Google will never be free of Marissa Mayer, the cupcake-loving gigglepuss VP who oversees the company's multibillion-dollar search engine. Or so says Marissa Mayer.

In the week leading up to President Barack Obama's inauguration, it was open season on the outgoing president on political TV. Even conservatives like Ken Blackwell and Scott McClellan joined in the jeering.

Vice President Dick Cheney injured his back personally torturing one last enemymoving out of government housing, into a new lair. He'll be at the inauguration in a wheelchair.

As the advance text indicated, the president's speech tonight was truly pathetic, an uninspired attempt redeem his record with old cliches. And that's how Bush will some day make us stop hating him.

Yahoo's board will soon announce it has hired Carol Bartz, a software-industry veteran, to run the troubled Web-media business. The first question: How long before Bartz fires Sue Decker, Yahoo's president? (Update: not long!)

Robert Rubin, a senior counselor and director at Citigroup who helped steer the megabank into taking on more risk, is quitting amid a firestorm of criticism. Why? Because he's "tired."

Our tipster said it's more heartwarming than the puppy cam , this, the best headline yet in 2009: "Bush starts packing to leave White House." It's true, he can't wait to leave.

What will Google be like without Marissa Mayer, the glamour nerd whose goofy laugh so neatly captures the search engine's adolescent awkwardness? We'll know soon. We hear the company's 19th employee is planning her goodbye.

Is Steve Jobs dying? Larry Ellison thinks so — the prospect reportedly moved the Oracle CEO to tears. A Gizmodo source thinks his "health is rapidly declining." For Apple, it could be good news.

Recessionary times should be glory days for LinkedIn, as people furiously network on the business-contacts website for scraps of work. But instead, it's LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye who finds himself out of a job.

Tesla Motors, once the best hope of Silicon Valley's nascent electric-car industry, is getting better known for manufacturing drama than vehicles. The company just saw its top marketer, Darryl Siry leave — allegedly after running his mouth about ex-employees.

People who use Twitter, a service which posts short updates to the Web and cell phones, love nothing more than to Twitter about themselves, and the medium they've so enthusiastically adopted. If you go by the Twitterers' collective reporting, every event, from an earthquake in Los Angeles to terrorist bombings in Mumbai, is more notable for the fact that people are writing about it on Twitter than for its inherent interest as news. The dominant narrative of Twitter is the rise of Twitter, the latest force to displace the mainstream media and roil the world's information economy. Too bad the real story of the company is one of top-to-bottom incompetence.

Among the many windmills Jerry Yang tilted at in his brief career as Yahoo's CEO was his devotion to Web search. It veered on an obsession for him. It played into his decision to resist Microsoft's offers to shower him with cash, first for his whole company, then for just its search business. Is it a coincidence, then, that Yahoo's top search engineer has left a day after Yang stepped down? A tipster tells us Sean Suchter resigned yesterday, and speculates that he may be joining Microsoft.If so, Microsoft may have gotten Yahoo's search business on the cheap. Our tipster writes:

Can it get any dumber? Jerry Yang's post on Yahoo's corporate blog, "Stepping down," is throwing me an error message that suggests Yahoo has banned the IP address of my Sprint wireless Internet card, but only for their corporate blog. And yet the post is visible on the blog's homepage. It seems too bad to be true: Yang can't even say goodbye right. Update: The "999" error indicates that the server automatically throttled itself to prevent a surge in traffic from taking the site down. Yang's resignation blog post had made the front page of Digg, the news-discussion site. What does it say about Yahoo's competence at building reliable websites if Digg can take down the boss's blog?

It is one of the most heartwarming narratives of Silicon Valley — the founder is abused and evicted by the suits and then returns triumphant. But that's not how it worked out for Jerry Yang, ousted as Yahoo's CEO Monday by a suddenly restive board. Until yesterday, Yang was never much abused by Yahoo's suits; if anything, he was coddled for more than a decade, granted the honorific of "Chief Yahoo" and allowed a say in the Internet portal's strategy. He held a seat on the company's board, and played a role in courting executives like former CEO Terry Semel; but until last year, he never had to operate a business.Experience is underrated in Silicon Valley. Novices are thought to do better than old hands. But the truth is that the intensity of actually running a startup — raising money, hiring people, assembling desks by hand — is better training than that provided by most business schools. Looked at that way, Yang gave up way too early, hiring a professional CEO when the company only had five employees. A graduate-school dropout, Yang had no management experience, and no predilection for the task. He is still, to this day, famously indecisive and fatally nice. Steve Jobs has rarely spoken about the heartbreaking experience of being cast out of Apple, the company he cofounded. In June 2005, though, he gave a commencement speech at Stanford University and openly discussed it. "I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me," he said. "The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." Yang's exit, like his entrance, is far too soft. He will remain CEO until the board finds a replacement; he will remain Chief Yahoo after that. Such kid-gloves treatment does him no favors. For his own good, Yahoo should exile Yang, as Apple did with Jobs, and give him a chance, at last, to prove himself. His golf score may suffer; his nights may prove sleepless. But they say tough economic times are when the best companies are born. Perhaps he'll correct the mistakes he made at Yahoo with his next company. And maybe — if there's still a Yahoo left to welcome him back, if it hasn't been swallowed up by Microsoft or News Corp. or AT&T — he'll return to his first company a conquering hero. And prove that Silicon Valley's tale of the prodigal founder isn't so mythical.

