One of those is Cal Henderson, Flickr's longtime director of engineering (left). AllThingsD's Kara Swisher reports that he's left Flickr and is working on a startup with Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield, who quit Yahoo with a bizarre resignation letter last year.

That's not all he's up to: We hear he spoke at some length with a Google recruiter at a party Saturday night. In an IM conversation, Henderson admitted he went to a party "with some folks from Six Apart [the blog-software company] and Flickr," but denied he'd spoken to anyone from Google.

Google's interest in Flickr's people is of long standing. Before Yahoo bought Flickr in 2005, Butterfield and his cofounder, then-wife Caterina Fake, flirted seriously with selling to Google. (In the small-world department: Megan Smith, the Google executive who championed a purchase of Flickr, is married to Swisher, the blogger who broke the news of Henderson and Butterfield's new startup.)

So if Google can't have Flickr, why not have its best people? No surprise that they're talking — and no surprise that Henderson's playing hard to get.

He certainly has the motivation: revenge — and the success which is its best form.

Van Natta joined Facebook when the startup was an also-ran site, limited to college kids and run by college dropouts, and steered it through a period of hypergrowth. He was a key negotiator behind an advertising deal with Microsoft which provided Facebook with a solid financial footing as its user numbers blew up. His payback? Founder Mark Zuckerberg demoted him gracelessly in August 2007, and left in February 2008 — the first of many high-profile departures by executives who had fallings-out with Zuckerberg.

He then spent months hanging out and vacationing before joining a Palo Alto music startup he'd invested in, Project Playlist, as its CEO. Playlist's music widget for social networks had been banned by both Facebook and MySpace as it feuded with the major labels, and while he didn't manage to get it reinstated on either site, Van Natta did strike a deal with EMI.

Deals are what Van Natta built his reputation on. He spent seven years at Amazon.com, ultimately becoming its vice president of worldwide business development. Before that, his LinkedIn profile offers few details. There's a six-year gap between his 1992 graduation from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a BA in English and American literature and his 1998 arrival at Amazon.

Here's what we've reconstructed of his background: CNET editor Charlie Cooper recalls him being a sales intern at Computer Shopper in the early '90s. By 1996, he was working at Softbank Expos, a conference organizer. He then joined Zip2, a now-forgotten dotcom started by Elon Musk, now the CEO of Tesla Motors, and became its senior director of network advertising. In 1998, he joined PlanetAll, a nascent social network, as its VP of sales, shortly before it was acquired by Amazon.com.

What this alleged Internet studmuffin's resume tells us is that he's a smart opportunist. Is that what MySpace needs? It has certainly missed enough opportunities along the way. The other skill Van Natta's noted for is the ability, rare among slick suit-wearing dealmakers, to be tolerated by engineers. MySpace has never been a technology-driven company, and that flaw finally caught up with it over the past couple of years.

If Van Natta plays to his past reputation and just cuts some flashy deals, he'll solidify his reputation as a dilettante dealmaker, and doom his career. If he woos the right talent to MySpace and turns the place around, he'll prove he deserves to be a CEO — and rub his success in the face of a certain snotnosed punk in Palo Alto.

Van Natta, who has long aspired to run a consumer Internet startup, is an obvious choice. Having fallen out of favor with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's fickle 24-year-old CEO, he is spending his exile running a music startup, called Project Playlist, out of an office building shared with Facebook. While Van Natta has managed to extricate Playlist from some of its legal troubles with the music labels, it hardly seems like a gig that encompasses his ambitions. Having worked for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos as well as Zuckerberg, Van Natta seems capable of dealing with a testy owner-CEO like Rupert Murdoch.

Calacanis, meanwhile, has no qualifications for the job. He tanked his first media company, then sold his second one, Weblogs Inc., for $25 million to AOL, where he accomplished nothing of note after the acquisition. He's since raised far too much money for Mahalo, a Web 2.0 rehash of Yahoo's 1995-era Web directory. Silicon Alley Insider thinks he should be MySpace's new CEO because he worships Jon Miller, the former AOL CEO who played mentor to him before Miller was fired and Calacanis quit. Ever the clever fameball, Calacanis is playing coy and saying "No comment" as loudly as possible.

