Analysts asked the question time and again after Ms. Bartz delivered Yahoo’s financial results to Wall Street for the first time since becoming chief executive earlier this month.

Time and again, Ms. Bartz said she had not yet made up her mind. If anything, Ms. Bartz suggested that breaking off the search business would not be easy and that any decision would not come soon.

“It is my job to make sure that as a company we look at anything that makes sense long term for the company and creates shareholder value,” Ms. Bartz said in a conference call with analysts on Tuesday. “So yes, everything is on the table.”

But she added: “This is not a company that needs to be pulled apart and left for the chickens.”

While Ms. Bartz delivered Yahoo’s mixed financial results, the fourth quarter was the end of Jerry Yang’s turbulent 18-month tenure as chief executive.

Yahoo swung to a loss during the quarter, as sales declined slightly because of weakness in the online display ad business. The company also recorded a number of one-time charges. But cost-cutting efforts, including sizable layoffs, helped Yahoo top analysts’ expectations for profitability. And the results were in line with forecasts Yahoo had made three months earlier.

“Delivering on profitability expectations is a real achievement in this environment,” Ms. Bartz said.

Yahoo reported a net loss of $303 million, or 22 cents a share, compared with a profit of $206 million, or 15 cents a share, a year ago. Yahoo said it incurred $108 million in charges related to severance of employees and $488 million in write-downs of some of its European assets.

After adjusting for those and other charges, Yahoo said it had a profit of $238 million, or 17 cents a share, up from 13 cents a share a year ago, and above the 12 cents a share expected by analysts.

Yahoo said that its revenue of $1.8 billion was down about 1 percent from $1.83 billion a year ago. Net revenue, which excludes commissions Yahoo pays to advertising partners, was $1.37 billion, down from $1.4 billion a year ago, and in line with analysts’ estimates.

Some investors were bracing for worse, and Yahoo’s shares rose about 5 percent in after-hours trading, after the company’s report, to $11.93. Yahoo shares closed the regular trading session at $11.34, up 17 cents.

“They didn’t bleed as much as the very bearish side feared,” said Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst with Wunderlich Securities. “I don’t think this is a quick fix and the economy is going to add headwinds to that.”

Yahoo’s results reflected the continued shift by marketers toward forms of advertising that deliver immediate and measurable results. Search advertising, which marketers use to attract customers to their sites, grew about 11 percent, while display advertising declined about 2 percent.

Those results suggest that other online publishers that rely heavily on display ads, including AOL, are likely to suffer as well.

“Yahoo’s display business is very indicative of what is going on in the display advertising business,” said Ross Sandler, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets.

Yahoo warned that it would continue to face tough times. Its outlook for the current quarter calls for revenue to fall 5 to 16 percent. The company did not provide forecasts for the full year, saying that the deepening recession made it too difficult to predict demand from advertisers.

“There is so little visibility on the long-term forecast for advertisers,” Blake Jorgensen, Yahoo’s chief financial officer, said in an interview. “We are really being cautious for the rest of the year.”

The persistent questions about Ms. Bartz’s willingness to sell Yahoo’s search business made it clear that investors were likely to continue pressing her to consider more decisive measures to reverse Yahoo’s slide and prop up its depressed share price.

Analysts also asked about her willingness to merge Yahoo with the AOL Internet unit of Time Warner or to sell certain assets. Ms. Bartz declined to answer.

“There may be some investor disappointment that we will not get a quick answer on all the big strategic questions,” said Marianne Wolk, an analyst with the Susquehanna Financial Group. “I think those are all under consideration. If there is any insight at all, it is that it may not be easy to unplug parts of these businesses.”

Ms. Bartz had time for a dig at her would-be partner, Microsoft, whose chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, has repeatedly said he would like to reach a search deal with Yahoo. She said that Yahoo, while lagging far behind Google in search, had three times as much market share as the “next player,” which is Microsoft.

That was a slight exaggeration. According to comScore, Yahoo accounted for 20.5 percent of all searches in the United States in December, while Microsoft accounted for 8.3 percent. Google leads the market with 63.5 percent of searches.

Last week, Google reported that its net revenue jumped 25 percent in the fourth quarter.

Philip W. Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Beginning this week, three of the four major music labels — Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group — will begin selling music through iTunes without digital rights management software, or D.R.M., which controls the copying and use of digital files. The fourth, EMI, was already doing so.

