给梅尔一个重振雅虎的机会 Give Mayer a chance to make Yahoo work

In her three years as head of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer has made a lot of people extremely rich. Start with Dan Loeb, the hedge fund manager who spied an opportunity in the lumbering tech giant and began buying its shares and agitating for change in 2011. He led a campaign to force out Scott Thompson, then chief executive, and brought in Ms Mayer, one of Silicon Valley’s hottest executives. By 2013, when Mr Loeb’s Third Point sold its position, the fund had netted $1bn.

在掌舵雅虎(Yahoo)的三年里，梅里莎蔠尔(Marissa Mayer)让很多人赚得盆满钵盈。第一个是对冲基金经理丹勒布(Dan Loeb)。他在这个步履蹒跚的科技巨头身上发现了机会，2011年开始买入雅虎的股票，并呼吁雅虎进行改革。他领导了一场运动，迫使时任首席执行官斯科特搠湬森(Scott Thompson)下台，使硅谷最炙手可热的高管之一梅尔入主了雅虎。到2013年，当勒布旗下的Third Point基金卖出雅虎股票时，这家基金赚入了10亿美元。

Then there is David Karp, who sold his blogging platform, Tumblr, to Yahoo in 2013 for $1.1bn. Mr Karp, who was 27 at the time, owned 25 per cent of the company, so made a cool $275m. Nick D’Aloisio was just 17 when Yahoo bought his news-reading app, Summly, for $30m. He recently left the company to focus on his degree at Oxford.

接着就是大卫愠湓(David Karp)，2013年他以11亿美元把自己的博客平台Tumblr卖给了雅虎。当年卡普27岁，拥有Tumblr 25%的股权，所以他整整赚到了2.75亿美元。当雅虎以3000万美元收购尼克德洛伊西奥(Nick D 'Aloisio)的新闻阅读应用Summly时，他才17岁。不久前，他离开雅虎，专心在牛津大学(Oxford)攻读学位。

Shareholders who bought Yahoo the day before Ms Mayer became chief executive and held on to it have seen the value of their shares more than double, despite a recent fall. If you had held the S&P 500, you would have earned a mere 55 per cent return over the same period. If you had owned Apple, you would have a made a comparably measly 35 per cent return.

有些股东在梅尔成为首席执行官前一天买入雅虎股票并一直持有，他们手中股票的价值涨了一倍多，尽管近来有所下跌。如果你同期持有标普500指数(S&P 500)，那么你仅能获得55%的回报。如果你同期持有苹果(Apple)股票，那么你的回报率相对而言低得可怜，只有35%。

Any other chief executive might be celebrated for that kind of performance. Not Ms Mayer. Early on it was all Vogue photo shoots and praise for one of the few women to scale the peaks of the tech industry. Then she was attacked for insisting employees no longer work from home. Now she is under attack for all the confusion surrounding Yahoo’s strategy — primarily its plans to spin off its stake in Alibaba, the Chinese ecommerce start-up — and her own pay.

若是换作其他首席执行官，取得这样的业绩或许会受到赞美。但梅尔没有。最初，《时尚》杂志(Vogue)刊登了梅尔的许多照片，梅尔作为少数攀登至科技行业顶峰的女士之一，也受到了推崇。接着，她由于坚持不让员工在家中工作遭到抨击。如今，她因雅虎战略——主要是剥离所持中国电商创业企业阿里巴巴(Alibaba)股份的计划——引起的困惑和她本人的薪酬受到攻击。

She walked into the job from Google, having amassed an estimated $300m in her brief career. In 2013 her Yahoo pay including stock awards and options was $24.9m, and in 2014 it reached $42m, mostly thanks to Yahoo’s then rising share price. All quite normal for companies of Yahoo’s size.

