Patrick Pichette won’t be coming into a pre-IPO Google, with billions of dollars in stock options waiting to be claimed. The former Bell Canada executive will step into a company with a globally recognized brand and a dominant position in its industry.

Google disclosed Pichette’s selection after the markets closed on Wall Street. Previously president of operations at Bell Canada, Pichette takes the role of senior VP and CFO with the search advertising company.

Pichette comes into Google on August 1, with formal assumption of duties scheduled for August 12. Along with his Bell Canada experience, Pichette worked for the McKinsey consulting firm on North American telecom issues.

“On behalf of all my colleagues at Google, we welcome Patrick and, once again, thank George Reyes for all that he’s done for Google,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a statement. Shame he didn’t mention why it took Google ten months to find a replacement for the retiring Reyes, who probably wouldn’t mind knowing that himself.

Google’s stock is currently sitting at $689.96.  Its market cap is $215.85 billion.  And these are the sorts of things that one might expect to draw applicants like crazy.  But there are some good reasons as to why the CFO position is still available.

After all, CFOs probably aren’t the sort of people who just want to roll around in piles of money – they want to ration and control it.  At Google, where a few million dollars seems to get spent on "this or that" once a week, control isn’t exactly a part of corporate culture.

Also, as Wendy Tanaka pointed out, "Clearly the financial incentives for joining Google in 2008 with its stock price in the stratosphere are less compelling than during its pre-IPO period when Reyes joined."

We’ll see what Google can turn up, then.  Since "[t]he company hoped it could find a new CFO in a few months," according to Tanaka, this could soon become a source of corporate embarrassment; it was bad enough when, in July, YouTube’s CFO ran off to join Facebook.

Google CFO To Pop Golden Parachute

A familiar voice will be missing from Google’s conference calls around earnings time in 2008. George Reyes plans to leave the Googleplex after helping the company move a new CFO into the position, Google announced after the markets closed today.

Reyes will leave behind his old Sun Microsystems workmate, Eric Schmidt. When Schmidt was Sun CTO, Reyes served in a variety of finance positions for the technology company.

“As Google’s CFO, George successfully navigated our innovative IPO, the regulatory demands of Sarbanes-Oxley, and the management challenges of scaling a global finance organization. Though we fully appreciate his decision to step back from active management, we’ll miss his thoughtfulness, good humor and wisdom,” said Schmidt.

Reyes has been with Google for five and a half years. Over that time, Google has moved into a dominant position in the search and online advertising industries. Their IPO price of $85 has soared to today’s close of $506.40.