tessera or the people involved that made them decide to move in the other direction. 

Of course, sometimes managing the board can be less work for a CEO if he or she is Chairman than if he or she is not.  One is not so much taking on a second role as formalizing what one is already doing and so making it easier. 

What in the world is going on over at Hands-on Mobile?  Glu Mobile has just announced that it has brought on Niccolo De Masi as CEO, after a six month long search.  This is the same Niccolo who just took over the CEO spot at Hands-on in a seemingly orderly succession from David White.  He had been hired at Hands-on as President 18 months before and I only say seemingly because the transfer apparently passed without any comment from the press folks at Hands-on. 

Seriously, who takes a CEO slot and then jumps to a competitor three months later?  More significantly who is the board that decides to take a flyer on a CEO that does that?  Perhaps they had been courting him since before October, but the time to make a decision was then.  It's not like he can have been surprised at anything he inherited from David White. 

For more juicy speculation, Cabana Mobile is the place.  We can only hope there is something more to this than meets the eye.  I'll add fuel to the fire only by noting that if you scratch De Masi hard enough you will find an M&A guy under the skin.  He first got connected with Monstermob as their investment banker, before he fronted a boardroom coup to oust the founder there, and before suffering the same fate himself

Meanwhile, David White has surfaced as the CFO at SolarCity.