Miller now runs News Corp.'s Internet operations, so he's the one to pick DeWolfe's successor. We have a suggestion: Hire both! Van Natta can do the hard work of fixing MySpace. While he's affable enough, he hardly seems to crave attention.

Tom Anderson, DeWolfe's sleazy sidekick at MySpace, is every MySpace user's first friend when they sign up. He needs a replacement, too. Why not replace him with Calacanis, the ultimate Web fameball, who seems to measure his self-worth by his number of Twitter followers? He doesn't need any other responsibilities. And as MySpace's Chief Ego Officer, he can still claim to be CEO.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had planned to have 1,000 employees by last December. A tipster at the company told us that despite pleas from executives as the economy melted down, Zuckerberg kept hiring — and the only reason he missed his headcount goal was that potential hires were balking at coming on board.

Now Facebook has posted a recruiting video touting the amazing number of photos being uploaded to the site (some 40 billion images in total). It's a slick, PR-friendly video. "What engineeer wouldn't want to work here?" gushes Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer.

Anyone smart enough to draw Facebook's interest, actually. Engineers of that caliber are perfectly capable of doing the math themselves on Facebook's storage requirements withou a video to help them along. If Facebook has to go to such efforts to make itself look cool, then it isn't by definition. No wonder Facebook employees are bitching about the company in internal surveys while Twitter poaches its top prospects.

A sign of how insular the world of big media is: Confirmation of Miller's job offer comes from Ross Levinsohn, who held much the same job before leaving News Corp. to start a venture-capital fund with Miller.

It's all a crazy waiting game until the aging mogul can install his wayward children in power. Most believe that's the reason why Chernin left, as it grew increasingly clear that Murdoch would never let the Hollywood hired hand become CEO of News Corp. But there are plenty of takers for the big jobs available in the meantime.

Miller replaces Fox Interactive Media chief Peter Levinsohn, who, as many inside News Corp. expected, is taking a job with the L.A.-based Fox TV and movie units. Miller, though, will have more power than Levinsohn, running pretty much everything with a URL attached and reporting directly to Murdoch. He'll need that authority to rein in wayward MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe, who has long resisted reporting to the suits rotating through the executive suite of Fox Interactive Media.

If he takes the job, that is. Papers aren't signed yet, for reasons that are mostly legalese. Miller was ousted as AOL's CEO in 2006, replaced by the astoundingly awful Randy Falco. He's since been looking for a comeback, most recently through the VC firm Velocity Interactive Group — but he's been stymied by a noncompete agreement with AOL parent Time Warner, whose CEO, Jeff Bewkes, nastily decided to enforce after Yahoo invited Miller to join its board.

That noncompete ends in three days. Assuming Miller accepts the offer, and it seems like it would be enormously embarrassing for him not to, he'd be ending one long-running drama and joining another.

(Photo via LAT)

Unlike the part-time PR gig he announced last week, this is a real full-time job. Except not quite. Venture capital firms hire entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley equivalent of a Hollywood first-look deal; they pay EIRs a salary in exchange for the chance to invest in their next big thing.

So Hughes has a business card and a place to call home — but he's still figuring out what to do next. After cofounding Facebook and helping elect the most powerful man in the world, almost anything would seem like a comedown. Lucky for him, he's found someone willing to pay him while he figures it out.

Falco and Grant were almost instantly hated when they arrived at AOL's Dulles campus — partly because Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes badly mishandled the exit of former CEO Jonathan Miller. (Miller is now a venture capitalist, and both his name and Armstrong's came up as candidates in Yahoo's CEO search.)

Armstrong, head of Google's North American ad sales, seems like the best possible man for the job — and with Google's shares hovering around $323, down more than 50 percent from their peak, and AOL at the nadir of its tumultuous existence, it seems like a good time for him to prove what he can do.

He benefits from an easy comparison: Falco's reign at AOL, where the company's notional value sank from $20 billion to a fraction of that, will go down in history as one of the worst reigns as CEO at any company, anywhere.

But what is Armstrong going to do? He'd never have left his cozy perch at Google to oversee AOL's further decline. Let's assume that's not in the cards.

