Google (GOOG) is barging into the business of computer operating systems—via Chrome, due next year. Microsoft (MSFT) is vigorously defending its turf–via Windows 7, its new operating system due in October. Simultaneously, Microsoft is striking at the heart of Google, via Bing. “We should have been earlier in search,” said CEO Steve Ballmer two weeks ago in France when asked to name his greatest regrets over the years.

We may be at a tipping point in tech. The spending will rise. So will the sparring. And as the sparks fly, have you noticed? Google and Microsoft both seem to be doing their own searching…to answer that most basic business question: Who am I?

Ballmer riffed on this question, actually, at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. I did an  on-stage Q&A with him there (you can find details and video clips by searching “Ballmer” on Postcards‘ homepage), and afterwards, I followed him to a meeting with the Cannes “Young Lions.” These are rising-star marketers and creative execs age 3o and under. One of them asked: “What does Microsoft stand for?”

Ballmer seemed to love the question. “This is a real debate inside Microsoft,” he replied. “It’s rumored that we’re going to open retail stores,” he added, and then he surveyed the Young Lions about whether it would be wiser to call the stores “Microsoft” or “Windows.” Ballmer suggested that “Microsoft” means “software company” and “well-run business.” What does “Windows” mean? “Access” and “guide to technology,” he said.

Ballmer didn’t get what he hoped for in this mini-focus group. The young stars of the ad universe appeared evenly divided on the ideal name for the prospective retail outlets. Microsoft’s chief ended the discussion by asking: “How many people here use Macs?” Most in the room raised their hands. “Biased!” Ballmer bellowed.

For what it’s worth, we’ll likely see in October what Microsoft can do retail-wise. The company is mum on its plans, but it’s a pretty safe bet that stores will open this fall, accompanying the Windows 7 marketing onslaught. Retail is a gamble; except for Apple (AAPL), consumer tech giants have stumbled. Managing conflicts with existing retailers, like Best Buy (BBY), is tricky too. Moreover, who would bet that Microsoft, which has never oozed sex appeal or product-intro pizazz, would be good at this game?

Then again, Microsoft is redefining itself–or trying to, at least. To command its retail drive, the company recently recruited a heavy-hitter: David Porter, previously head of worldwide product distribution at DreamWorks Animation SKG (DWA). Before the movie gig, Porter spent 25 years at Wal-Mart (WMT).

One of the smartest takes on consumer tech retailing is a story that Fortune ran in 2007: “Why Apple is the best retailer in America.” It’s worth reading again.

The ideal career path may be: reaching the top of the corporate world, then taking time off for family when your kids need you most, and then jumping back into a primo job at a top-tier global company.

Impossible in this dreadful economy? Here’s someone who’s done it. Remember Jeanne Jackson? At Gap (GPS) in the 90s, she built Banana Republic and then went to help Wal-Mart (WMT) take Walmart.com from start-up stage. But after leaving Wal-Mart seven years ago, Jackson was out of the big game, except for board gigs at McDonald’s (MCD), Nordstrom (JWN), and Nike (NKE).

She’s back. Actually, I follow these Most Powerful Women (and Jackson was one, on our annual list a decade ago), but the announcement four months ago that she landed at Nike–as President, Direct to Consumer, reporting to the CEO–was so low-key that I’d missed it. A few days ago, I spotted Jackson’s name and Nike title on the participant list for our upcoming Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. I popped her an email. We talked yesterday.

“I made a commitment to my family,” Jackson, 57, told me, explaining why she had dropped out for so long. Since 2001, when she joined the Nike board, Jackson actually had talked on and off with chairman Phil Knight and CEO Mark Parker about joining the company. But not until this year, when her son graduated from high school and her daughter accepted an internship in London, at Burberry, did she decide to jump.

She didn’t think the jump would be to Nike first thing. “I thought I’d do something related to private equity,” says Jackson, who has been quietly running her own private equity/consulting business, MSP Capital, out of Newport Beach, California for the past several years. She expected one of the companies she backed “would speak to me.” But nothing did. (Along with “some spectacular failures,” she says, she scored a couple of hits, including Pure Digital, which sells the Flip camera and recently was acquired by Cisco.)