她是从谷歌(Google)跳槽至雅虎的，在很短的任职期间便赚到了约3亿美元。2013年，雅虎支付给她的薪酬（包括股票奖励和期权）为2490万美元，在2014年，主要得益于当时雅虎股价上涨，她的薪酬达到4200万美元。对于雅虎这种规模的公司而言，这一切是相当正常的。

The question is what exactly she did to earn it. For all of her dizzying plate-spinning, buying, selling and hiring, it is not clear that Ms Mayer has done much to improve Yahoo. It remains tucked in behind Google, Facebook and YouTube as one of the most visited websites in the world. But rather like AOL, it is considered a service stuck in internet dark ages. It is what grandma uses to look up the weather. It is not for Snapchatting teenagers. And it is not what investors crave most of all: the prospect of growth.

问题在于，她到底做了什么赚到这一切。尽管她“转盘子”、收购、剥离和招聘的动作令人炫目，但人们看不出来梅尔为改善雅虎做了多大贡献。作为全球浏览量最大的网站之一，雅虎仍然裹足不前，被谷歌、Facebook和YouTube抛在后面。与美国在线(AOL)一样，它被视为一种困在互联网黑暗时代的服务。老奶奶会到雅虎上查看天气。热衷于Snapchat的年轻人不用雅虎。雅虎也不具有投资者最渴望的特征：增长前景。

Fortunately, Yahoo has been the beneficiary of an extraordinary investment made by Jerry Yang, founder and former chief executive. In 2005 he bought a $1bn stake in Alibaba — a stake now worth $31bn. But now Yahoo and its investors are like a family bickering over the corpse of a wealthy relative. What to do with this windfall? The US tax authorities are refusing to make it simple; so, instead of trying to enhance Yahoo’s products to catch up with Facebook and Google, Ms Mayer is spending her time figuring out what kind of legal and corporate contortions will realise the best return for the Alibaba stake and clear the air around the core business.

幸运的是，雅虎一直受益于其创始人、前首席执行官杨致远(Jerry Yang)所做的一项卓越投资。2005年，杨致远购买了阿里巴巴10亿美元的股份——如今价值310亿美元。但现在的雅虎与其投资者就像一家人围着一个有钱亲戚的遗体争吵。如何处理这笔意外之财？美国税务当局当然不会轻易放过；因此，梅尔没有设法去提升雅虎的产品以追赶Facebook和谷歌，而是花时间琢磨什么样的法律和公司漏洞能让所持的阿里巴巴股份带来最大回报，同时扫清核心业务周围的障碍。

For engineers such as Ms Mayer, simplicity is highly coveted. And Yahoo is anything but simple. It remains a blur of services and assets of wildly different value. It is hard to get a handle on exactly what it has. Those 1bn monthly active users — are they right ones? That $5bn of revenue — is it growing? For the right management team, there is plenty of cash to acquire and invest.

梅尔这样的工程师极为崇尚简化。但雅虎的缺点就是过于庞杂。它仍然是一个价值迥异的服务与资产的模糊组合。很难确切了解雅虎手中到底有什么。每月10亿的活跃用户——是理想中的客户吗？50亿美元的收入——还在增长吗？对于一个称职的管理团队，有大量现金供他们赚取和投资。

We need to get over Ms Mayer’s pay cheque. She has been paid for taking the job in the first place. Those options grants were the Smarties required to hire her. Mr Loeb and Yahoo’s other investors have been more than handsomely rewarded by her decision to join the company and fire up the stock. What she now deserves is a chance to operate its core internet businesses, and the sooner the better. Only then can we hope to tell whether she is worth it.

我们要理解梅尔的巨额薪酬。她得到如此高的薪酬是因为她在一开始接受了这一职位。授予她的期权是为了聘用她而必须给她的“彩虹糖”。勒布及雅虎的其他投资者已经从她决定加入雅虎以及后来的股价上涨中获得了异常丰厚的回报。她如今理应得到一个运营雅虎核心互联网业务的机会，越快越好。只有这样，我们才有希望看出她是否配得上自己的薪酬。