Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s brand-new CEO, is promising to bring some passion to the job. On a conference call with analysts and reporters this morning, Bartz said she planned to help Yahoo get “some friggin’ breathing room” so the company can “kick some butt.”

The move was predicted last week in Kara Swisher’s “Boom Town” column on AllThingsDigital, the Wall Street Journal’s Valley-watching blog. This follows months of speculation that Yahoo had narrowed its search to Bartz, former CEO of Autodesk, and Susan Decker, Yahoo’s president. Yahoo now reports that Decker will be quitting.

Michael Liedtke of the Huffington Post opines that Bartz’s hire “could set the stage for Microsoft to renew its efforts to buy Yahoo’s Internet search operations as a way of mounting a more serious threat to Google.”

The company has been leaderless since Jerry Yang stepped down last year, after spurning a $47.5 billion offer from Microsoft and failing in an attempt to forge a coalition with Google.