Are Yang and Co. ready for trench warfare?
By BELINDA RABANO Jerry Yang once compared his job as the co-founder of Yahoo!, the world’s top Internet destination, to that of a lowly railroad worker. The Net, he said, is a “huge, fast-moving train.” And while that train rushes forward, Yang and his fellow Yahooites “are just half a mile ahead, laying the track so that it doesn’t go off the cliff.” Yang’s been working on the railroad, make no mistake. The tracks run right through the heart of Asia. Notwithstanding all the dust and din raised by this year’s Internet explosion the Hong Kong shell companies that raised buckets of cash on nothing but new economy rhetoric, the rise of genuine Chinese portals with millions of viewers but not a red cent in black ink there is one inescapable, overarching truth about who rules Asia’s Internet. Yahoo does. Since setting up shop in the region in 1996, the same year it became one of the first publicly traded Internet companies, Yahoo has established itself as the No. 1 or No. 2 website in almo
