Yahoo! has announced that Carol Bartz has joined the Internet giant's board of directors and has been named Chief Executive Officer with immediate effect.

This signals the end of Jerry Yang's 18-month tenure as CEO and he will return to his former role as Chief Yahoo. He said he "couldn't be more pleased with the board's choice" in a company statement.

Bartz, 60, was most recently Executive Chairman of Autodesk and, prior to that, she was CEO of the company for 14 years.

During this time, she increased the company's revenues from $300 million to more than $1.5 billion a year, while the share price increased by a factor of ten in the same period. This transformed Autodesk into one of the market leaders in computer-aided design software packages.

In addition to her successes at Autodesk, Bartz has worked at Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment Corporation and 3M and has had extensive hands-on executive experience at these companies.

What's more, Bartz is also Lead Independent Director at Cisco Systems and serves on the board of directors at Intel and NetApp.

Do you think this is a good move for Yahoo! and will we see the company return to its former glory? Discuss in the forums.