The word from a plugged-in Sunnyvale source: Bartz, who has been on the job less than three weeks, was instantly suspicious of Yahoo's attempt to ship its own branded cell phone. But she got the proof she needed, according to our source, when she saw her daughter play with a prototype of the smartphone preloaded with Yahoo services. Layne, now a junior at the University of Southern California, immediately put the One Phone away and switched back to her own cell phone.

The fallout, our source says: a top Yahoo mobile executive left, and others may have been fired.

A Yahoo flack issued a non-denial denial, flatly insisting the anecdote "has no basis in fact" and then declining to answer further questions about the phone project. As for the firings, she said she had no knowledge of any firings or staff departures. Motorola, and AT&T did not respond to inquiries on the matter.

But the mere fact that this anecdote is making the rounds, though, bodes well for Bartz. It may strike some detractors as an executive making flip decisions. Another way to look at it: Bartz is going by her gut and exercising a clear vision for what Yahoo will and won't do. When she was hired, many expressed doubts about Bartz's boring background in enterprise software sales. It may turn out, after all, that she is the product nazi Yahoo has long needed.

Update: AP's photo library actually gave us a photo of another Greg Brown altogether, taken for a story on voicemail etiquette. Having looked at all of the corporate headshots of Motorola's Brown, we're sticking with this guy — he'd probably do a better job running Motorola, too. (Photo by AP/Alan Diaz)

One company which listened, to its detriment, to shareholders was Microsoft. When Bill Gates ran the software company, he liked to keep a year's worth of expenses on hand, in case things went awry. Microsoft is no longer quite so stingy with its cash; it dribbles some out in dividends, and gave shareholders a $32 billion payout a few years back. Good thing it didn't shell out $44 billion for Yahoo; that deal would have left it cash-poor and debt-ridden, at exactly the wrong time. Even so, Microsoft's balance sheet is no longer the most sterling in tech.

So who's got cash on hand? Here are the 10 richest tech companies, from a Yahoo Finance screening. (I left out companies, like IBM, whose cash was matched by equally outsized debts.)

1. China Mobile, $31.0 billion
   China's oil, steel, and finance giants are investing overseas. Why not its leading wireless company? Yes, China censors its citizens. That was a trendy thing to worry about in August 2008.
2. Cisco Systems, $26.2 billion
   Cisco's so proud of its cash pile, its investor-relations chief has blogged about it. If only investors had any confidence in Cisco's bizarre social-network acquisition strategy, which has nothing to do with its fine telecom-equipment assets. Memo to Cisco's M&A team: Just because it has the word "network" in it doesn't mean you have to buy it.
3. Microsoft, $21.2 billion
   The $44 billion Yahoo offer was half in cash, half in stock, which would have strained Microsoft's finances and required it to take on some debt. Good thing it fell through.
4. Apple, $20.7 billion
   In the '90s, Apple almost ran out of money. No danger of that happening soon. Ever-secretive Apple rarely makes big, splashy acquisitions; that could change if the right bargain comes along.
5. Google, $12.7 billion
   A slumping share price may mean more acquisitions done for cash.
6. Intel, $12.0 billion
   Intel's chip factories require billions of dollars in investment; count on Intel to spend its money there, rather than on cute Web companies.
7. Nokia, $10.8 billion
   Like Cisco, Nokia's eager to be more of a Web player. Blogging and lifecasting are particular areas of interest. The cell-phone maker could throw investors a curveball and buy, say, Six Apart, Automattic, or Tumblr.
8. Dell, $9.0 billion
   Dell could have more cash on its hands if it manages to sell its PC factories, a move it's considering as HP chips away at its business. On the shopping list: software and services.
9. Motorola, $7.2 billion
   It's hard to see Motorola being an active acquirer until it figures out what to do with its cell-phone business.
10. Taiwan Semiconductor, $7.0 billion
    AMD's only worth $2.6 billion, and TSMC already makes some chips for it. Why not just buy it?

