Ash Patel is something of a fixture at Yahoo. He's been at the company since 1996 - just a couple of years after it was founded - and in his time he's held more titles than Roger Federer.
These days his business card bears the legend "executive vice-president, platforms and infrastructure". It might be a clunky moniker, but at least his underlying task is straightforward: it's his job to turn Yahoo inside out.
Under pressure from all sides, the company is beginning to embark on a radical programme of product launches that will expose the skeleton of Yahoo's services so that web developers can build on it. This will, they believe, make Yahoo a vital part of the internet's ecosystem and (they hope) unlock the company's hidden potential in the process.