The best indicator of Armstrong's preferred strategy is not the one he pursued at Google. Based primarily in New York, Armstrong oversaw an agenda set by the geeks in Mountain View. To keep him on board, Google's top managers allowed Armstrong use his Google-IPO wealth to make several startup investments on the side, even when they posed a conflict of interest.

One company, Associated Content, run by Armstrong's college roommate Luke Beatty, lets amateur publishers post content on the Web and get paid a share of the advertising revenues. Another, Patch, is building local news sites with real journalists behind them, in competition with the New York Times.

It's not clear if Time Warner, which is stricter about this kind of thing, will let Armstrong stay involved with his side gigs. But what they spell out is a guy who's itching to be a media kingpin, not the boss of an army of programmers.

What that likely means: The future of AOL will rest in its blog-heavy MediaGlow division, while Armstrong works his Madison Avenue connections to rebuild AOL's slouching ad sales. If he makes it work, it will be a triumph over his old bosses at Google — the ones who believe in the alchemy of algorithms over the hard work of creating content that attracts an audience.

Why is a designer switching teams such big news? Jason Fried, the influential founder of Web-software company 37signals, hailed Bowman's 2006 hire as Google's "best acquisition to date." Google even created a grand new title for him: "visual design lead." But now Bowman's leaving after less than three years.

People switch jobs for all kinds of reasons. And Bowman had to work for every designer's nightmare client, Google executive Marissa Mayer. But Bowman, a veteran of the industry who pioneered Web design at Wired (where we were briefly coworkers), is a telling barometer.

Earlier in this decade, in the midst of another downturn, Google was the black hole for Silicon Valley's most talented people. Two years ago, it was Facebook. Now Twitter — a revenueless startup with just 30 employees — is the startup with the pick of the litter.

Talent has always flowed this way in the Valley, drawn by money and hype and the shared belief that a small group of people can, through sheer force of all-night coding sessions, change the world. (Change the world, that is, from one in which they are poor to one in which they are rich.) Here's to Bowman keeping the dream — or delusion — alive.

(Photo via Fawny)

There's much to the good in this org chart. Ash Patel, a famously lazy old-time Yahoo mostly regarded for his time in the job, is nowhere to be seen in Yahoo's executive ranks, replaced by CTO Ari Balogh. He's still at Yahoo, but his new job is unclear. Hopefully he'll be out the door entirely soon. And CFO Blake Jorgensen, an ineffective hire made by former Yahoo president Sue Decker (he was her best man at her wedding), is also gone.

But there are too many holdovers. Michael Callahan, a general counsel who got founder Jerry Yang hauled in front of Congress and labeled a "moral pygmy" over Yahoo's outing of a Chinese dissident, whose own department generated a labor lawsuit by Yahoo's first black, female lawyer, and who blithely expressed optimism about a lucrative advertising deal with Google that antitrust cops end up shooting down, should not be holding his job. HR chief David Windley's faults are less public, but Yahoo insiders say they loathe him.

Finally, there's the new face Bartz has picked: Elisa Steele, Yahoo's latest chief marketing officer, who joines the company from NetApp. Like Bartz, Steele previously worked at Sun. For all the same reasons that people were dubious about Bartz's hire — she's a software and hardware saleswoman who's unfamiliar with Web products and online advertising — one might be skeptical of Steele's background. Instead of shoring up her weaknesses in those fields, Bartz has hired a clone.

For those who want to plow through Bartz's explanation of what that purple graphic means, here's her memo:

From: Carol Bartz
Reply-To: Carol Bartz
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:02:49 -0800
To: "all-worldwide@yahoo-inc.com"
Subject: Our New Organization

Yahoos,

As I've gotten to know Yahoo! over the past several weeks, I've developed a
point of view on how our organization should be structured to set us up for
success.

Our goal is simple: to consistently deliver awesome consumer and advertiser
experiences, everywhere in the world we do business. Delivering great
customer experiences is everyone's job at Yahoo! – and each part of our
organization will have a clear role in making that happen every day.

The timing of this announcement is important. As soon as decisions were
made, I wanted you to know about them — even if that means we don't have
all the details nailed down yet. Yes, there's been a lot of speculation in
the media over the past few days … that's been a little frustrating, but I'm
not willing to speak publicly about decisions before they're final. Today,
they are — so I'll lay out our new organizational structure for you now.