In return, Apple, whose dominance in online music sales gives it powerful leverage, agreed to a longstanding demand of the music labels and said it would move away from its insistence on pricing all individual song downloads on iTunes at 99 cents.

Instead, the majority of songs will drop to 69 cents beginning in April, while the biggest hits and newest songs will go for $1.29. Others that are moderately popular will remain at 99 cents.

The music companies are hoping that their eagerly awaited compromise with Apple will give a lift to digital downloads. They will be able to make more money on their best-selling songs and increase the appeal of older ones.

And with the copying restrictions removed, people will be able to freely shift the songs they buy on iTunes among computers, phones and other digital devices.

Technologically sophisticated fans of digital music complain that D.R.M. imposes unfair restrictions on what they can do with the tracks they have bought. For example, the protected files from iTunes do not work on portable players made by companies other than Apple.

“I think the writing was on the wall, both for Apple and the labels, that basically consumers were not going to put up with D.R.M. anymore,” said Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, a market research company.

Music industry watchers widely applauded the move and said it could help digital music sales, which have shown signs of slowing down just five years after Apple introduced iTunes.

In particular, lower prices for some songs could spur consumers “to buy deeper into the catalog, and expand their relationship with digital music,” said Russ Crupnick, an analyst with the NPD Group.

The music industry could use a lift. Sales of CDs fell 20 percent last year from 2007. About 2.4 billion songs were bought on iTunes in the last year, aided by Apple’s expansion into international markets. But that was not nearly enough to make up for losses in traditional retail stores.

Industry pundits have long pointed to D.R.M. as one culprit for the music companies’ woes, saying it alienated some customers while doing little to slow piracy on file-sharing networks.

Apple has been campaigning against D.R.M. at least since February 2007, when the chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, wrote an open letter criticizing the software. Apple reached a deal with EMI that year to offer music without the copying restrictions.

But it could never reach the same agreement with EMI’s larger rivals. Sony, Warner and Universal allowed other online music services, like Amazon’s MP3 Store, to sell unprotected music, but they withheld it from Apple. Their goal, industry analysts say, was to try to strengthen online rivals to iTunes, which they viewed as having a dangerous level of control over their business.

“Apple definitely wanted to remove D.R.M. from music, but the record labels would not allow them to renegotiate their licensing agreements, because they wanted to help competitors succeed against Apple in the market,” said Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a consulting firm.

Apple, for its part, appeared to resist variable pricing, fearing it would amount to a price increase for the most popular tracks on iTunes, which constitute the bulk of sales on the service. It has also said the consistent 99-cent price made things simpler for buyers.

It is not clear what broke the impasse, but the deteriorating economy may have put pressure on music companies.

“For the major labels, it was clearly time for them to accelerate becoming digital music companies in a macroeconomic environment that is downright frightening,” said Greg Scholl, chief executive of The Orchard, a digital distributor of music from independent labels.

The compromise gives the recording industry new leverage over their online music sales, Mr. Scholl added. They can start to sell new tracks at the higher price, then gradually drop prices to keep sales moving. Labels could also experiment with bundled packages of songs and even special editions at higher prices.

Harry Wang, director of mobile product research at the consulting company Parks Associates, said, “They aren’t going to get a huge amount of money from this new arrangement, but in an ailing music industry, anything that can provide more money will be better than the status quo.”

Apple said customers would be able to pay a one-time fee to strip copying restrictions from music they have already bought on iTunes, at 30 cents a song or 30 percent of the album price. ITunes customers can achieve the same effect by burning all of their music to a CD and then reimporting the music into the iTunes software, although this reduces sound quality somewhat.

The company also said that its popular iPhone would be able to download songs from iTunes over wireless data networks like AT&T’s. Previously, iPhone owners had to either attach the phone to a computer or connect to a local Wi-Fi network.

Apple reported the changes in iTunes at its keynote presentation at the annual Macworld conference in San Francisco, given by Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing.

Mr. Jobs was not at the event, after disclosing this week that he had a treatable hormone problem that had resulted in significant weight loss over the last year.

SAN FRANCISCO — This Christmas, the titans of the personal-computer industry are finding big lumps of coal in their stockings, and a few are grumbling that it’s Intel’s fault.

