Jerry Yang, the soft-spoken chief executive of Yahoo, rarely becomes animated, at least in public. But ask him about his company’s lackluster performance by the past year, and he pounds the table — albeit ever so lightly — punctuating his reply with a dose of impatience.

“We have a plan,” Yang said during an interview at Yahoo’s headquarters. “We want to grow the business by a three-to five-year period. We are executing against that plan. And we are still doing

that despite all the stuff that’s happened to us.”

All the stuff that’s happened, of course, refers to the turbulence since Jan. 31, when Microsoft made an unsolicited takeover bid. The conventional wisdom was that Microsoft and its hard-charging chief executive, Steven Ballmer, would quickly swallow the company.

But Yang has emerged as an unlikely survivor — at least for now. He beat back Ballmer, whose offers to buy all or […]

Orginal post by Top Tech News