As the global economy tanked, she felt ever more drawn to the thing that she has focused on throughout her career: strong brands. Says Jackson, who was at Disney (DIS) and Victoria’s Secret early on: “In this economy, consumers default to strong brands.” Now, in this new role that Nike CEO Parker created for her, she oversees the company’s global retail holdings. That includes some 3,500 franchised Nike stores, more than 600 wholly-owned Nike and Cole Haan stores, and five e-commerce sites. Some $3 billion in revenues annually travels through these “direct to consumer” channels.

And despite the global meltdown, Nike is performing well. Revenues reached $19.2 billion in the year ended May 31. Profits fell 21% after five years of 20%+ annual growth, but investors have stayed with the stock: It’s up nearly 40% in five years, while the S&P has dropped 20%. The world’s largest athletic shoe and apparel marketer, Nike has smartly reduced spending and layers of management, while selectively adding key talent like Jackson.

Of course, she’s contending with the retail slowdown–Nike too has cut new-store expansion. But in some ways, Jackson is returning to the sort of thing she did inside Gap and Wal-Mart: playing entrepreneur inside a corporation. Last week, she opened the first Hurley/Converse/Nike store, in Orange County, California. The Hurley brand is for surfers and skateboarders and other cool kids. Converse, she says, has particularly broad appeal–from high school kids to musicians to “my mother-in-law, who is 87 years old and wears Converse.”

The family dynamic–usually a complication when executives, especially women, return to big jobs–is alright for Jackson. At least until her son heads off to SMU this fall, she’s commuting from California to Oregon, where Nike is based. Husband Doug, a retired airline pilot, is flexible and always has been. “I could take any job and he would just relocate,” Jackson says. (He has his own passion: cars. He owns the Batmobile–one of four built in 1966 for Batman on TV.)

Jackson, meanwhile, has simplified her business extracurriculars. She quit the boards of Nordstrom and Harrah’s Entertainment, as well as Nike. The one board she’s staying on: McDonald’s. After all, you can never get enough lessons in smart retailing.

by Patricia Sellers

As speculation ever swirls about Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) joining forces to give Google (GOOG) a better run for its money in search, one party in the on-and-off  negotiations has been notably evasive this week. “If we ever have a deal with Microsoft, it will be announced publicly and until we do, we have nothing to say,” declared Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz at the company’s shareholders meeting yesterday in Santa Clara, California.

A world away in France, one day before, I did an onstage interview with Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, And of course I asked him about the likelihood of a deal with Yahoo. Some industry watchers have speculated that the early success of Bing, Microsoft’s new search venture that debuted June 1 (and in less than a month boosted Microsoft’s share of U.S. search results pages to 12% from 9%, according to comScore) makes a Yahoo deal less essential–for Microsoft, at least. Here, in this excerpt from our Wednesday conversation in Cannes, Ballmer suggests that’s not necessarily so…

Sellers: For every share point that you gain in search thanks to Bing, by what percent does that decrease the need to do a deal with Yahoo?

Ballmer: Have you ever heard of a more back-handed way of asking the question than that?  Oh my God… (He waits for audience laughter to die down.) OK, I’m going to try this one time. First of all, we have no interest in acquiring Yahoo.  Can I…? I’ve said that 88 times. I’ll say it the 89th just to make sure it’s clear.

I have said, and I will continue to say, we remain open to a partnership with Yahoo. I think the thing that advertisers. probably more than anything else, appreciate is: When you have two players that are fairly low-share, sitting in an advertiser’s shoes, you have to decide how many of the “search engines” do you bid on and how many key words do you bid on per platform? More people, more advertisers bid on more key words on Google than on Yahoo or Microsoft–even more dramatically outside the U.S. than in.

Forget the economic side to that story, it also affects the product.  The more relevant ads the search engine can serve up, the more relevant the whole page looks. When your average consumer looks at the search page, they don’t just say, “I’m going to look at the algorithmic results.”  They look at the whole page, including the ads.