Sony, Samsung, Motorola and Hitachi have banded together to adopt Amimon's ready-and-shipping wireless HDTV chips for next year's products. Because the products will have no cable jacks, the new gear will sport a conspicuous logo that indicates it will connect to other devices with the same logo. If you want to play pundit, predict a format war between Amimon's WHDI and SiBeam's WirelessHD, which other manufacturers are tinkering with. But if you want to know who will win, Amimon's technology is already shipping and SiBeam's isn't.

As with TWA, Icahn is making a fundamental mistake. He thought that an airline was about airplanes, and he likewise must imagine Yahoo is about websites, or banner ads, or searches. Wrong in both cases. Those businesses aree about people. At TWA, his actions precipitated crippling labor unrest. At Yahoo, the talent won't strike, but it will leave — those who haven't already walked out the door, that is. At Microsoft, too, the thought of taking on all of Yahoo's problems is sparking unease among the executives who would be charged with making a deal work.

Besides Microsoft, it's unclear what Icahn can do for Yahoo, or to Yahoo. Certainly, its board and management need wholesale replacement. Yahoo requires a "product Nazi," one Silicon Valley executive told me, to bust through the company's broken culture of consensus and impose a singular vision on all its efforts. But Icahn is exactly the wrong person to attract that kind of talent. He freely admits he knows nothing about technology; he's just good at opportunism.

As Dan Lyons, writing as Fake Steve Jobs, points out, Icahn's assault will likely start with a character assassination on Jerry Yang, as Icahn did with Motorola CEO Ed Zander, who soon resigned. With Yang's poor performance handling the Microsoft bid, he has sharpened Icahn's knives for him.

Yahoo president Sue Decker should start earning her outsized pay and head this off by taking the lead on handling Icahn. (Yang, the prickly cofounder) is far too tone-deaf to handle such a negotiation.) She should take her cues from former Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons, who played Icahn like a fiddle during his attempted raid on that company; instead of breaking the company up, as Icahn suggested, Parsons arranged for a slightly larger buyback of shares than previously planned.

The lesson from Parsons: The way to handle Icahn is to spend lots of time letting him talk, and then figure out how to pitch something the company was planning to do anyway as his brilliant idea. For Decker, who is widely thought unqualified to be CEO at Yahoo or anywhere else, it will be excellent practice for her future as a perpetual No. 2.

(Photoillustration by Jackson West; photo of Icahn by AP/Mark Lennihan)

After making repeated attempts to contact you via your office, I am forced to write this open letter to publicly air my grievances concerning Motorola.

As I told the company's senior designers at Motorola's 75th anniversary meeting: create something cooler and more expensive than anything else out there, and everyone will want it.

Zander ... seemed to care more about his golf score than running one of America's greatest corporations.

Many believe Ed Zander worked Geoffrey to death, putting the pressure of the fate of the company in his hands ... Ed Zander continued to reap the dividends of Geoffrey's work, and the company made billions in profit from overselling the RAZR. He had the audacity to say "well, maybe Geoffrey should have come up with a better successor to the RAZR," and told me to "wait for big things in 2008." I guess he was right — he got a big golden parachute, and exited out of the company.

Maybe it sounds like I take the downfall of Motorola personally; I do. It was my experience at Motorola, with people like Geoffrey and all of the loyal employees who still remain, that taught me that Corporate America can and should be; now, with people such as Zander and yourself, Motorola symbolizes the worst of Corporate America.

I've been there when Motorola's handset division was brought back from the brink of death 5 years ago; follow my advice, and we can do it again.

Motorola sells 20 times that many phones in a year. No, the real problem is that Samsung has taken market share from it in the U.S., where Motorola dominates, and Nokia is killing it in the developing world. And that's entirely Motorola's fault. Fixated by the high-end smartphones popular in the U.S., Motorola didn't sell enough cheap phones elsewhere. While we debate the relative virtues of locked and unlocked iPhones, billions of people wait to make their first telephone call ever. You can only sell so many phones to The 250 — even if they keep breaking them.