Ups and downs in the fortune of a dot-com company are to be expected. But the future of SafeHarbor Technology Corp. is in question. A former dot-com darling that hit upon hard times, things were turning a corner in recent months.

Apparently not fast enough. Annette Jacobs, chairman and CEO of the Satsop-based firm, has resigned her position after a three-year stint aimed at turning the struggling Internet company around. The company, which provides online and telephone customer support for web companies, turned an operating profit in four out of the last six months of 2006, but has yet to fully crawl out of the red.

Jacobs' resignation was effective July 27. When reached on her cell phone shortly after stepping down, Jacobs is mum, "It was the right timing for me to really make a transition. I've accomplished everything I wanted to with the company." She declines to discuss SafeHarbor's present condition or its future, referring those questions to Brian Vincent, executive chairman of the company and former managing director of software for Vulcan Capital.

Jacobs' departure is the latest jolt to a company that has been struggling to steady itself for some years after wobbling under the dot-com implosion and working to improve a problematic relationship with its landlord, the Grays Harbor Public Development Authority, which is redeveloping a never-completed nuclear plant in Satsop.

Jacobs says Vincent and other senior company leaders are now running SafeHarbor until a permanent CEO is found, adding that she worked with Vincent to make the transition a smooth one.

Marc Droppert, SafeHarbor's outside counsel at the law firm of Graham & Dunn, says that "the company restructure process is still under way and has significant distance to go yet. "I believe Annette made significant contributions to getting the company turned around."

It is now unclear what the company will do next. The 49-year-old Jacobs took over SafeHarbor in 2004 with a mission to make it profitable. She now says she wants to pursue other opportunities but didn't want to do that while still at SafeHarbor. She is pursuing "a couple different options," and would like to stay in the Puget Sound area, she says,.

Jacobs, whose experience includes leading major business units with Qwest Communications, Verizon Wireless, GTE Wireless and AT&T, was making progress at SafeHarbor: She flipped the company's business model, resulting in three-quarters of the company's revenue now coming from Web-based self-service support instead of call center services. SafeHarbor had managed to turn an operating profit in recent months,  with Jacobs telling Washington CEO Magazine in an interview earlier this year that the company was on track to having a profitable year in 2007. "We improved our operating loss by more than 50 percent from 2005 to 2006," she says.

Those gains were predicated on landing marquee clients, such as IBM, American Airlines, T-Mobile and Washington Mutual. For American Airlines, for example, SafeHarbor reduced costs by organizing content on the airline's employee website so that its employees could easily access information and get answers to questions about everything from benefits to internal job application procedures. Brad Aspgren, senior manager of enterprise programs for American Airlines, says SafeHarbor has "been extremely proactive in developing ideas and coming to us with suggestions, not just taking what we tell them."

Chad Waite, a SafeHarbor board member and a partner with OVP Venture Partners in Kirkland, said at the time that Jacobs "has the operations expertise that we needed" and that she "doesn't get ruffled."

The SafeHarbor of the late 1990s rode a massive wave of confidence stirred up by the euphoric dot-com economy. This was also the time when SafeHarbor, then a fast-growing Internet start-up, began cementing a problematic relationship with the entity that's redeveloping the Satsop Development Park in Grays Harbor County: The Grays Harbor Public Development Authority. The authority, created in 1998 and launched in 1999, has as its mission to transform a never-completed nuclear plant in Satsop into a 1,700-acre, environmentally friendly business and technology hub, attracting technological and manufacturing companies and pumping jobs into a rural area.