I know you guys have reorg fatigue. Hang in there – our intention is to
leave this structure in place for two to four years. We'll continue to make
adjustments as needed, but we expect this core structure to stay put.

The structure outlined below will enable us to make big improvements in our
product quality and operational efficiency. Part of that is simplicity –
I'm frankly amazed at how complicated some things are here! We'll have much
clearer decision making and accountability. Product and regional teams will
share responsibility for revenue targets and expense management, but we'll
have one P&L, for which I'm accountable.

We will also be in a better position to really listen to and understand our
customers -both consumers and advertisers. I think we've gotten into the
habit of focusing internally too much and we sometimes forget who we're here
to serve. You'll notice that our management structure puts a renewed focus
on the customer, with stronger feedback loops across the company… and they
all come through me.

Also, as you know, no organizational structure is a substitute for
collaboration, communication and trust. We'll all need to evolve our
behavior a bit – as teams and as individuals – to make this structure work
the way it's designed.

So here's the overview, with the roles that will report directly to me. As
you'll see, some of our leaders are still to be determined. I know you'll
want more detail than what's below – you can learn more on Backyard:
http://backyard.yahoo.com/ourorg .

Products: We've combined Tech and Product groups under one roof, led by Ari
Balogh as EVP Products & CTO. Ari's charter is to deliver global products
that enable extraordinary consumer and advertiser experiences. Ari's direct
reports now include one leader for each product group – we've taken care of
the "two in a box" problem.

One important note: The Connected Life team has been integrated into various
parts of the new organization. Our mobile strategy remains a key part of
Yahoo!'s focus going forward and all of our product groups will own mobile
innovations. After leading Connected Life for four years, Marco Boerries has
resigned from the company to spend more time with his family in Europe. We
thank Marco for his important contributions at Yahoo!.

Regions: There are now two: North America and International. As I've said
before, international growth is critical for Yahoo!, which has become too
reliant on its U.S. business over the years.

The regions deliver Yahoo!'s products, programming and services to
consumers, partners and advertisers in local markets. They will partner
closely with the newly formed Regional Solutions & Products group in Ari's
organization to help drive a significant shift in how Yahoo! develops
products for different geographies. The goal is to have global platforms on
which regional product offerings are based.

The North American region — comprised of the U.S. and Canada – is led by
Hilary Schneider. The leader of our International region, to be hired soon,
will be responsible for a cohesive Yahoo! global strategy and seizing our
international growth opportunities. Until we determine who'll lead the
International region, Rose Tsou (Asia), Rich Riley (Europe) and Keith
Nilsson (Emerging Markets) will continue to report to me.

Marketing: Elisa Steele will be joining Yahoo! as our Chief Marketing
Officer (CMO), effective March 23. Elisa joins us from NetApp where she was
SVP, Corporate Marketing. Previous to NetApp, she held executive positions
in marketing at Sun Microsystems. Elisa will oversee our global marketing
strategy and provide direction for our marketing function. She'll bring
together the various Yahoo! marketing teams that have been spread across the
company. Reporting into Elisa will be Brand Marketing, Audience Marketing,
Corporate Communications, Insights, Policy & Privacy, Community Affairs and
related central teams. I'm delighted to have Elisa joining the team.

Customer Advocacy: As I said, we can do much better in hearing the voice of
the customer across Yahoo!, and incorporating what we hear into all of our
work day-to-day. We have opened a search for a leader, who will oversee
Customer Care and Ad Operations globally with the goal of improving how we
support Yahoo!'s users and advertisers. In the interim, these teams will
continue to report to Hilary.

Service Engineering & Operations: This new team is responsible for
delivering common technology services at scale, including application
management and infrastructure. No matter how cool our products are, the
customer's experience won't be great unless our applications consistently
deliver. Note that we're bringing Service Engineering together as one group
because these engineers bring expertise that is best applied horizontally.
Leading this organization is David Dibble, who joined Yahoo! in December.
David's team also will be accountable for delivering more effective
corporate IT systems.

