Time Inc.’s Fortune magazine–which never met a list it did not like to make–had a solid group of women tech types on its “50 Most Powerful Women 2009” roster, the annual survey that it posted yesterday.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz made the Top Ten this year, clocking in at No. 8, along with a lot of other tech-savvy women in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

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Here come more tech earnings this week, as investors hope the industry can help goose a still shaky economy.

But while the tech industry is healthy, relatively speaking, they probably should not hope too hard to be soaring anytime soon on Silicon Valley’s digital flying carpet.

In other words, down is still the new up.

In any case, on deck this week: IBM, Yahoo, Apple and Microsoft.

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BoomTown is not going to go all servers and Solaris on you, as I am leaving the complicated details of the collapsed IBM bid for Sun Microsystems to Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski to sort out.

But I wonder if every failed tech merger with a squabblefest and a board in chaos will now be accused of blowing it, as most think Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang did in rejecting the $41 billion buyout offer from Microsoft.

And former Netscape CFO Peter Currie certainly has his hands full–he is on the Sun board and also just signed up to be the financial adviser to Facebook, after it abruptly parted ways with its former CFO.

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About three weeks ago, BoomTown surmised that the they’re-practically-giving-them-away prices for some prime but distressed tech companies–combined with cash hordes by stronger players–would eventually result in some acquisition activity sooner than later.

One combination I flagged most prominently, based on several sources, was that IBM would try to grab Sun Microsystems.

And today, The Wall Street Journal reported that that was indeed the case. Such a deal has been long rumored in Silicon Valley, so I wasn’t the first to suggest such an obvious move, and these talks come as a surprise to very few, which would rescue the long-declining Sun and give heft to IBM’s Internet aims.

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About 10 days ago, BoomTown posted a piece titled, “With a King’s Ransom in Cash, Why Is There Still No Buying Spree in the Tech Space Yet?”

Noting the big cash hordes being held by a plethora of giant tech and Internet companies and their strong cash flows too, even in the midst of the economic meltdown–I wondered when the mergers and acquisitions would ever begin.

With no hooking up as yet–which feels about as annoying as the persistently unconsummated flirtation of Chuck and Blair on “Gossip Girl”–that just won’t do!

So, here are a few suggestions to get this party started.

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Over the next two weeks, tech companies will be reporting their fourth-quarter earnings and the expectations are pretty much what you might imagine: Bad to very bad to very, very bad.

That’s bad, of course, because tech has been one of the bright spots in the U.S. economy, with strong returns quarter after quarter for a long time now.

It begins today with IBM, followed by Apple, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

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BoomTown strives to bring readers the very best in internal memo decoding, and this one is just too good to pass up.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent a short memo to employees this afternoon about finally hiring someone to head the software giant’s lackluster digital efforts.

That someone is former Yahoo tech star Qi Lu. He will become president of the Online Services Group at Microsoft, right after the new year.

Thus, let us try to read between the lines.

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While the tech blogosphere fiddles away on navel-gazing stories–Who are the top tech bloggers? Do they Twitter to get to the top? Or do they FriendFeed? Do they feed friends while tweeting? More importantly, will there be chicken wings?–I’d advise anyone interested in the much more serious issue of making some money from Web 2.0 [...]

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