So, I will tell you, I have a friend who rents apartments–mostly to American tourists. She rents apartments in Paris. If I wasn’t her friend, she would not submit bids. In the old days of 8% share–this goes back a year–she wouldn’t probably bid on our system. She’d only bid on the market leaders. So now somebody types “apartments in Paris for rent. And they’re going to get the relevant ad on the market leader. And they may not get the relevant ad on Yahoo or on Microsoft.

So a partnership makes sense, not because of technology just. Or business just. It makes sense because I think we can provide a better product through scale to our users based upon the kinds of interactions we have with advertisers. I want every bid on every key word that every advertiser in every part of the world would put on Google, I want on our system. As much not just for the revenue, but as much for the value in terms of the relevance of our offering as anything else.

So, am I open to a partnership with Yahoo? We remain open to a partnership with Yahoo.

Sellers: So what’s the likelihood that there will be a partnership in the next year?

Ballmer: Who knows?  Who knows?  I can…

Sellers: Carol Bartz wants “boatloads of money.” Don’t you have, like, almost $30 billion of money in cash?

Ballmer: We’ve got shareholders who want to make sure we take good care of it.

– Thanks to Joshua Glasser and Jessica Shambora for additional reporting.

“I believe, this is my own marketing philosophy, that you degrade your brand value if you’re saying, this is not worth but half. At some point people go, ‘I guess it’s not really worth what they charge.’ ”

– Rick Hendrie, senior vice president for marketing at Uno Chicago Grill, in Wednesday’s New York Times. Uno Chicago Grill, currently offering a $9.99 pizza meal deal, is embroiled in a discount showdown with competing chain restaurants like Ruby Tuesday (RT) and DineEquity’s (DIN) Applebee’s. But even if the chains, which grew rapidly in recent years, can ride out this economic storm, they may find they’ve done irreparable damage to their pricing power. –Jessica Shambora

I had breakfast this morning with an old friend, Scot Safon, a fellow Wahoo from UVa Class of ‘82. He’s now chief marketing officer of CNN. We both work for Time Warner (TWX) now (and we both think we have the best jobs in the world, even as our jobs get harder everyday).

Scot, who lives in Atlanta, was here in New York this week because he’s on the board of Promax, an association for marketing and promotion execs in the entertainment industry. And Promax had its annual confab at the New York Hilton.

Scot told me this morning about a talk by Jim Margolis, whom he introduced at the powwow on Wednesday. Margolis, a senior partner at a political advocacy and advertising firm called GMMB, was a top strategist on Obama’s Presidential campaign.

“I studied 18 different Presidential marketing campaigns in 2007 and 2008, and I found every one interesting,” Scot told me over breakfast. “But the Obama campaign rewrote the rule-book in so many ways.”

Margolis laid it all out–creating a movement around the brand, grassroots organizing, social networking–in a case-study presentation called “Obama for President: The Campaign that Changed Everything.”

What really struck this crowd of marketing pros, though, was Margolis’s main message, which he illustrated by showing a video of Barack Obama speaking. If Margolis hadn’t noted that the clip was from the 2004 Democratic National Convention, most people would likely have assumed it was President Obama speaking today. The point: Brand consistency is everything.

Why did Barack Obama become President against all odds, and why are his favorability ratings still high? His message and his values have stayed consistent for five years. Great marketing starts with the product and a consistent brand.

Good to think about as I head to the Cannes Lions International  Advertising Festival in the south of France. (Goodbye, soggy Manhattan!) I’m interviewing Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer — the Lions’ Media Man of the Year — on stage there next Wednesday. What should I ask him? Let me know!

by Patricia Sellers

You might call Al Koch the world’s biggest trash collector. As bankrupt General Motors (GM) splits into two parts — New GM, containing Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick, and GMC, and Old GM, containing designated bad assets such as Pontiac, Saturn, Hummer, Saab — Koch is the hired gun who’s supposed to create value from that latter lot.

Bringing “New GM” out of bankruptcy will be difficult enough. Why would anyone take the tougher slog at “Old GM”?