Of course, it’s been a bad holiday season for just about everyone – the National Retail Federation expects the weakest holiday sales gains in six years – but it’s particularly bad for computers.

Not only has the U.S. economy tumbled into a deep recession, but the rest of the world has fallen in too, ruining the tech industry’s overseas growth story. If U.S. consumers are hesitant to drop a few hundred dollars on a new PC, how do you think buyers in developing economies like Brazil are feeling?

There is one relatively bright spot in this gloomy retail season: the “netbook,” a device resembling a laptop that’s been shot with one of those cartoon miniaturization guns.

The typical netbook weighs 3 pounds, has a 9-inch screen, offers a wireless Internet connection, runs Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) Windows XP and has an Intel chip inside. Oh, and it costs less than $400.

I know what you’re thinking. A laptop for less than $400? What’s wrong with that? If you’re Intel (INTC, Fortune 500), not much.

Intel is the company that probably has the most to gain since the most popular netbooks carry Intel’s new Atom chip. Atom is smaller, cheaper to produce, and more power-efficient than Intel’s mainstream fare, making it an ideal cornerstone for a low-cost laptop.

With this in mind, Intel encouraged the emergence of the netbook segment by selling Atom chips to upstart companies like Acer and ASUS, and allowing the resulting netbooks to be sold in tech-savvy markets in Europe and North America. (Originally, Intel planned to target poorer countries.)

Is Intel worried about cannibalizing sales of higher-end laptops? Not really. Intel executives say that, if anything, Atom-based netbooks seem to be luring buyers who otherwise would have bought laptops with low-cost chips from rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, Fortune 500).

But Intel customers like Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500) and Dell (DELL, Fortune 500) aren’t so thrilled. Unlike the Taiwanese companies that are embracing netbooks, HP and Dell are frustrated with the low margins at the low end of the business, and are focused on creating clever designs and software that entice consumers to pay more – a strategy that Apple has successfully executed in the past.

“There’s no money to be made at $400,” one marketing executive said recently. “Consumers might be hungry for a deal, but these are not great machines.”

To the big-name brands, bare-bones Atom-based netbooks are a plague. They may be popular, but they are pushing industry heavyweights toward a price war, something they’ve worked hard to avoid for the last few years.

Silicon Valley executives privately talk about PC price wars as a race to the bottom, where companies vie to put out the cheapest, barely functional product while managing not to lose money. As one CEO described it: “It’s like a crap-eating contest. Who wins: the one who eats the most, or the one who eats the least?”

For now, the big names are trying to eat the least. Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) is staying away from netbooks entirely; CEO Steve Jobs has said he’s unwilling to compromise quality to satisfy the bargain bin.

Todd Bradley, the chief of Hewlett-Packard’s PC division, has said he’s only interested in profitable growth; rather than push bare-bones netbooks, his team is trying to fast-track a premium model developed with input from designer Vivienne Tam.

Dell is selling its Inspiron Mini 9 netbook direct only, a venue that maximizes profits.

Will that work? The latest numbers released by research firm IDC show peronal-computer unit sales up but revenues down – a sign of the netbook effect. If that continues, PC makers will be tempted to bring bigger appetites to the crap-eating contest.

After all, if people no longer trusted their banks, why would they trust some start-up with their most private financial information?

As it turns out, interest in these sites is up, not down. Burned by their banks and the stock market, people seeking help with budgeting, saving and investing are turning to sites with names like Mint, SmartyPig, Cake Financial, Wesabe and Credit Karma.

“There is a significant loss of confidence with banks right now,” said David Furlonger, a vice president at the research firm Gartner, who studies the financial services industry. “People are turning to whatever communities they think are best able to serve them.”

Visits to online personal finance sites are up threefold over last year, said Jim Bruene, founder of the trade publisher Online Financial Innovations, and many of the sites say they have grown quickly since the crisis worsened in September.

Mint, which tracks users’ financial accounts and creates budgets, has 630,000 registered users, a quarter of whom have joined since the fall.

“The worse the news was, the more people started using Mint,” said Aaron Patzer, founder and chief executive of the company, which is based in Mountain View, Calif. “People realize they need to get a better handle on their money.”

The economic crisis is hitting Web start-ups particularly hard, causing cash shortages, layoffs and, in some cases, bankruptcy. Finance sites are, of course, vulnerable to these threats, and not all will survive. But they are hoping that once the crisis recedes, the customer base they are building now will linger.