Corporate Functions: Blake Jorgensen will be leaving Yahoo! and I am
searching for a new CFO. Blake will remain through a transition with his
successor, and I want to thank Blake for all of his great contributions to
Yahoo! over the past two years. Mike Callahan will continue to lead our
Legal team, and David Windley leads our Human Resources function. Joel
Jones joins the team as my Chief of Staff.

So that's the high-level view. These changes are effective immediately, but
we've got more work to do in filling out the structure of each group. In
the short term, this transition will be challenging for many of our people.
My executive staff will be working with their organizations as quickly as
possible to create further clarity. For example, we'll need to recast
budgets and adjust work areas so we have the right people working
side-by-side.

I want to thank all of you who've shared your ideas and views with me since
I arrived. Several leaders across Yahoo! came together to design this new
structure – I've been very impressed with their dedication to the right
outcomes, particularly how they've embraced the need to eliminate the silos
that have been a drag on this organization for so long.

I think this organizational structure has the potential to solve many of the
issues you've helped me better understand. Of course, new issues will
emerge. But I know we'll be aligned and nimble in tackling them together.

This is a tremendous, proud company with a powerful brand, great products
and a bright future. Now's the time to get more focused than ever on
delighting our users and advertisers. Let's show them how great Yahoo! can
be.

Carol

Smith is replacing Google.org's current chief, Larry Brilliant, who's getting put out to pasture with some vague job involving "philanthropy evangelism." (In Hollywood, they give retiring executives producer deals; in Silicon Valley, they make you an "evangelist," a flowery marketing title which really means you get paid to give speeches at conferences and have lunch with people who also don't matter.) She'll now oversee do-gooding investments, like Google's push into renewable energy and disease tracking. That's on top of her day job wrangling deals with Google partners like MySpace (a relative success) and Facebook (an abject failure). She's close to founder Sergey Brin, a source of considerable soft power in the supposedly unhierarchical company.

Meanwhile, her spouse, Swisher, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, gets most of her power in the industry from running D, an annual tech-CEO conference she organizes with Walt Mossberg, the paper's powerful gadget reviewer. Mossberg gave Swisher away at the couple's first, unofficial wedding; the couple later got officially married before the passage of Proposition 8, California's gay-marriage ban.

Swisher has a lengthy disclaimer about the relationship on her AllThingsD tech blog, and the couple have wrapped up Smith's Google holdings in trusts so Swisher can reasonably claim she doesn't control them. People in the industry still look askance at the relationship, questioning how Swisher might have an ulterior motive when she's tough on Google competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft. As Smith's ambit grows, those questions will rise in volume.

But Swisher causes as much trouble at work for Smith as Smith causes for Swisher. The latter's savage reporting on the antitrust implications of Google selling ads on Yahoo helped derail an agreement between the companies, and almost got Google sued by the government. Smith's job makes things difficult for Swisher as a reporter; Swisher's reporting gets Smith's bosses in hot water with the feds. If these two are still together, it must be love.

(Photo by Lane Hartwell)

Cooper, who joined Portfolio in 2006, was one of the the business magazine staffers who was made a contract writer when they cut costs last year. He writes in his welcome post that he'll "continue to write for Conde Nast Portfolio, where I'm a contributing editor, as well as its website, and other publications."

Cooper's reporting for Time got him caught up in the scandal which brought down Scooter Libby, the Dick Cheney aide accused of outing CIA agent Valerie Plame. He was a high-profile hire for Portfolio, establishing the magazine's breadth of ambition; his departure, after the slashing of the magazine's Web staff, now signals a contraction. As Portfolio sinks, weighed down by the expenses of print, TPM rises.

Over the next dozen years, her relentless upward trajectory took a pause. She'd moved up the org chart from 3M to DEC to Sun Microsystems, where she was vice president of worldwide field operations, a top sales post. Then she went to Autodesk, becoming the first female CEO of a major software company; was briefly celebrated as one of the "top women of the '90s" alongside the likes of Jodie Foster; got invited to President Clinton's first economic summit; and disappeared.

Yes, Autodesk grew from $300 million in sales to $1.5 billion before she stepped down as CEO in 2006. But the company's software, mostly used by architects and product designers, was hopelessly obscure. A 2004 profile in Business 2.0 was the last major look at her career.

