Quincy Smith will serve as CEO and Neil Ashe will serve as president at CBS Interactive in the wake of the now-completed acquisition of CNET by CBS. And those are just the juicy meatballs atop a tangled mess of management noodles after executives from the two companies were tossed in the pot. News.com editor Dan Farber, however, didn't even make the menu, notes presumptive CNET killer Michael Arrington, who presents the internal memos emailed to CBS and CNET employees. Farber might have been prescient in posting a photo of early CNETeer Ryan Seacrest to his preview of the Web site's new redesign — the CBS News demographic is older than the silver-maned Farber, and CBS head honcho Les Moonves played up sports and entertainment ahead of news at the new company.

How'd the CBS-CNET merger go down? Without much involvement from CBS Interactive head Quincy Smith, it turns out. Most of the negotiations with CNET CEO Neil Ashe went through Fredric Reynolds, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of CBS. Occaisionally, CBS CEO Leslie Moonves stepped in to move things along. That and more surprises in our timeline of the deal, below.

Under the wing of CBS, CNET CEO Neil Ashe will continue to earn his $700,000 salary. He'll also get a 100 percent bonus and, in the next 10 days, a long-term stock award of "not less than $1,625,000 per year," according to a 8-K CNET filed with the SEC yesterday. CNET CFO Zander Lurie will get such a stock award worth "not less than $1,000,000 per year."

CNET has been eyed by Quincy Smith, CBS's hyperacquisitive online chief, long before he sealed a $1.8 billion deal to buy the company. As a banker at Allen & Co., CNET was his client. "At one point, he wrote this major presentation about how valuable content was," a tipster tells us. "The single example in it was CNET. It was basically his only idea." An unfair dig? Perhaps. There is little like CNET on the market — a pure play on professional online content worth $1.8 billion? It can't be found. But the lack of a direct competitor may have also been CNET's undoing — the mixed blessing that brought it under attack by activist investors and led it to CBS's waiting arms.

Myopic Wall Street often uses a microscope when it should use a telescope. The rot at Web publisher CNET goes far beyond the particulars of one quarter. Forget the question of by how many cents per share it missed earnings expectations, and ask yourself this: Why isn't CNET gushing cash? Its established brands in tech news and reviews should be printing money. No wonder hedge fund Jana Partners is trying to unseat its board. I'm not sure Jana has any plan, other than throwing the boardroom rascals out. So what's the problem, and what to do?

This made me LOL for real: In this post about the memo CNET CEO Neil Ashe sent out regarding CNETs recent layoffs, commenter random_play penned a beauty:

"That's life," commenter danmiller3 wrote after we told you about how CNET laid off an employee recovering from cancer. Turns out he was more right than he knew. A new CNET tipster tells that one of his laid-off colleagues lost his job just two months after his wife gave birth. "Fuck Neil Ashe," our source says. He says CNET employees are "all half hoping" private equity firm Jana Partners — which already has a 14.9 percent stake in the company — "takes over and fixes the platform and other underlying legacy issues from when CNET was a cable syndicator instead of trying to create tons of new fledgling brands."

CNET CEO Neil Ashe sent this all-hands memo to explain to his charges the changes that CNET is making to be successful. The memo looks like it came straight out of a Dilbert strip. Ashe says CNET must "embrace change" and "drive greater efficiencies in the business." In addition, a management task force has evaluated CNET's "organization and resource alignment." How about writing a memo in actual English? That seems easier — and a better way to spend everyone's time. At least Jerry Yang's memos had that funny e.e. cummings-esque no-capital-letters charm going for them. Ashe's anodyne euphemisms? They make me glad I don't work at CNET — or any other huge conglomerate for that matter.

You may recall CNET Networks sold Webshots to American Greetings yesterday at the fire-sale price of $45 million. Well, it's not stopping there. In an effort to build the "media company of the future," CEO Neil Ashe said, "it is also important to sell some of our properties and we won't shy from it." Important in the we-lost-$16-million-in-the-third-quarter kind of way. Remember when CNET had a monopoly on tech news and reviews online? Now it's holding a slew of Baltic and Continental Avenues, like Search.com and MySimon. Time to trade those in for some hotels on your more rentable domains, Neil.

Reformed stock promoter Henry Blodget has a suggestion for CNET: Take it private, with the help of former CEO Shelby Bonnie. An excellent idea. From all we hear, morale couldn't be lower at the tech-news portal. And current CEO Neil Ashe isn't helping matters. His idea of a pep speech? "We should be more like Al Qaeda," he told an assembly of employees. You mean, hated by everyone on the planet? Judging from how his underlings feel, Ashe is getting a head start on that project inside his own offices. Cheer up, Neil! You just won the latest prize for being a Silicon Valley Tool.

CNET employees loved CEO Shelby Bonnie, according to the San Francisco Chronicle (and a CNETter confirms to me that there was loyalty since he'd been at the company since Day One). So it was a shock when he seemingly fired himself this week over overseeing improperly backdated stock options.