过人性化的特点 就是雅虎的致命弱点

As Marissa Mayer an-nounced the $4.8bn acquisition of Yahoo’s operating business by Verizon, the US telecoms company, she gave a eulogy to the company she has headed for four years. Yahoo “humanised and popularised the web, email [and] search”, she said.

在宣布Verizon以48亿美元收购雅虎(Yahoo)运营业务的消息时，玛丽萨•迈耶(Marissa Mayer)为她领导了4年的这家企业大唱了一番赞歌。她说，雅虎“令万维网、电子邮件和搜索变得人性化并流行起来”。

It was a backhanded compliment, given that less “universally well-liked companies” have overtaken the enterprise with the exclamation mark in two decades, including Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon. Ms Mayer identified the problem: Yahoo started as a link directory compiled by its founders and remained all too human.

考虑到20年来众多不那么“广受欢迎的公司”超越了这家带着惊叹号的企业——包括Alphabet、Facebook和亚马逊(Amazon)——迈耶的赞歌听上去像是带挖苦意味的恭维话。她点出了问题：雅虎成立之初是由其创始人编纂的网站链接目录，它一直带有太过人性化的特点。

Yahoo’s valuation grew to $128bn in spring 2000 because of investors’ faith that human curation could beat search engines — people browsing on slow dial-up lines needed a human interface. But technology triumphed over humanity. The internet was more powerful than they imagined and all that was left for Yahoo was likeability.

2000年春季，雅虎的估值曾增至1280亿美元，原因是投资者坚信人力信息筛选会打败搜索引擎——那些通过缓慢的拨号线路上网浏览的人们需要一个人性的界面。然而技术胜过了人力。互联网比他们想象得更强大。如今，雅虎剩下的只有魅力了。

One example of how far things have come since Yahoo was founded in 1995 is Elon Musk’s “Master Plan, Part Deux” for Tesla, published last week. The electric car company’s founder envisages vehicles that will not only drive themselves but will also form part of an automated fleet in their down time. “Enable your car to make money for you when you aren’t using it,” he concludes.

要说明自雅虎1995年成立以来情况已发生多大变化，有一个例子就是埃隆•马斯克(Elon Musk)最近发表的特斯拉(Tesla)《总规划，第二部分》(Master Plan, Part Deux)。这位电动汽车公司创始人构想的车辆不仅会自动驾驶，还会在“空闲”时成为自动化车队的一部分。马斯克得出的结论是：“让你的汽车在你不用它的时候为你赚钱。”

Mr Musk’s vision, two decades after Yahoo’s directory seemed a better bet than Google, is still improbable but it is no longer inconceivable. The internet has turned out to be not merely a bunch of computers strung together across a network but much, much more. It has been constantly upgraded by mobile broadband, global positioning technology, smartphones, cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

在雅虎的目录貌似比谷歌(Google)更值得投资的20年后，马斯克的愿景仍不太可能实现，但不再不可想象了。事实证明，互联网不仅仅是通过网络连接到一起的大量计算机，它的范畴要大得多。移动宽带、全球定位技术、智能手机、云计算和人工智能都在不断升级互联网。

The group of innovations bundled together and labelled as “the internet” proved to be a general purpose technology similar to the steam engine and electrification. It has had a deep, disruptive effect on many industries and is likely to keep doing so for some time to come.

被贴上“互联网”标签并打包在一起的一系列创新，已被证明是一种类似蒸汽机和电气化技术的通用技术。它对许多产业都有深刻的、颠覆性的影响，并可能在今后一段时期内保持这种状态。

Yahoo’s problem was that it was on the wrong side of the human-technology divide from inception and never found a way back. The closest it came was in the mid-2000s, when Terry Semel, one of its parade of chief executives, acquired Inktomi, AltaVista and Overture in a failed attempt to compete with Google’s algorithms.

雅虎的问题在于，在人力与技术的隔阂中，它从一开始就站在了错误的一边，而且从未找到回头路。最接近的一次是在本世纪头10年的中期。当时，走马灯般上任的雅虎首席执行官之一特里•塞梅尔(Terry Semel)收购了Inktomi、AltaVista和Overture，试图与谷歌的算法竞争，却没有成功。

Ms Mayer’s appointment was another attempt to cross the chasm, since she came from Google. In practice, the best she could do was to trim some of Yahoo’s inefficiencies and adapt its ragbag of products, from Yahoo Mail to mobile to entertainment and news.

