Top Googlers, overheard at a holiday party, chattered about Mayer's departure as a matter of if, not when. And in some ways, it's surprising she's stayed as long as she has.

First of all, she's wealthy. That "19th employee" bit is code, within Silicon Valley, for "rich"; the earlier an employee joins a startup which succeeds, the more money they make. With Google, which is still worth $96 billion after its stock tumble, that translates into hundreds of millions of dollars for Mayer, who owns a penthouse apartment in San Francisco's Four Seasons, another home in outrageously pricey Palo Alto, and a large (if questionably tasteful) art collection, including original glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly. A couture hound, she once paid $60,000 for a lunch with Oscar de la Renta, and she owns part of I Dream of Cake, a "cake gallery" in North Beach, as a way of indulging her pastry fetish.

So she's already made her money. And her career? Mayer, who joined Google in 1999 straight out of Stanford's graduate computer-science department, rose quickly through the ranks. A stint dating Google cofounder Larry Page surely didn't hurt her chances, but she won promotions first to director and then to vice president mostly by dint of a schedule of robotic overwork and an obsession with keeping the search engine's homepage sparse and free of clutter. Her looks — blonde, Midwestern, unusually attractive for Silicon Valley — helped her win magazine covers. And she won fans among Google's tight-knit top management, even as underlings groaned about her scattered, arbitrary management style.

But the lack of turnover in Google's excuive ranks has hurt her chances of rising farther. Jonathan Rosenberg, a six-year veteran of Google who's close to its founders and a regular on its quarterly earnings calls with Wall Street analysts, would be hard to displace. While Mayer photographs well, she's an awkward public speaker — that awful, offputting giggle! And really, she already runs the world's most successful search engine, which continues to steal share from well-funded rivals. What else could she do at Google to match that?

It's a good time to leave: Mayer just got engaged to Zack Bogue, a property manager and lawyer who, importantly, looks good on his fiancée's arm at the San Francisco society events she favors. She'll no doubt be courted by venture capitalists, too, to run companies. But if I had to bet, I'd put my money on her returning to Stanford, where she now teaches computer-science classes in her spare time. Academia is the environment most like the comforting cocoon of Google, where she's spent her entire working life. From a professor, a nerdy laugh is almost expected.

As vice president for search products and user experience, she's guarded against clutter on Google's homepage. And Google continues to seize market share from rivals who can't grasp the obvious lessons of Mayer's perfectionism. Memo to Marissa: We actually like you better when you're being bossy, not ostentatiously girlish. More tirades, fewer cupcakes, please.

The regularity with which she appears in the society pages is astonishing, particularly for a Google exec (where this sort of public display of materialism is considered very ungoogley). And despite the materialism, she never manages to pull it off well (this is a common after-work look for her where she pairs a funky/loud top with standard black dress pants, and it rarely works). At least she isn't wearing the same outfit as Sloan.

All true, dear tipster, but last we checked, Marissa has hundreds of millions of dollars in Google stock, a penthouse apartment at the Four Seasons and the nouveau-riche gumption to rent an entire movie theater for her birthday. And we don't. Can the rest of you come up with a better caption? Do so in the comments. The best one will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: kfury, for "Shhh! I'm reading about the keynote!" (Photo by Drew Altizer via SFLuxe)

Quelle horreur: Both Barnett and Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president for cupcake-recipe spreadsheets, wore the same blue Oscar de la Renta dress with a green-leaf pattern along the hem! Also, it seems that arm-candy real-estate manager Zack Bogue is trying to tear Valleywag editor Owen Thomas's affections away from stubblicious Flickr developer Cal Henderson by sporting some ursine facial fur. Though my guess is he was just too lazy to shave — that the top button and not the middle button is buttoned on his pinstriped jacket says "sloppy."

(Photos by Drew Altizer)

But throw enough money around and you, too, can pretend to have taste! Worked for the Gap's Donald Fisher, who's opening his own ironically named Contemporary Art Museum of the Presidio (or "CAMP") because he didn't want SFMOMA to meddle with his precious collection. No wonder Google chose the Gap building with its godawful Richard Serra sculpture for the company's newly opened San Francisco office. (Original photo by Steve Rhodes)