This is what Koch does — the toughest turnarounds. He’s vice chairman at restructuring consultancy AlixPartners, which works on saving sick comapnies globally but has been a Detroit mainstay for decades. AlixPartners’ clients have included DeLorean’s creditors in 1984, Detroit (the city itself) in 1994, and Kmart in 2002.

Koch, now 67 and a 14-year veteran of the firm, has served as interim CEO of crippled companies such as video-game distributor Handleman (HDLM) and manufactured-home builder Champion Enterprises (CHB). But his most memorable job was at Kmart in 2002. Kmart was the largest retail restructuring in history and, as it turned out, one of AlixPartner’s big successes.

As Kmart’s interim CFO through its bankruptcy, Koch got lucky. When I interviewed him in late 2005 for a story about investor Eddie Lampert, he said that he and his restructuring-expert colleagues had never heard of this young investor who had swooped in and bought Kmart bonds at 40 cents on the dollar. “To most people, Kmart looked like a pile of trash,” Koch said. “We were told that this hedge fund guy had bought a huge portion of Kmart and wanted to get it out of bankruptcy fast.”

Lampert pressed Koch and the other restructuring pros, who were earning $10-20 million a month during Kmart’s bankruptcy, to exit Chapter 11 quickly. Lampert argued that neither customers nor management talent would be attracted to a bankrupt Kmart. The company emerged from bankruptcy in May 2003, a year ahead of schedule. Lampert, who had invested some $800 million for a 54% ownership stake, merged Kmart with Sears two years later to form Sears Holdings (SHLD).

Old GM won’t be as smooth or as quick as Kmart was. As my colleague Alex Taylor notes, “new GM” will have an incentive — from the U.S. government, new owner of a 60% stake –  to exit Chapter 11 rapidly, possibly in 60 to 90 days. The Old GM restructuring, meanwhile, could take years.

As Old GM’s chief restructuring officer, Koch will be negotating separation agreements with New GM and commandeering efforts to unload or liquidate those dud brands such as Saturn and Hummer.

His influence could turn out to be broader than his marching orders designate. After all, he’s worked with GM several times over the years. These past few months, he’s helped negotiate the sale of New GM assets to the government. Now he’s reporting to CEO Fritz Henderson and to GM’s board as well. As a guy who lives and dies by finding value in junk, Koch surely won’t take his shot at making history lightly.

Defining a brand and sticking to it is always difficult. Particularly in a downturn.

Which is why the success of Bravo – the NBC Universal cable network that serves up food, fashion, beauty, design and pop culture to upscale audiences – is all the more impressive.

This morning, I went to Bravo’s “upfront” presentation, where NBCU’s Lauren Zalaznick, who built the network, and her team pitched their new season and their growth story: a 38% year-to-year rise in adult 18-49 TV ratings, bigger gains online, and 97 new advertisers, including AT&T (ATT) and McDonald’s (MCD) and BlackBerry (RIM), in the past year.

Sales chief Susan Malfa noted that Bravo’s “affluencer” audience (the network claims to have the most upscale and educated viewers in cable) is “fairly recession resistant.” So she says, but don’t you think that investors in Saks and Coach and other beaten-down high-end brands would wonder about that?

Here’s the thing: Bravo’s success derives, really, from brand consistency that other marketers could learn from. The network’s unscripted programming – primarily, cutthroat creative competitions like Top Chef and over-the-top docudramas like Real Housewives of Orange County – are pure escapism. That escapism syncs with boom times but may resonate even more during times of crisis like we’re in right now. Among the new shows on Bravo’s let’s-deny-the-downturn slate: NYC Prep, which follows six privileged kids who attend private school in New York City, and Miami Social, a lush-life version of Friends set in Miami Vice territory.

