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More Than Just Microsoft and Yahoo
不僅僅是微軟和雅虎
Rather as John McCain cannot be displeased to have seen Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama fighting it out, Google has for the past three months enjoyed watching its only two serious rivals, Yahoo! and Microsoft, tear each other to pieces. Yahoo!, once an internet pioneer, has fallen far behind Google in web search and related advertising. Microsoft still dominates desktop computing but lags behind Google as software moves online. So Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's boss, dared ask Yahoo!: what would be wrong with making, if not exactly a dream team, at least a joint effort out of it?
一如約翰麥凱恩很樂意看到希拉里跟奧巴馬在決一死戰一樣，谷歌在過去的3個月里也在盡情地欣賞著其最強勁的競爭對手——雅虎和微軟，爭得你死我活。雅虎曾是互聯網領域的領軍企業，但是現在已在搜索引擎以及相關廣告上遠遠落后于谷歌了。微軟則依舊主導著臺式電腦操作系統，但是隨著軟件在線化，微軟則表現出不敵谷歌的勢頭。因此微軟的老總史蒂夫巴默理直氣壯的跟雅虎表示：即使不是完美的夢幻組合，至少也是共同努力的團隊，這樣的聯合何錯之有？
But on May 3rd, after a frustrating marathon of meetings, Mr. Ballmer walked away. He had raised his offer for Yahoo! from an initial $44.6 billion on January 31st to about $47.5 billion, some 70% more than Yahoo!'s value at the time of the opening bid. Jerry Yang, Yahoo!'s co-founder and boss, wanted at least $5 billion more. Mr. Ballmer wrote him a bitter letter saying that "you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table." Wall Street's verdict, on May 5th, was to cut Yahoo!'s value to $34 billion.
5月3日，在經過一場讓人失望的馬拉松式的會議后，巴默放棄了收購。他的報價從1月31日的446億美元提高到了475億美元，這比在最開始競標時雅虎的市值高出70%。雅虎的聯合創始人和老板楊致遠則覺得至少再多加50億美元。巴默在給楊致遠的一封信中挖苦地寫道你和你的股東們沒有在談判桌上把握這個千載難逢的機會。而華爾街給出的最終報價則是在5月5日，雅虎的市值降至340億美元。
That the sell-off was not even worse primarily reflects the possibility that a deal may yet happen. Another software company, Oracle, recently dropped a bid for a smaller rival, BEA Systems, after its board rejected the offer, but eventually had its way after BEA's angry shareholders forced their board back into negotiations and a sale. Mr. Ballmer's farewell letter to Yahoo!, by recapitulating the negotiations in all their embarrassing detail, provides just the sort of fodder for Yahoo!'s investors to order Mr. Yang to resume talks.
股價的下跌并沒有想象的那么糟，主要顯示出這筆交易還有再談的可能。另一家軟件公司——甲骨文，最近放棄收購一個較小的競爭對手——BEA系統，因為BEA的董事拒絕了對方的出價。但是最終在BEA憤怒的股東們的壓力下，BEA公司董事會又回到談判桌前與甲骨文談判并達成了交易。在巴默對雅虎的告別信中詳細列出了談判中每一個令人尷尬的細節，這替準備給楊致遠施壓而迫使其回到談判桌前雅虎的投資者們提供了有力武器。
Mr. Ballmer took particular pains to criticize Yahoo!'s readiness to "make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft." By this he means Mr. Yang's apparent plan to outsource Yahoosearch-advertising technology to, of all people, Google. In a purely mathematical sense, this could indeed make Yahoo! somewhat more valuable. Google is better than Yahoo! or Microsoft at placing relevant ads next to search results and collects more in revenue for each resulting mouse click.
巴默不厭其煩地指責雅虎的行為只會使其成為不受微軟歡迎的收購目標。于此他的言下之意是：楊致遠的計劃顯然是將雅虎的搜索廣告業務出乎意料地外包給谷歌。純粹地從數學概念上來看的話,這樣做確實令雅虎的市值有所上升。谷歌在搜索結果中嵌人相關廣告并且從每次鼠標點擊里獲取更多利潤。在這一點上，谷歌比雅虎和微軟做得更好。
Yet it is a bizarre tactic. The history of Yahoo! during this decade is of trying, failing, and trying again to catch up with Google in search advertising. Its first big failure was not to bid high enough to buy Google outright. Its next attempt, in 2003, was to buy Overture, the company that pioneered search advertising, but by then Google was pulling ahead. An outsourcing deal with Google was considered and rejected. For the past two years Yahoo! has invested oodles in a project called Panama that was meant, again, to catch Google.
然而這個戰術依舊讓人覺得奇怪。在近10年里雅虎屢戰屢敗，屢敗屢戰，就是想要在搜索廣告領域趕上谷歌。他們的第一個重大錯誤就是沒有出足夠高的價格直接把谷歌買下來。另一次嘗試是在2003年，雅虎買下搜索廣告領域的先鋒公司Overture，但那時谷歌在該領域已經是一馬當先了。雅虎的一項同谷歌的外包業務的交易在經過商討后也被拒絕了。在過去的兩年里雅虎大量投資在一個名為“巴拿馬”的項目上，最終目的還是為了追趕谷歌。
Presumably Yahoo! has been exerting itself so because it believes that the advertising technology is, along with search, the source of competitive advantage in the internet era. That is certainly what Microsoft believes, which is why it bought aQuantive，an online-advertising specialist, and built its own search-ads platform, called adCenter. What Yahoo! and Microsoft lack is volume-in the number of both searches and advertisers bidding to place ads. Teaming up would help to address that problem; but a capitulation by Yahoo! to Google would merely invite antitrust regulators to look at Google's dominance.
據推測雅虎認為廣告技術和搜索技術是互聯網時代競爭優勢的源泉，所以他們才竭盡全力去達到這些目標。微軟肯定也是這么想的，于是微軟買下在線廣告專家aQuantive，建立起自己的搜索廣告平臺，稱之為adCenter。雅虎和微軟缺少的都是數量——參與搜索量和發布廣告的廣告商的量。合作也許能夠對解決這個問題有所幫助，但是雅虎對谷歌的投降不過只是引來反壟斷監管者對于谷歌控制領域的關注。
Mr. Yang could merge Yahoo! with AOL, the web portal of Time Warner, but AOL already outsources its search ads to Google and would be no help at all in catching the leader. Asserting, as Mr. Yang does, that Yahoo! all by itself could become "the starting point" on the internet, and its advertising powerhouse, rings hollow.
楊致遠可以將雅虎同美國在線合并（時代華納的網絡門戶），但是美國在線已經把自己的搜索廣告業務外包給了谷歌，所以這對于雅虎趕超谷歌沒有任何幫助。楊致遠斷言雅虎憑自己的力量可成為網絡的“起點”，但是它的廣告業務，依然是名過于實。