Bartz is no egomaniac; she's pleasantly folksy, dressing down in jeans for an interview with BusinessWeek at the time of her resignation from Autodesk. But there has always been an undercurrent of resentment that she has not won more attention. It shows, at times — like a speech she gave students at Stanford University, where she started a speech by carping about all the empty chairs. And while she's unpretentious about her looks, she's glammed up noticeably in the past decade — which, sad to say, still seems to be a prerequisite for a woman to rise in corporate America.

if Bartz secretly craves attention, she surely got it by taking Yahoo's top job. The company has been better known as a source of drama than of innovation. Here's what we know about Bartz:

Fearless. When she joined Autodesk, it was run, unofficially, by a small group of engineers known as "the Core" who were loyal to batty founder John Walker and had all but deposed her predecessor, a nebbishy accountant who didn't use email. Bartz imposed order over them when she joined in April 1992, even as she found, on her second day on the job, that she had developed breast cancer. She delayed treatment until June and took only four weeks off. She called an executive she'd been trying to recruit from her hospital room, hours after a radical mastectomy. He took the job.

Blunt and profane. Bartz once walked into a meeting and said, "Tell me why I shouldn't fire the lot of you." She likes to drop the f-bomb. In 2004, she summarized Wall Street's bubble-earromance with now-forgotten dotcoms as "Used-Fucking-Golfballs.com," and questioned a rival's entry into her market by asking, "What the fuck does Adobe know about engineering drawings?" Yesterday, at her first all-hands meeting, she promised to "dropkick to fucking Mars" anyone who leaked information to blogs.

A loving if terrifying mom. Bartz has three children and is married to Bill Marr, a retired Sun executive. More magazine described her family's reaction to her 2006 retirement:

When she told her daughter, Layne, 17, the news, "She looked at me like I was crazy." Bartz's husband, Bill Marr, who retired 10 years ago, warned her, "Don't expect you're going to come be CEO of the house and boss us around." "They were terrified," Bartz says, laughing.

Bartz showed up in jeans to the BusinessWeek interview because she'd spent the morning hanging out with her daughter:

She's in back-to-back meetings at a Starbucks near her home, dressed in jeans and an orange sweater, wearing no makeup. Earlier that morning Layne, who's anxiously awaiting responses from colleges, crawled into bed with her, something she hasn't done since she was a child. "She's more stressed than I've ever seen her," Bartz says. "I knew something was wrong and so I just hung." All the while, she knew the clock was ticking on a breakfast meeting she had scheduled. She comforted her daughter, threw on clothes, and raced out, already late. "The concept of balance is perfection," she says, miming a seesaw motion. "And that's crazy."

The kid seems to have turned out okay. Layne graduated from Sacred Heart Preparatory School that year, debuted at the Peninsula Ball, and is now a junior at the University of Southern California, according to Facebook. She has not posted anything embarrassing about herself on MySpace, as best Google can tell.

Wealthy, but grew up poor. Bartz and her family live in Atherton, Calif., the wealthiest ZIP code in America. Yahoo paid her a signing bonus of $10 million in cash and stock, with a salary of $1 million a year and a bonus that ranges from $2 million to $4 million a year. That's actually not a vast improvement over what she made at Autodesk 16 years ago, when her salary was $650,000; she also reportedly made $230 million from her Autodesk stock options. If she's driven to make that kind of money again at Yahoo, it will be because of her upbringing. More magazine relates her childhood and young adulthood:

Carol Bartz's early story is one of vulnerability — and the refusal to be vulnerable. She was born in the town of Winona, Minnesota, in 1948, to a mother with a chronic, disabling disease. Shirley Bartz died when Carol was 8 and her brother, Jim, was 8. For the next few years, Carol would drop Jim off at the sitter's on her way to school and pick him up on the way home. Their father worked at a feed mill for $40 a week. His idea of discipline was to beat the children with a belt.

When Bartz was 12, her grandmother, Alice Schwartz, took her and Jim to raise in her own home, 30 miles away, in Wisconsin. Schwartz was smart, supportive, loving, and strong. Encouraged to succeed, Bartz bloomed: In high school, she was a majorette, the homecoming queen, and one of just two girls in her physics and advanced algebra classes.

