Notes from the field: Robert X. Cringely is keeping tabs and the count is now Geeks 1, Hollywood 0. The game to which he refers, of course, is being played out at Yahoo, where CEO Terry Semel just relinquished the helm to founder, and geek, Jerry Yang. “Talk around the water cooler is that Yahoo has a big red ‘Acquire Me’ sign on its back,” Cringe reports in Yahoo’s your daddy? “Look for Microsoft, Google, News Corp., or some other corporate monolith to line up with their knives and forks, ready to carve out a slice.” Columnist’s corner: It might not be the first of the bigwigs to embrace Web 2.0 technologies, but by unveiling three major collaboration and social networking tools — Quickr 8.0, Lotus Connections and IBM Infor 2.0 — Big Blue lends gravitas to the Enterprise 2.0 trend. “My advice is to skip a few stages and figure out how to accommodate social networking and collaboration into your IT architecture now,” Ephraim Schwartz explains. “If you can’t, well, now that Big Blue is in the game, get out your checkbook; there’s always IBM Global Technology Services.” Careers: Responding to Marc Andreesen’s ‘How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with’, Nick Corcodilos says that the three criteria Andreesen lays out “matter much, much more than any others,” in Manhole covers don’t cut it. Those are drive, curiosity and ethics. “But there’s a catch to his approach: It requires a savvy interviewer. A manager who is highly motivated, curious, and ethical. That’s where you start. Companies that have a problem with that will have a problem hiring.” The news beat: California’s Attorney General Jerry Brown says that Microsoft will make ‘significant changes’ to the search functionality in Windows Vista. With its new iProcess Suite, Tibco links BPM to SOA. And McAfee sends Total Protection 2.0 into beta testing. Technology Industry