SUNNYVALE, Calif.

JERRY YANG, the soft-spoken chief executive of Yahoo, rarely becomes animated, at least in public. But ask him about his company’s lackluster performance over the past year, and he will begin to pound the table  albeit ever so lightly  punctuating his answer with a dose of impatience.

“We have a plan,” Mr. Yang said in an interview last week at Yahoo’s headquarters here. “We want to grow the business over a three- to five-year period. We are executing against that plan. And we are still doing that despite all the stuff that’s happened to us.”

All the stuff that’s happened, of course, refers to the turbulence that has engulfed Yahoo since Jan. 31, when Microsoft made an unsolicited takeover bid. At the time, conventional wisdom was that Microsoft and its hard-charging C.E.O., Steven A. Ballmer, would quickly swallow the company.

But Mr. Yang has emerged as an unlikely survivor  at least for now. He beat back Mr. Ballmer, whose offers to buy all or part of Yahoo were considered inadequate by Mr. Yang and his board. And he rebuffed Carl C. Icahn, the activist shareholder, who tried to seize control of Yahoo but settled for three seats on an expanded board.