Everyone wants a piece of beloved former AOL CEO Jon MIller, who was oh so unfairly fired, loyalists say, by Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes. First gossips suggested Miller as a fit to replace ineffectual Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang. Then, on Monday, Yang himself said Miller would fill one of Carl Icahn's new seats on the Yahoo board. Now, a source tells Kara Swisher that Miller is "one of the top outside candidates on the list" to head Microsoft's new Online Services division. Maybe everyone can stop moaning about the way Bewkes handled Miller's dismissal now?

The Charles Schwab Corporation has predictably named its president, Walt Bettinger, to succeed its eponymous founder as CEO. Bettinger, like Schwab, is a scrappy entrepreneur, or so the canned corporate biography has it; he founded a company at the age of 22, which Schwab later bought. Not mentioned in Bettinger's bio: A court case involving a Walter W. Bettinger II and Laura Bettinger. In 2005, this Walter tried to get a $6,000/mo. child-support payment to Laura reduced, in part because the value of her Schwab account had increased. If that's the same Walt Bettinger, Schwab shareholders should be impressed: He may not have kept the marriage intact, but he successfully retained his ex-wife as a customer.

Motorola has sued Mike Fenger, the former head of Motorola's mobile gadgets for Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Fenger allegedly broke a two-year noncompete agreement by jumping to Apple to run global sales for the's iPhone in March. “He cannot perform his duties for Apple without inevitably disclosing Motorola’s trade secrets,” says the lawsuit, which aims to keep Fenger away from Apple and other mobile makers for two years. Trade secrets? Here's a more honest appraisal: If Fenger did so well selling the Moto Q, imagine what he'll do given an iPhone.

Little has been heard from Slingshot Labs, the startup "incubator" News Corp. formed in February, in the months since its creation. The $15 million fund for spinoff ventures did succeed in keeping MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe in place: We hear that he made it a quid pro quo before signing a new, lucrative contract with Rupert Murdoch. He's not the only MySpace employee Slingshot played a part in keeping down in Los Angeles. We hear Nick Granado, a top engineer behind MySpace's iPhone version, first flirted with a job at Facebook, then worked briefly at Imeem, before getting lured back with a gig at Slingshot.

Whatever side you're on, everyone agrees that Twitter's problems with downtime come down to one man: Blaine Cook. Cook's advocates claim he was hobbled from fixing the site by incompetent managers; Cook's detractors say his decisions as Twitter's chief architect led to its frequent outages. We'd heard he left Twitter with plans to relocate to the U.K. Instead, we've learned, he took a job at Yahoo's Brickhouse, the troubled San Francisco office meant to incubate new projects. He's believed to be working for Chad Dickerson, who recently listed a position for a software engineer experienced in the Ruby programming language — one of Cook's specialties.

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.

Why so gloomy, VMware investors? The company's stock drop, while likely driven more by the virtualization software maker's newly slenderized forecasts and the resignation of its founder, seems like a slap in the face to incoming CEO Paul Maritz. And that would be a shame, since VMware is now getting one of the princes of the software world as its boss — and just in time, as it's facing tough competition from Microsoft, where Maritz used to work.

Has Palm run out of Apple engineers to poach? Or has Steve Jobs's intimidation campaign proven effective? Whatever the reason, Palm's latest hire seems smart: Matias Duarte, the designer of the user interface for the Sidekick and Helio's Ocean.

Doug Field, described as "the driving force behind Segway" on the company's customer forums, is leaving Segway for Apple, where his role will be "a VP of product design" according to a Segway coworker. (Just nosy: If Field is not the VP of product design, but a VP, then how many vice presidents of product design does the company have?) A few years ago, Steve Jobs slammed the Segway as "this incredibly innovative machine but it looks very traditional," and challenged Field to design "things that would make you shit in your pants." Will Field make good on that? Video or it didn't happen, Doug.

So you know how in Sex and the City: The Movie, Carrie Bradshaw interviews, like, a bazillion young women trying to find a personal assistant before finally deciding on the sassy, "urban," but safe Jennifer Hudson? No? OK, well, if you saw the movie it was you'd know it was such an ordeal. And then you'd have sympathy for famous reporter and author Sarah Lacy — who, like Bradshaw, just found herself a personal assistant and sent a Twitter message about it last night. She writes:

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.

Outgoing Google CFO George Reyes might have been called an "idiot" behind his back, but in the immortal words of the Wu Tang Clan's Method Man, "Cash rules everything around me, C.R.E.A.M. get the money, dolla dolla bill y'all." Having already cashed in $259.6 million in Google stock, Reyes has been selling down his pool of options from 51,750 since announcing his retirement and still holds 10,000 at a strike price of only $5. Though Google's stock has dipped in that time, there's good reason to believe Reyes cashed in a total of $300 million in shares, options, bonuses and salary since he started at the company. Which makes incoming CFO Patrick Pichette's $10 million over four years in the offer letter below look like a bargain. Not that Pichette's complaining — given seven days to consider the offer, he signed it the same day he received it.

