Jerry Yang, Yahoo chief executive, spoke emphatically about wanting to remain in that role, in an interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Following market rumours that he was about to quit earlier in the day, he told interviewer John Battelle:
“I’m passionate about Yahoo, I’m passionate about its people, I’m passionate about the mission and I’m willing to go through walls to do it, and that’s the reason I’m there [as CEO],” he said.
Yang was also critical of the Justice department, which had just scuppered Yahoo’s search advertising deal with Google.
“I really thought that the government in this case does not understand our industry, they have a market definition that I think is too narrow and I think things like this tend to have unintended consequences for our entire industry.”
The internet company’s chief also said he had wanted to do a deal to sell Yahoo to Microsoft in May, but “it was not meant to be.”
“I don’t have an ego about remaining independent. At the end of the day, we believed that there was a deal to be done, we were not that far apart, they walked away because they saw something else that they didn’t want to do.
“And we went back to them and we said even at the price [of $33 a share] you were suggesting, are you guys willing to do the deal, and they said no, so I don’t know what else we could have done.”
With Yahoo closing at $13.92 on Wednesday, maybe now the price is right for Steve Ballmer to reconsider.
(Photograph copyright James Duncan Davidson)
