Jerry Yang Talks About Microsoft, Google and more at Web 2.0

[Web 2.0] In a conversation with John Battelle, Jerry Yang still sees Yahoo’s search engine as a “great marketplace” that will continue to improve. As for what happened with the Google deal (that fell apart yesterday), he thinks that the government does not understand what the market is and that it has a “narrow definition of it”.

After founding Yahoo 15 years ago, Jerry Yang came back as CEO to do what it takes to make yahoo better. He mentions the advertising platform and went on to say that he does not regret anything ” although it was not the most fun thing to go through”.

On Y! Open Strategy (Y!OS): Jerry says that Y!OS is different from Facebook, it lets developer access what was once only available only from within Yahoo . Ultimately, this will lead to a “new consumer experience”.

John Battelle: You just bought Flickr three years ago. It seemed that yahoo bought all the cool things, why did you stop?

Jerry Yang: We bought 40 companies. Perhaps they are not as visible as Flickr or Delicious. A good example is Zembra (an open-source email and calendar company that competes with Google apps and Microsoft office).