From the tips line:

Yahoo Sports head James Pitaro will take over departing VP Karin Gilford's responsibilities as head of Yahoo Entertainment. But with no end to the Microsoft ordeal in sight, how long will Pitaro stay? Yahoo Media boss Scott Moore put Gilford in charge of Entertainment only this spring, but the promotion obviously didn't stick. She's going to Comcast."She got poached," a Yahoo exec tells us. "C’est la vie at Yahoo these days, unfortunately." We hear Moore's had his hands full trying to keep Pitaro in place, too.

A classic move by a startup hoping to recruit an executive is to offer him a board seat. So what to make of Zvents naming AdBrite executive Paul Levine to its board? Levine joined AdBrite, a San Francisco-based ad network, less than a year ago from Yahoo, where he ran that company's Yahoo Local properties. Since then, I've heard talk of high-level fights at AdBrite — the CEO and the head of sales yelling at each other behind closed doors, and constant turnover in the sales department.

When Scott Moore reorganized Yahoo's media business in April, we called VP Karin Gilford, head of Yahoo Entertainment, "the big winner." Now she's just another goner. Gilford has quit the company and will take a new job at Comcast. We admire Moore's ability to regularly crush the competition — In May, for example, Yahoo! News had 38.8 million users to AOL News' 29 million — but we wonder if Moore's shitkicking winniness might also crush his own reports. That Gilford joins a long list of Moore's reports who have suddenly exited the company doesn't do much to defend Moore's reputation. Former head of Yahoo Entertainment Vince Broady is gone. So is onetime Yahoo News editor Neil Budde. Yahoo Music boss Ian Rogers only gave Moore two days' notice when he left. Instead of running Yahoo Food like she used to, Deanna Brown is busy running Scripps Interactive to the company's notable profit. Here's an example of Gilford pitching Yahoo in happier days:

With Diane Greene ousted as the CEO of Silicon Valley software company VMware by a jealous man and replaced by testosterone-laden former Microsoftie Paul Maritz, there's not a single woman running any of the Bay Area's largest 150 companies by revenues. We'd be less despondent about this if the up-and-coming women didn't have us so down.

"Investing $5 million in a company that gets bought out for $25 million isn't going to get me into the VC Hall of Fame," Mayfield Fund VC Allen Morgan told Wired in 2006. "That's not why I got into this business." But that is why he's getting out of the business. Morgan was a champion of the Web 2.0 movement, suavely predicting that now-forgotten startups he funded like Pluck and JotSpot would soon go public in splashy IPOs. He bet that the spread of broadband would resuscitate business ideas which failed in the 1990s.

A tipster writes to tell us that a number of fellow Sun employees have either coincidently decided to quit the Sun Microsystems en masse, or are being given the pink slip in a round of layoffs that's rumored to include anywhere from 30 to 65 percent of the marketing department. Has Sun's ponytailed CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, decided that his blog is all the marketing Sun needs? He must be hoping that once Wall Street catches wind of the cost-cutting, it'll boost the company's stock, which has lost over half its value in the last year. After the jump, a gracious parting letter from an employee who had been with the company for over a decade. Our suggestion is that if the layoffs bump up the company's share price, the departed might want to sell before it sinks any lower.

Palo Alto server virtualization software maker VMware'scofounder Diane Greene resigned today, effective immediately. Virtualization is technology that allows one server to operate like its two or more, and it was thought to be a hot growth sector. Key word being "was." The company, which EMC spun off in an IPO only last August, also lowered its revenue growth expectations for the quarter below 50 percent.

When Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang became CEO last year, BusinessWeek found a senior executive to anonymously sing his praises. "I was so wrong," that source now tells the magazine. "This thing can be saved, but not by the current management team." That executive is now gone from the company — our money is on BusinessWeek's source being the ever-chatty Brad Garlinghouse. Plenty of Yahoos are trying to join him. One tech recruiter said he gets several Yahoo resumes a day. Even if Yahoo turned itself around, the appearance that Yahoo is a sinking ship likely already outweighs reality, said Stanford behavioralist Roderick Kramer: "Once there is even a perception of an exodus, the dynamic becomes insidious and takes on a life of its own." (Photo by Misserion)

The Economist tidily sums up billg's career this week, now that Microsoft's Rain Man (see video) has walked away from the company after 33 years. I've whittled the piece down to its talking points.

