Will the last person to leave corporate America for the Net please turn out the lights?

This week's headlines -- like the Wall Street Journal's Wednesday lead story, "As Web Riches Beckon, Disney Ranks Become a Poacher's Paradise" -- have made it sound like the ranks of big U.S. companies are being decimated by the online boom. But is there really a brain drain to the Web? Where exactly are the brains in this picture, anyway?

Dobbs, whose "Moneyline" is a big hit for CNN and who had been president of CNNfn, may well have a blast running the new outer-space information site Space.com. But the site doesn't exactly "leverage" Dobbs' "personal brand" in the field of financial journalism. And his departure seems more the result of a personal feud with CNN president Rick Kaplan than any kind of profound conversion to the Net religion. One thing the Internet industry indubitably provides media veterans is a safe haven to run to in the event of a corporate falling-out: There's always a site somewhere that needs a CEO.

Winebaum is leaving Disney, according to the Journal and other reports, because he wants to run his own company -- and because he covets the big equity stakes only available in Internet start-up-land. All true, no doubt. But it's also true that he leaves Disney at the very moment that it's finally admitting the flaws in its misconceived Go.com strategy. The concept of aggregating all of the megacorporation's Web properties under a single umbrella site with a new name doesn't seem to be working any better for Disney than it did for Time Warner with Pathfinder.

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Similarly, the most prominent defection in the recent wave of departures from Microsoft is that of Nathan Myhrvold, the company's chief technology officer and Bill Gates' advanced-technology guru. Myhrvold's "leave of absence" is to allow him to pursue a bunch of "personal interests."

At first glance you might think, gee, this has got to hurt the company, to be losing such a key figure. Then again, Myhrvold is the man at Microsoft whose job was to foresee things like the rise of the Internet -- and he blew that in a big way. No doubt he is, as widely reported, brilliant. But it's hard to see what Microsoft will lose with his departure -- other than the occasional thumb-sucking white-paper memo that can be strategically leaked to the New Yorker.

Of course, there's no question that the lure of fast riches in newborn Net companies is sucking some talent from the ranks of traditional companies into the so-called New Economy. But Myhrvold and the other Microsoft execs who've left in droves of late certainly aren't chasing equity; their stock holdings are already ample enough to fund the purchase of private jets and personal islands. And Disney was presumably not paying Winebaum starvation wages.

What's happening in the Net job economy today isn't ultimately driven by money, but rather by what you might call the big-company bullshit factor.

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