Double Exposure, another new show that Bravo previewed this morning, features backstabbing fashion photographers. It looks as loud and annoying as CNBC’s Jim Cramer (another over-the-top character in General Electric’s TV cable stable). The new Bravo program that might appeal to business folks: Design Sixx, about entrepreneurs Bob and Cortney Novogratz, who have six kids (now seven, since the show’s filming) and make their living buying, rehabbing, and selling homes to rich people. Great people, the Novogratzes – I know them, though not well, since Bob is the brother of Jacqueline Novogratz, the CEO of Acumen Fund, and of Mike Novogratz, the president of Fortress Investment Group (FIG). (See Jacqueline’s Guest Post about her investing in to help the poor in Asia and Africa.)

Bravo also announced today that it’s branching out into scripted programs. More escapism – what else would it be? One show is called Blueprint, about best friends, one straight and one gay, who run an architecture and design firm in Manhattan. The other is 30 Under 30, which tracks the interconnected lives of 30 young people who have been christened superstars by a hot magazine (Fortune?!).

And scheduled to launch next week, April 20: Bravo’s first iPhone application. The Real Housewives: Personal Favs app will be city shopping guides with recommendations by Bravo talent including, yes, those Real Housewives of the OC, Atlanta, New Jersey…and who knows where else that brand can travel?

As for NBC Universal, the boss, CEO Jeff Zucker, told me this morning, “It’s not as bad as it could be.” The local TV news business is “a disaster,” he admitted. But Universal’s movie business has held up surprisingly well, he said. And NBCU’s cable channels – including USA Network and SciFi and MSNBC, as well as CNBC and Bravo – are a much-needed growth engine for struggling GE (GE), which reports first-quarter earnings on Friday. Stay tuned, as they say in TV land.

P.S. Did you catch my boss, Fortune managing editor Andy Serwer, on The View this morning?! Andy was on with Joy and Whoopi and the gals to talk about Fortune’s cover story, How to Get a Job. He named two companies that are hiring: Wal-Mart, (WMT), which added 33,000 jobs last year alone, and HCA, the Nashville-based hospital giant. An HCA exec who was in the show’s audience said that 9,000 jobs are available there. Hard to believe!

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Another powerful woman called last week to tell me she’s opting out. “I’m going to do what I want to do rather than what I need to do,” said Julie Fasone Holder, Dow Chemical’s (DOW) SVP and chief marketing, sales and reputation officer

It’s the trend lately. If you’ve been checking into Postcards regularly, you’ve read about my conversations with high-ranking women choosing the good life vs. the grind. Susan Arnold quit the presidency at Procter & Gamble (PG) with not a clue what she’s going to do next. Former Pepsi-Cola (PEP) North America boss Dawn Hudson phoned a couple of weeks ago to say that she’s going to work for a consulting firm three days a week. That gig leaves four days for tennis, golf, family, and board duties. Hudson chairs the LPGA and is on the Lowe’s (LOW) and Allergan (AGN) boards.

And now here’s one of Dow’s top women execs joining the parade. A 34-year Dow veteran, Fasone Holder had planned to quit next year, once she hit the 35-year mark. But when Dow acquired Rohm & Haas – a $16 billion deal that just closed – her bosses wanted to move her into a new post, and she decided now was the right time to go. “My husband retired five years ago,” she says. “He’s been living the good life. And I’ve been working my butt off.”

Now, at 56, what does she want to do? She doesn’t know exactly, but like many women who have climbed high in business, she says, “I’ve had a nice career and now I want to give back. How crazy do I want to go in that space? I don’t know. Do I do something in Kenya or Zimbabwe?”

Via a sustainability project, which Dow started in January and she oversees, Fasone Holder has met some not-for-profit pioneers, including Jacqueline Novogratz, whose Acumen Fund backs entrepreneurs who help the poor in Asia and Africa. (Read Novogratz’s Guest Post, “Building value in the developing world.”) “I don’t know whether my passion extends to Africa,” Fasone Holder says. “There’s need everywhere.”

Indeed. Yesterday on Postcards, in “The job crisis strikes top talent,” I mentioned that not-for-profits don’t seem to be doing a very good job recruiting the high-end talent that’s suddenly available. Nicole Russell, an ace communications consultant looking for work, has found volunteer work difficult to line up. What a missed opportunity!