Patrick Pichette, the new Google CFO who's bringing his years of monopoly management experience from Bell Canada, will make at least $9,569,686 — plus benefits — if he sticks around for four years and hits all of his bonus targets. And that doesn't include increases in the value of stock grants or the sale of any options after they've vested in 2012. That's according to the numbers on his offer sheet, which was obtained by the Mercury News. The catch? The deal hinges on the Canadian national's ability to get a work visa for the United States. We have a feeling the dapper Oxford grad won't have the trouble that, say, an Indian IT professional might in securing an H-1B or similar specialized allowance. After the jump, a breakdown of Pichette's compensation package. [Ed. Note: As commenter van_line points out, Canadian national can apply for a TN visa, which can be renewed yearly. However, Google can sponsor Pichette for a "green card" which would allow permanent residency.]

George Reyes, Google's current CFO, announced his retirement last August. But he won't be getting the office party and the gold watch until nearly a year later, when Patrick Pichette, formerly president of operations at Bell Canada, assumes the position on August 12th. Pichette also has experience working for top management consulting firm McKinsey & Company where he worked with North American telecoms. Pichette only has an MA, no PhD, but it is from Oxford. He'll be wandering the Googleplex as of August 1st, giving him some time to acclimatize to the local cult before taking over the company's financials. Full release after the jump.

You have to hand it to Google, because thanks to them the food is only getting better for hungry cube-dwellers trapped on expansive campuses. Former Google food director John Dickman has been hired by Apple, and I can only imagine how Steve Jobs must have felt about the company's second-rate cafeteria status — as he considers himself the premier tastemaker in the Valley. Even Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook has Google-level cuisine, and that kid wears shower shoes outdoors. [FoodGal] (Photo by System One Gang)

Kara Swisher's camera briefly caught departing Yahoo executive Qi Lu Tuesday night smiling next to a laughing David Sze, the Greylock Partners venture capitalist who loves to talk up his seat as a board observer at Facebook. But she now admits she didn't recognize him at the time. What's the significance of Lu sitting down with Sze? Lu might be up for a job as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Greylock, or with one of Sze's portfolio companies. "I may do it again," Sze joked with Swisher, about hiring Lu's colleague as an entrepreneur-in-residence. Was that why Lu was smiling?

While former Yahoo database engineer Jeremy Zawodny might prefer FriendFeed to Twitter, he'll be commuting to the offices of Craigslist from his home in San Jose. He was recruited via email by CTO Eric Scheide while still at Yahoo, and met with founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster before leaving Sunnyvale for the Inner Sunset. He'll help maintain and expand the company's ever-growing MySQL database. Because the last thing someone trying to sell a baby needs is for a PHP mysql_fetch_array() call to fail when posting their ad. (Photo by David Weekly)

We make enough fun of old-media cranks making their way to exciting, new old-media opportunities. What about new-media mavens moving laterally to a new, new-media ladder? That's the direction tech reporter Farhad Manjoo is moving in, with his jump from Salon to Slate.

Yahoos are still buzzing about Jeff Weiner's departure for the world of venture capital. Before he left, many of his coworkers thought he was a shoo-in for a CEO gig at Facebook. Now that he's an entrepreneur-in-residence jointly at Accel Partners and Greylock Partners — both investors in Facebook — the conspiracy theorists have changed their patter: Weiner's just in a holding pen until Accel and Greylock can boot founder Mark Zuckerberg, install Weiner as CEO, and take the company public. "Zuck is definitely out ... it's just a matter of time. It's clear as day," one tipster writes. Clear as mud, rather. It makes sense that Yahoos, bitter at Facebook's success and eager to have one of their own deliver a comeuppance to Zuckerberg, would be circulating this rumor. But here's what they don't know about Jeff Weiner and Mark Zuckerberg.

The latest Valley guessing game: Who will be Yahoo's next CEO? Jerry Yang's days seem numbered; if he does not win reelection to the board at Yahoo's annual shareholder meeting, now pushed back to August, he will almost certainly have to step down as boss, too. Overeager to throw a name out — likely in the hopes of currying favor if one of their guesses turns out to be right — the likes of Kara Swisher and Michael Arrington are suggesting a series of candidates. Dan Lyons gets it right in a blog post, writing as Fake Jerry Yang: None of them are likely to fly. None are likely even to be interested in the job.