Yang on Yang

Yahoo and Microsoft are both open to discussions, but merging appears to be off the table at this stage of the game.

In the wake of the breakdown of the Microsoft takeover talks, Yang defended his one year on the job as CEO and said he believed he was the right person to lead Yahoo into a new era of growth, even if the company must invest heavily to do so.

"I do think I am the best person to lead Yahoo," Yang said.

He compared conflicting media reports about who was responsible for the failure to reach a deal to a romance gone bad: "It's like you break up with your girlfriend in high school ... it pretty quickly becomes 'he said, she said'."

Yang reiterated what the company has been saying over the past year: that it "has a lot of work to do" and needs to make investments to reach management's vision of a new Yahoo.

Its strategy involves tapping the underlying social connections of its roughly 500 million monthly visitors to become a "must buy" for advertisers.

One audience member complained to Yang she was having a hard time finding Yahoo mobile services on U.S. smartphones. She was apologetic for drifting off the topic of Microsoft.

Yang was only too happy to answer: "Of all the questions I have been getting for the past four months, I am glad to get a technical question."

(Editing by Leslie Gevirtz and Lincoln Feast)

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