If she doesn’t turn her talent to non-profits, Fasone Holder says she may join Heidrick & Struggles’ (HSII) new Chief Advisor Network. The recruiting firm launched the network a month ago to place out-of-work execs inside companies that are seeking temporary help. Says Fasone Holder: “It could be an interesting way to work without the stress.”

Well, there’s stress in all work – even in these situations where an exec, through the Heidrick program, goes into a company as a special advisor or interim leader to work on a turnaround or restructuring or special project. But Lauren Doliva, the Heidrick partner who is leading the Chief Advisor Network, notes that it meets the needs not only of companies that seek flexible solutions but also people who want flexible solutions too. “Many executives prefer a ‘portfolio’ lifestyle that will allow them to have personal flexibility, while still contributing,” she says.

Flexibility is a luxury, particularly in these stressful times, and I realize that not everyone can do what Susan Arnold and Dawn Hudson and Julie Fasone Holder are choosing to do. But if you can find flexibility and still have a career, good for you. I’m looking for examples. Please let me know if you’ve found a smart way to keep your career on track and have that flexibility at the same time.

P.S. For more job tips, read Fortune’s current cover story, How to find a job.

by Patricia Sellers

Dawn Hudson spent more than a decade chasing stretch goals at PepsiCo (PEP). She headed sales and marketing at Frito-Lay, the consumer giant’s snack unit. She led marketing at Pepsi-Cola North America and ascended to CEO of that $5.5 billion business.

That job turned out to be Hudson’s ceiling inside PepsiCo, where chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi has put her own stamp on the company. Hudson (who ranked as high as No. 41 on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list in 2007) left Pepsi in January of last year. Since then, headhunters and others have wondered what big job she’ll land next.

It took Hudson 14 months–of silence, self-reflection, and ducking press inquiries—to decide that her new gig will be at….drum-roll…a firm you might not have heard of: the Parthenon Group, a Boston-based strategic advisory outfit. She’ll be vice chairman, working just three days a week.

What gives? Like a lot of women–and men too lately–who have come close to reaching a pinnacle in business, Hudson, 51, decided that shooting for bigger and bigger jobs is simply too stressful. And not worth the price.

“I was neglecting life,” she says about her time in the Pepsi pressure-cooker. “It took six months for me to realize that there’s some great life out there to be lived.”

Not that she’s idled these past 14 months. She serves on the boards of Lowe’s, the home-improvement retailer, and Allergan, whose restorative medical products range from breast implants to Botox to Refresh eye drops. Hudson got her own shot at reinvention as soon as she exited Pepsi: She stepped up to chair the LPGA–and then whittled her golf handicap to 12, from 15.

A serious athlete ever since her Dartmouth days, Hudson played in five competitive tennis leagues and a golf league–yes, simultaneously–at one point during her time off. “I transferred my 24/7 work ethic to sports,” she says, adding that she paid for it. She developed plantar fasciitis, or heel spurs. “I played through it.”

Her onetime boss, former PepsiCo CEO Roger Enrico, gave her the best advice about rerouting her career: “Roger said, ‘Whatever you do, you’re going to do passionately. So make sure you join a group of people who you really want to spend time with.’”

And Ann Fudge, a former top exec at Kraft Foods (KFT) who later headed Young & Rubicam Brands (and now sits on the General Electric board), was also helpful. “As her career progressed, she fought the urge to overload herself at the expense of her family and personal time,” Hudson says. “Ann told me that you have to follow your gut, take a deep breath, make the call to say no to something. And if it turns out to be the right call, you’ll wake up in the morning with a great sense of relief and satisfaction.”

That’s what Hudson did–but only after considering opportunities in consumer goods and retail. She says she came close to taking the top job at one large company owned by private equity. “But then I thought, what’s really going to be different this time?”

Parthenon appeals to her, she says, because she’ll have the chance to work with lots of companies in lots of areas–strategy, marketing, IT–and reach beyond business too. Parthenon has a philanthropy practice, and she plans to help the firm build a sports practice as well. She’ll start at Parthenon in a month or so. First things first: She promised to take her 11-year-old daughter (the younger of two) skiing in Colorado, and she’s taking “a mystery trip” with her husband, Bruce Beach, who wants to surprise her. (She’ll find out where the trip is when she gets there.)