She found another home of sorts in the bank where her Sunday-school teacher was president, working her way up from secretary to teller. Like any person with clear memories of money struggles, Bartz remembers every decimal of those early paychecks. She earned 75 cents an hour as a teller. Right after she graduated from high school, the bank managers realized they owed her back pay because of a change in the minimum wage, and gave her a check for $350. It was "the biggest windfall in my life," says Bartz, who years later would cash in $11 million in Autodesk stock options in one year. "It was an incredible amount of money to me."

The bank managers also helped Bartz get a scholarship, allowing her to go to William Woods, an elite all-girls college in Fulton, Missouri. She wasn't one of the crowd, though; she had a job in the cafeteria serving food to the wealthy students. "A pretty humbling experience," she calls it. "I was one of very few students actually working there. It wasn't the kind of school where people did that."

Bartz through the years:

Anything to add to her record? Send us a tip or leave a comment.

(Photos by AP/Getty Images/Yodel Anecdotal)

Bartz (left) will soon have to take stock of the fact that Decker (right), for all her talents in finance, has long been a burden on the company. The former Wall Street analyst took the company's CFO job in 2001 as a temporary post, a stopover point on her way to a Silicon Valley CEO job. In that role, Decker starved its search business of funds, anxious to preserve Yahoo's profit margins and thereby please investors. But she did so at the precise moment when Google began its meteoric rise.

To sate her personal ambitions, she engineered a reorganization that drove out her chief rival, COO Dan Rosensweig, and then led a palace coup to drive out Hollywood movie mogul Terry Semel as CEO. (It's said that the misplaced kindness of founder Jerry Yang has been the main factor keeping her on the job; she filed for divorce in 2007, and Yang has been loathe to add professional troubles to her personal woes.)

Bartz, as a new CEO, can ill afford to keep such a schemer on board. But Decker is not a stranger to her; they both serve on the board of Intel. And the last thing Yahoo needs is more drama. So Decker's exit, I suspect, will be quiet and graceful, as such things go. But she would be ill-advised to fight for her job. Bartz, when she took over as the CEO of Autodesk, a maker of computer-aided design software, simultaneously fought a quarrelsome founder and breast cancer. She is much tougher, in short, than Rosensweig, Semel, or Yang. And as a woman, she will have no worries of charges of sexism in discarding Decker. It is the first thing she needs to do at Yahoo, and the best way to show her steel.

Updated: Steely indeed. Decker is "resigning."

(Photo of Decker by AP)

A ludicrously patchy trial balloon lifted off this week, airing the notion that Microsoft might fund some kind of complex buyout of Yahoo, at a knockdown price of $20 billion — less than half what Microsoft offered last February. It was swiftly shot down: If Microsoft wanted to get its hands on Yahoo, why would it loan someone else the money to buy it?

Another tall tale is making the rounds: that Sue Decker, Yahoo's president, is still a candidate to replace founder Jerry Yang, who's stepping down from the CEO job after a disastrous year and a half. (Anyone care to bet on whether one of the "sources familiar with the search" who told CNET News that Decker was a contender was Decker herself?)

Decker, a former investment banker, wrecked her credibility with Wall Street through overoptimistic forecasts. Never a strong manager, she similarly killed whatever loyalty Yahoos had left for her through her mistreatment of key underlings. (She had Wenda Harris Millard, Yahoo's former U.S. sales chief, locked out of her office over the weekend when Millard told Decker she was planning to leave — and only months later thought to invite Millard to a farewell party, which Millard refused to attend.)

What Decker has going for her: She's already in place, and is a known quantity. If Yahoo's CEO search utterly fails to find an outside candidate and doesn't settle on a board member, Decker is the board's only option. John Chapple, a board member who was previously CEO of Nextel Partners, has said he's no longer interested. One of the outside possibilities, Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, has reportedly dropped out. Another, former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz, has yet to express any enthusiasm. But what does it matter that you have a known quantity, when you have taken that quantity's measure and found it lacking? Insiders whisper that Yang, Yahoo's dithering founder, is loyal to a fault, and that's the only reason Decker has not been fired.