Money-tracking sites like Mint, Wesabe and Quicken Online pull financial information from the accounts of users and analyze it with graphs showing, say, how much money they spend in restaurants compared with how much they are saving for retirement. On social investing sites, including Cake Financial, Inner8 and Covestor, people rely on other members for investment tips.

Other sites solve narrower pieces of the financial puzzle. PearBudget walks users through creating a budget with an online spreadsheet application. Credit Karma lets people check their credit scores free as often as they want, and track and discuss their progress in improving them. On SmartyPig, users share savings goals with friends, and the site withdraws money from their checking account each month.

The biggest challenge for these sites has been earning the trust of wary Internet users.

The sites use security measures like encryption and are certified by Web security firms. But Mint users who want the site to consolidate information from their online banking and investment accounts must entrust it with their passwords. Other sites involve frank discussions of one’s net worth and debts (although anonymity is allowed).

The risks did not discourage Holli Buck, 38, an administrative assistant in Canton, Mich., who turned to SmartyPig in November after she was laid off from her third job in 11 months. She is using the site to save money for an online copywriting class so she can freelance.

“Because of the crisis, I actually felt more comfortable than if this were some big bank,” Ms. Buck said. “With everything that’s going on with banks, I’m not ready to give them my money. This Web site makes me feel safer.”

Xavier Shellman, 27, a student in Asbury Park, N.J., said she trusted SmartyPig because it sends her Twitter updates and has a Facebook page. “There’s someone there; it’s not just some banker somewhere making millions of dollars with your money,” she said.

Personal finance Web sites are almost as old as the Web. Banks began offering their customers online banking a decade ago, and the dot-com bubble brought successes like Financial Engines and failures like MyCFO and Mortgage.com.

The older sites offer articles, financial planning advice and interest rate comparisons. The new ones use Web 2.0 tools to help people analyze their financial situation and swap investment ideas.

“It’s the wisdom of the masses,” said Michael Healy, 33, a recruiter in San Francisco who discusses investments on Cake Financial. Marc Hedlund, co-founder and chief executive of Wesabe, said: “Oftentimes you don’t want to talk about stressful financial issues with your friends. Online, you can come in an anonymous way, talk about the things you’re struggling with and get feedback.”

There are holdouts who still depend on tools like Excel and the PC version of Quicken to manage their finances. “I tend to be pretty protective of my personal finance information,” said Trent Hamm, 30, who writes The Simple Dollar, a personal finance blog, from Des Moines. “To me, it’s not worth that risk.”

If these sites are to go mainstream, they will have to persuade people like Mr. Hamm to sign on. Some have affiliated themselves with banks to demonstrate that they are backed by an established institution. The money saved on SmartyPig in the United States, for example, is held by West Bank of West Des Moines, Iowa.

Persuading people to keep coming back can be difficult, too. “My biggest fear is that if it’s always bad news, month after month, that at one point people just don’t want to know how much money they don’t have,” Mr. Patzer said.

To encourage return visits, Mint is unveiling a new feature in March that grades the financial fitness of users in 12 categories, like late payment fees on credit cards and retirement savings.

Though the financial crisis has bolstered visitor numbers, it has strained revenue. Cake Financial was forced to do two rounds of layoffs this fall and is just starting to generate revenue. SmartyPig, Mint and Wesabe have revenue but are not yet profitable.

Venture capitalists are betting millions on the notion that financial help on the Web can be profitable. Mint has raised $17 million from Benchmark Capital and the angel investor Ron Conway, among others. Mr. Conway also invested in Cake Financial. Wesabe has raised $4.7 million from a group including Union Square Ventures and Tim O’Reilly, the technology publisher.

Many of these sites earn some money through advertisements from financial firms. An October report from the research firm Forrester predicted that despite the recession, spending on Web marketing by financial institutions would double by 2012.

Yet revenue for many of the start-ups comes mostly from referral fees earned when customers successfully sign up for new credit cards or checking accounts. Though more people are clicking on such offers, fewer are getting approved.

The start-ups hope that when the economic climate improves, the hunger for financial guidance will persist.

“Human nature didn’t change in September,” said Mr. Hedlund of Wesabe. “They’re still going to have trouble managing their money.”