Microsoft has confirmed its $100 million purchase of Powerset, the overhyped search engine whose buzz flared and fizzled last year. Cofounder Barney Pell, whom investors pushed out of his CEO seat last November, amid rumors of a top-level love triangle, may not last long after the deal. Consider the faint praise Microsoft offers for him:

Ryan Block, the perpetually-in-hyperdrive head of consumer electronics superblog Engadget, is quitting the site after two years to launch a new site with his predecessor, blog millionaire and RCRD LBL founder Peter Rojas. A TechCrunch report stops short of further facts, but correctly dismisses the notion that Block's plans can be reverse-engineered by looking up the 39 domain names he owns — do you really believe Mr Always-On didn't think of that angle?

Microsoft co-founder, former CEO and executive chairman Bill Gates should be just about wrapping up his last day as a full-time employee of Microsoft and moving on to head up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. While I never met the man, he certainly loomed large in my life growing up in Seattle and beyond. While the classic "Tiger Beat" style photo here tried valiantly to make Gates appear a little sexy for the publicity machine surrounding the launch of the original Windows operating system, it failed where Gates succeeded. While Gates was a ruthlessly competitive capitalist who used and abused Microsoft's monopoly position to maim and sometimes kill the competition, he did make being a computer nerd something to aspire to, if not exactly cool.

The Bill Gates media express rolls on as Gates powers down his infernally unusable computer at Redmond today, but he's leaving as a prophet. In an interview with Tom Brokaw, he notes that any Yahoo deal (which he was never enthusiastic about in the first place) probably won't happen. [CNBC]

It's hard out there for an Objectivist. At least, that's according to Normative founder Jakob Lodwick, who cites his mama when deciding that we're all just too negative to appreciate the risk-taking, innovative soul behind Vimeo and (too a much more secretive extent) Muxtape. You animals have scared him away from the Internet with your snide comments and ad hominem insults! Never mind that markets, like emotional states, tend to be volatile — if your will is positive enough, you can conquer all, promise! At least, that's the theory. Lodwick has decided to stop trying to live up to it and will cease to publish anything but positivity online, presumably with comments disabled.

Yahoo is about to perform that dreaded big-tech-company maneuver, the "reorg." For you young-uns who don't get why reorg is such a scary word: Think massive layoffs, lost mortgages, and people like your parents with no back-to-school money for brats like you. Multiply by 10,000-plus. I can only wish a soft landing for the folks who designed, built and shipped Yahoo's new search engine interface, and the marketers who dreamed up those radio ads that got me to — I can't believe I'm admitting this on a blog — actually use Yahoo to find stuff.

Del.icio.us, along with Flickr and Upcoming, was a Web 2.0 darling acquired by Yahoo a few years ago. Also like Flickr and Upcoming, Del.icio.us hasn't rolled out much in the way of new features — though don't blame founder Joshua Schachter, who quit today last Wednesday. Blame Yahoo's management, who pushed Schachter aside.

A Yahoo employee writing the blog Sambog.com writes: "I still like the Yahoo! brand and continue to use Yahoo! News, Finance, Mail and Flickr. I love the culture, the environment and the fun stuff." But the disclaimer only comes after ten reasons why he'd leave the company. A list which our tipster tells us "sums Yahoo! up completely," below.

In a MadLibs-style web form with simple multiple-choice drop-down menus, the DIY Yahoo Resignation Letter makes it so much easier to let your managers know that you've decided to blow the Sunnyvale popsicle stand. Not sure who's currently in charge? You can simply address your greeting to "whomever is running things today (sorry, the org chart Wiki is changing too fast for me to keep up)." You can thank freelance writer and Wired contributing editor Mathew Honan for the handy tool.

Yahoo CEO-in waiting Sue Decker continues to push the company through yet another reorganization. An her minions aren't happy about it. One told Kara Swisher: “I am not sure right now, with all this drama and all this tension from Microsoft’s failed takeover and the rest of it, why we have to do this. This feels crazy.” We figure the best way to do this is rip the band-aid off and move on. So below, who's in, who's up and who's out in quick and dirty bullet points.