Addressing the audience at a meeting of the Advertising Club, Yang outlined his view of the Net economy and the shape of things to come. "By 2003, $1 trillion of B2C e-commerce is expected on the Net, and just half of that will be out of the US," stresses Yang, thereby rationalizing Yahoo!'s move to establish a presence in the "Internet-populated" regions of the world.

Dwelling on the shape of B2C in the years to come, pure Net plays and otherwise, Yang feels both have a place at any given time. "The questions Internet businesses should really be asking are: Do I make a difference to people's lives?

Am I doing things that influence consumers everyday? These have to be the focus areas for business on the Net," stresses Yang.

Replying to a question on whether it was B2B or B2C that was likely to rule the roost, Yang said: "Investors and others may look for a theme or a pattern in the Internet business, but honestly neither B2B nor B2C is going away. The Net is going to get more ubiquitous than ever, and both businesses will have to follow parallel tracks."

Explaining Yahoo!'s move to establish a local presence in various countries across the world, Yang said: "We need to be in all Internet-populated centres. We cannot be just an American company, we need to be a local company doing local business everywhere."

"The battle for the next five years is not how many customers we get, but how many we keep. Are we doing the things that people need? Are we getting indispensible? These are questions that we ask ourselves continously," he stresses.

Yang also dismisses the theory that more Internet companies are going out of bsuiness now than ever before. "It's just that they are more visible now. The mortality rate remains just what it was a few years ago. It's just that these companies are going public faster than they should and, thereby, attract more attention" he surmises.

Yahoo! at last count (March 2000) had 140 million users, over a 125 million of them in its registered user base, and over 22 properties worldwide. And finally, Yang threw some light on the quirky name for the portal he co-founded as a student out of Stanford - "Yahoo! stands for an indecent, uncivilised character in Gullivers Travels, and that's what we thought of ourselves back then," he states matter of factly!