In an attempt to boost morale at Yahoo, signs showing CEO Jerry Yang with cofounder David Filo went up around the Web giant's Sunnyvale campus recently. They had no measurable effect. News of Yang's resignation, pending a replacement, might do more to cheer up the troops. The signs have proved easily edited to accommodate the news. (Photo by docwho76)

Why is Yahoo looking for a new CEO? Because founder Jerry Yang, in his year and a half on the job, has proven himself incapable of meeting the company's many challenges. Here are five key moments where Yang failed to rise to the occasion:1. The all-too-sacred cows. When he first became CEO in July 2007, Yang promised that there would be "no sacred cows" and a 100-day action plan. Instead, his efforts became mired in Yahoo's famous bureaucracy; the cows were spared. While the company had layoffs last February, they were not nearly enough; next month, Yahoo is cutting another 1,500 employees. 2. The Microsoft deal. In retrospect, Yang should have taken the $45 billion offer Steve Ballmer made in January and run. With the stock trading below $11, the company is now worth a third what Microsoft would have paid. 3. The Google deal. Google and Yahoo had struck a tentative deal to have Google sell ads on some of Yahoo's search pages; because Google is more effective at selling such ads, the deal would have added an estimated $800 million a year to Yahoo's bottom line. But Microsoft executives, enraged at being spurned by Yahoo, made so much trouble for Google and Yahoo in Washington, D.C., that Google CEO Eric Schmidt chose to walk away rather than accept a deal that would set a precedent for regulating Google's monopoly on search advertising. 4. The Carl Icahn insult. Corporate raider Carl Icahn pressed hard to get Yahoo back to the negotiating table with Microsoft, then tried to unseat Yahoo's board. Yang and the board retaliated with a campaign on Yahoo's homepage which suggested Icahn was clueless about technology. Days after the diss on Yahoo.com, Yahoo's directors relented and nominated Icahn to a board seat. While he's been mostly quiet, Yang's unplanned exit is a sign that he has not forgotten the slight. 5. Jerry Yang. Since becoming CEO, Yang has been pressed for an answer on the most basic of questions: Why should he be the one to run Yahoo? His answers have boiled down to this: Because he founded the company. A Newsweek article last month proved his last chance to articulate why he should be CEO, and he botched it. "Bleeding purple," to use Yahoo's in-house jargon for being passionate about the company, is not enough of a reason. Just because it bleeds doesn't mean it leads.

How untidy was Jerry Yang's exit from the CEO seat at Yahoo? Here's a clue: Tech blog AllThingsD obtained a copy of Yang's all-hands memo before the PR team had sent it to the staff. It must be genuine, since, like the rest of Yang's memos, it completely lacks capitalization. The founders of Internet companies are too busy, it seems, to reach for the shift key. What Yang does not explain: Why, when he took over as CEO last year, he took pains to say this was not a temporary job. His excuse seems to amount to this: The changes he has made at Yahoo are so amazing, so transformative, that it is a "significantly different company" today which requires someone who can "manage this opportunity to leverage the progress up to this point." Translation: Jerry Yang was the right man to be Yahoo's CEO, until he wasn't. The memo:

Yahoo founder Jerry Yang is stepping down as CEO, and a search is underway for a replacement after a tumultuous 18 months on the job. Which is curious. In a recent interview, Yang had just told AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, "In this uncertain environment, I think I am absolutely the right person" to lead Yahoo. He must have changed his mind; Swisher reports that the decision was a "mutual" one made by Yang and Yahoo's board of directors. Either Yang was lying to Swisher, or he was deceived about the board's lack of support for him. Executive recruiter Heidrick & Struggles is conducting a search for Yang's replacement. Finding a successor to Yang will be difficult — not because Yang is irreplaceable, but because he has made such a mess of things that it will be hard to persuade a capable executive to risk their reputation fixing it.There are, nevertheless, some possibilities. One is former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who has been toying with entering politics. eBay and Yahoo have long flirted with a merger, so she's reasonably familiar with the company, and with the challenges of running a large Internet company. A similar candidate: Jon Miller, the former CEO of AOL, who is now a partner at Velocity Interactive Group, a venture-capital firm. Money is tight in venture capital, and Velocity has yet to raise a promised new fund in the multiple hundreds of millions of dollars it had planned for when he joined it. Yet Miller has a problem: Time Warner, the parent of AOL, used his noncompete agreement to prevent him from joining Yahoo's board; it's not clear why they would waive it to let him become CEO. The agreement does not expire until next spring. News Corp. COO Peter Chernin does not seem to have much hope of succeeding Rupert Murdoch as CEO, who is expected to hand the media conglomerate over to one of his children instead. But he does not have a credible claim for having much online experience — overseeing MySpace is the best he can do there. And lastly, as a courtesy, Yahoo's president, Sue Decker, is under consideration. Some say Decker's Machiavellian maneuverings helped out former Hollywood studio boss Terry Semel as CEO last summer. But she's seen inside and outside the company as a bad manager who lacks a vision for what Yahoo should be. More:

This morning, I blogged that Dell had "unpublished" CTO Kevin Kettler from the company's executive staff page. Kettler had been planning to leave as part of a reorganization, but his sudden disappearance from the management headshots would indicate a food fight behind the scenes. Truth is, Dell had never put Kettler on its exec staff page. As CTO, he wasn't considered one of the suits. There's a lesson here for me: John Paczkowski, from whom I got the factoid that Kettler had been removed from the management page, can be as wrong as Valleywag when he really tries. Sorry for the error. I have only one question for Paczkowski's publisher, AllThingsD: You guys hiring? (Photo by CNET/Stephen Shankland)