If Yahoo ends up with no choice but Decker, it will surely spell the end of the company. What options will she have, other than to sell it at a cut-rate price to Microsoft?

How depressing for a company once worth more than $100 billion, which promised to bridge Hollywood and Silicon Valley and dominate new media. It still has formidable assets, and valuable businesses. Why does no one know what to do with them?

That's because Murdock is the same guy who campaigned for the job of Apple CEO back in 1997, when Steve Jobs was only working as the company's interim chief. He emailed Jobs and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a close friend of Jobs and an Apple board member at the time, to make his pitch. In a prank, Jobs and Ellison told Murdock he had the job. He later had to be told not to show up at Apple's campus.

I don't know if Yahoo should reject him so readily. Here's Murdock's bio:

Hi and welcome to the site. I wanted to take a moment and give you a bit of background on me and why I am here. I am a US NAVY DISABLED VETERAN. I got my start in computers in 1975/1976 and very early on saw the potential for these machines in our lives. It's amazing how far they've come from the days when we carried paper tape and then cassettes for data storage. Now that and more fits on a simple USB stick.

The power of the web like the computer systems amazed me when it was first unleashed to the public. I can remember sitting in my office at Pixar Animation Studios (when we were still named PIXAR) and thinking...this thing called a browser has some potential, one day people will use this like they use a newspaper. In fact, this will probably replace newspapers.

See? Total visionary. Under Yang, Yahoo has been busy making deals with newspapers rather than predicting their doom. Murdock might be a better CEO than Yang, at the least — and that, sadly, is no joke.

A video from Murdock on Yang's departure:

A group of record labels sued Project Playlist in April — which is, sad to say, the music industry's usual approach to beginning talks. Van Natta has a reputation as a skilled dealmaker, and he led talks with the labels while at Facebook. But sources who have had recent negotiations with labels say they have been granting only short-term licenses for music — typically a year in length. Their strategy is to give startups a year to grow — and then shake them down for most of the profits they generate. Does Van Natta think he can get a better deal? Since he's taking the job, he must be betting on it.

Cook is paid more than anyone else at Apple, and he's the only executive allowed an outside board seat (Cook is a director at Nike). More importantly, he's humble enough not to push for a CEO job that can never be his as long as Jobs is in the saddle.

True, Cook is an operations expert, not a product genius like Jobs, but he could surround himself with Apple executives like Scott Forstall and Jonathan Ive to make up for that lack. Only one wild card: Mark Papermaster, the IBM chip executive whose recruitment by Apple has embroiled the companies in a lawsuit. if the hire goes through, Papermaster will report to Jobs, not Cook.

Joanne Bradford, a longtime sales chief at MSN who later headed up Microsoft's content operations, now runs U.S. sales. Jeff Dossett, after a protracted job dance with both Microsoft and Yahoo, just took over Yahoo's "audience" group, which oversees its media websites. And Eric Hadley, another longtime Microsoftie, has just gotten a job running marketing.

The three all know each other well from MSN and form a tight-knit cabal. And one thing drove them from Microsoft to Yahoo: Microsoft's senseless obsession with Google.

MSN has always been an oddball operation at Microsoft. Is it not, at its heart, a media company. That Google figured out a way to turn attracting an online audience and selling advertising into an algorithm infuriated Microsoft's leadership — but the thought that the Web might be a software business after all held a deep attraction to them.

Google's strength is in search advertising. And search advertising is bought, while display advertising is sold. Keyword ads practically sell themselves, while banner ads require the careful cultivation of human links between Web publishers and advertisers.

In their display-ads sales, Microsoft and Yahoo both took their eye off the ball, distracted by Google. Microsoft will remain distracted, possibly for all time. But Yahoo is beginning to rebuild an ad-sales operation badly wounded by Yahoo president Sue Decker's mishandling of sales chief Wenda Harris Millard.

That's what Bradford, Dossett, and Hadley have figured out. If there's still a role for humans in the packaging of audiences for advertisers, it's going to be filled at Yahoo, not Microsoft. It is a chancy, contrarian bet; running up against both Google and Microsoft takes guts. But it's no coincidence that so many Microsoft executives are now at Yahoo.