So much for Hudson’s spot on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list. Does she care? Hardly. “I’m in control now,” she says. “It’s a different definition of power.”

P.S. Hudson perpetuates the trend: Powerful women are opting out. Procter & Gamble (PG) president Susan Arnold quit her post two weeks ago, one day after she turned 55. Arnold needs to “decompress,” she told me, before she even thinks about what to do next. Former eBay (EBAY) Meg Whitman left business to run for governor of California. (She’s hardly decompressing, though! Read my current Fortune cover story.)

And three execs who used to be the most powerful women on Wall Street–Citigroup’s (C) Sallie Krawcheck and Morgan Stanley’s (MS) Zoe Cruz and Ellyn McColgan–are all without jobs now, while Erin Callan, the Lehman Brothers’ CFO who landed at Credit Suisse, is taking a leave of absence–supposedly to ease her stress. What do YOU think? Will women rise again when the business world gets out of crisis?

Tech companies are rethinking their identities. IBM may buy Sun Microsystems. Cisco (CSCO) is moving into the server market, and also mightily into the consumer space. The latest move by Cisco CEO John Chambers–whose family reportedly owns eight Flip cameras–is a buyout of Pure Digital Technologies, which sells those ultra-simple videocameras. (I love mine.)

Powerful people are busy rethinking their identities too. My  last two stories in Fortune are about ex-CEOs reinventing themselves. One is on the new cover story: Former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman is putting her all–including $50 million in personal funds, she ventures to guess–into the race to be California’s next governor. (The Golden State, the sickest state in the nation by many measures, needs reinvention too.)

Before Whitman, I profiled former Viacom (VIAB) CEO Tom Freston, whom we call “The Most Wanted Man on the Planet.” We’re being a little facetious, but since Freston got ousted by the media giant’s octogenarian chairman, Sumner Redstone, in 2006, he’s been in high demand and having the time of his life. Freston is helping Oprah Winfrey start her new cable network, OWN. The first lady of TV is busy recreating herself too.

Bad times are good times to redefine yourself. I recently had dinner with Jim Donald, the former CEO of Starbuck (SBUX), who got fired by chairman Howard Schultz early last year. Schultz retook the reins as CEO and is struggling. (Who would want his job?!) Donald is enjoying his unemployed life. He’s on the speaking circuit, teaching a class at the University of Washington, serving on boards, and is being wooed by Bill Ackman, the activist hedge fund investor, to help him fight for seats on the Target (TGT) board. (That’s a messy matter that Donald might best avoid–my opinion, for what it’s worth.) Meanwhile, Donald has gotten in serious physical shape. He recently won his age group, 50-54, in the Northwest Indoor Rowing Championship. Fame is fleeting, though. The ex-CEO of Starbucks just turned 55.

Others too are deciding to hang it up at that age. Two weeks ago, on the day after she turned 55, Procter & Gamble (PG) president Susan Arnold quit her job. She essentially took herself out of the running to succeed CEO A.G. Lafley (Bob McDonald has long had the edge). Judging from the chat I had with Arnold on that day P&G announced her move, I think she’ll be out of the corporate game for a while. The boss who was No. 7 on Fortune’s 2008 Most Powerful Women list wants to regroup. (See “Why P&G’s president quit.”)

Reinvention is clearly the trend. Last weekend in Arizona, when I was mini-vacationing to escape the New York stress, my hiking guide was a former lawyer who quit the rat race to lead mountain treks. This guy said he’s never been happier than he is now. Two nights ago at a Most Powerful Women dinner, I heard about one lawyer who just became an acupuncurist and another who turned herself into an entrepreneur. She’s selling her inventions on HSN.

This weekend, think about your life. Don’t leave what you love. But figure out who you are and what you really want to do. There’s less shame than ever in losing your job–in failing. Life is a trampoline. Use it to rebound. - Pattie Sellers