对迈耶的任命则是又一次跨越这一鸿沟的企图，因为她来自谷歌。现实而言，她可以采取的最佳措施是砍掉雅虎部分低效率业务，并调整其从雅虎邮箱(Yahoo Mail)和移动服务到娱乐和新闻的大杂烩般的各种产品。

The voracious maw of technology is apparent in this deal. Verizon has now acquired Yahoo and AOL, two of the internet’s original big names. They are joining a utility that increasingly sells broadband data connections. Yahoo was the internet equivalent of a phone book and is becoming part of a phone company refitted for the internet.

在这笔最新交易中，科技的巨大胃口表现得十分明显。Verizon如今已收购了雅虎和美国在线(AOL)，后两者都是互联网初期的知名品牌。它们加入的这家公用事业公司在宽带数据连接领域的销售额日益升高。雅虎原来像是电话簿的互联网版本，如今它正成为已向互联网转型的一家电话公司的一部分。

The story of technology dominating humanity and taking most of the reward is common across the internet. Facebook’s content is largely provided by users yet the value accrues to the company and its network — it has a market capitalisation of about $348bn, which equates to the price of 72 Yahoos. Amazon cuts prices by squeezing suppliers, including publishers, and is worth the same as Facebook.

在互联网上，技术主导人力并获得绝大部分回报的故事十分常见。Facebook的内容基本上由用户提供，然而这些内容的价值归于该公司及其网络——该公司市值约为3480亿美元，相当于72个雅虎。而亚马逊则通过挤压供应商（包括出版商）压低价格，它的市值与Facebook相仿。

But technology has an Achilles heel. Although each new wave creates and captures huge profits in the early stages, when it is new and wondrous (consider the 19th century railway booms), it eventually becomes routine. Telephones were once incredible machines but today voice calls on fixed lines are at best a commodity in a world where mobile video streaming is free.

不过，科技也存在致命的弱点。每一波新技术潮在早期阶段都是崭新而神奇的（想一想19世纪的铁路大发展吧），会创造并获取巨额利润，但最终会变得普普通通。电话曾是令人难以置信的机器，然而在如今这个移动视频流播免费的世界，通过固定线路传输的语音通话往好里说也只是一种日用品。

Nicholas Carr, the technology writer, says the shift from personal computers to cloud computing is akin to the late 19th century switch from electricity being generated locally to being delivered across power grids. The data centres built by Verizon, Facebook, Amazon and others are far more powerful than what preceded them. They also turn on-demand computing and access to data into a utility.

科技作家尼古拉斯•卡尔(Nicholas Carr)表示，从个人电脑向云计算的转型，类似于19世纪晚期从本地发电向电网输电的转型。Verizon、Facebook、亚马逊及其他企业打造的数据中心，比之前的数据中心强大得多。它们也把按需计算和按需数据访问变成了一项公用事业。

There is a hint of this in the Verizon-Yahoo deal. Although a combined Yahoo and AOL, which includes 25 brands such as the Huffington Post and TechCrunch, is likely to contribute only about 5 per cent of the merged entity’s revenues, it could provide growth. Verizon’s core telecoms business is large and generates a lot of cash but its revenues have fallen this year.

在Verizon收购雅虎的交易中，也显示了这一转型的迹象。雅虎加上美国在线——旗下拥有《赫芬顿邮报》(Huffington Post)和TechCrunch等25个品牌——所贡献的营收可能只占合并后实体的5%，但它们有望带来增长。Verizon的核心电信业务规模庞大，产生大量现金，然而今年其营收有所下滑。

Other internet and communications companies have also bolstered their revenues with media content fashioned by humans. Comcast, the US cable company that competes with Verizon, took full ownership of the film, TV and music group NBCUniversal in 2013.

其他互联网和通信公司也通过人力制作的媒体内容提升了营收。2013年，Verizon的竞争对手、美国有线电视公司康卡斯特(Comcast)全资收购了电影、电视和音乐集团NBC环球(NBC Universal)。而Netflix一直在投入巨资制作原创剧集和纪录片。