雅虎的極客女神還能呆多久
To the list of books about transformative technology companies and their visionary leaders we can now add one about Silicon Valley’s wayward soul and would-be savior: Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer.
關於變化中的技術公司，以及它們富於遠見卓識的領導的出版物名單中，如今又多了一本——寫的是硅谷性格倔強的靈魂人物與可能的救星——雅虎的瑪麗莎·梅耶爾(Marissa Mayer)。Ms. Mayer — “Yahoo’s Geek Goddess,” as Vanity Fair has called her — is not the first well-known executive brought in to reinvent Yahoo, but she certainly arrived with the most fanfare. When Yahoo hired her away from Google in 2012, she was only 37, making her the youngest woman to lead a Fortune 500 company. Valerie Jarrett and Nancy Pelosi were among those who called to congratulate her on her new job. Adding to the excitement was the news that Ms. Mayer was five months pregnant.
《名利場》(Vanity Fair)雜誌稱梅耶爾女士爲“雅虎的極客女神”，她並不是雅虎爲圖革新而引入的第一位著名經理人，但她的到來顯然是動靜最大的。2012年，雅虎把她從谷歌挖來時，她才只有37歲，成了《財富》(Fortune)500強企業的女領導者中最年輕的一位。瓦萊麗·賈勒特(Valerie Jarrett)和南希·佩洛西(Nancy Pelosi)等人都致電慶賀她的新工作。更爲這個消息錦上添花的是，她當時已有五個月的身孕。
Expectations were high, to say the least. In Nicholas Carlson’s “Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!,” we learn that when Yahoo’s new chief executive showed up for her first day of work, she was greeted by posters of her face, done in the style of Shepard Fairey’s Barack Obama poster — complete with the word “hope.” At Yahoo, they have a term to describe things that don’t feel like they should be part of the so-called user experience: “yawful.”
至少人們對她的期望很高。從尼古拉斯·卡爾森(Nicholas Carlson)的《瑪麗莎·梅耶爾與拯救雅虎之戰》(Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!)一書中，我們得知，當這位雅虎的新任首席執行官第一天上班時，迎接她的有印着她頭像的海報，是謝帕德·費雷(Shepard Fairey)爲貝拉克·奧巴馬(Barack Obama)做的海報的那種樣式，上面還寫着“希望”的字樣。在雅虎，他們用一個自己造的字眼來描述那種似乎不應當成爲所謂用戶體驗的東西：“yawful”。
“Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!” was excerpted in The New York Times Magazine, and in many ways it reads more like an overgrown article than a book. This is partly a function of Mr. Carlson’s informal tone and personality-driven approach. But it’s also a function of the subject. Yahoo is a big company, but it’s not what you would call an American institution, or even really a relevant force in our culture. And it’s not clear that there’s much more of substance to say about Ms. Mayer that hasn’t already been said in the many profiles of her.
《紐約時報雜誌》刊登了《瑪麗莎·梅耶爾與拯救雅虎之戰》的節選，它在很多方面讀起來更像一篇拉長的文章，而不像是一本書。部分是由於作者卡爾森那種隨意的口吻，以及以人物爲主導的方式。但是這也和本書的題材有關。雅虎是個大公司，但並不是一個典型的美國機構，甚至也不是我們的文化中的重要力量。關於梅耶爾的特寫報道已經有了很多，似乎沒有更多實質性內容是這些報道所不曾涉及的。That’s not to say that the book isn’t a lot of fun to read, or that Mr. Carlson isn’t steeped in his subject — an impressive feat considering that Ms. Mayer not only refused to cooperate with him, but actively interfered with his research and reporting. During her first day on the job at Yahoo, he writes in one of the news bites touted in the book’s news release, Ms. Mayer apparently mistook the company’s general counsel for the I.T. guy.
但這並不意味着這本書讀起來沒意思，也不是說卡爾森沒有深入挖掘題材。鑑於梅耶爾不僅拒絕同他合作，而且百般阻撓他的研究和報道，這本書簡直堪稱了不起的成就。卡爾森在給這本書的新聞宣傳稿中寫了一句可供媒體引用的話：梅耶爾去雅虎上班第一天，就把公司的法律總顧問錯認爲IT工作人員。Mr. Carlson, the chief correspondent for Business Insider, a website that covers technology and finance, doesn’t waste words lingering over details or musing on bigger themes — leadership, technology, the nature of innovation. He favors the short paragraph and the brief biographical sketch. “She was a pompom girl and a debater,” he writes in his précis of Ms. Mayer’s childhood. “She was on the precision dance team.” The result, to borrow the digital media cliché, is corporate history as snackable content.
卡爾森是技術與金融業網站“Business Insider”的首席記者，他沒在細節上浪費筆墨，也沒去思索關於領導力、技術與創新本質之類的宏大主題。他喜歡短小的段落與簡短的傳記式素描。“她是個拉拉隊長式的女孩，喜歡爭論，”他在概括梅耶爾的童年時這樣寫道。“她總在那個正確的舞蹈隊裏”。其結果，用一句數字媒體的俗話來說，就是把公司的歷史變成了快餐式內容。Today’s Yahoo is a sprawling hodgepodge of products and services, none indispensable. It is a company adrift, a well-capitalized mess. But as Mr. Carlson reminds us, Yahoo was a pioneer of the Valley. In its earliest incarnation, Yahoo was the digital equivalent of TV Guide, providing an advertising-supported directory of web pages for the still nascent Internet. Before it became known as Yahoo, it was called David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web, after the company’s founders, David Filo and Jerry Yang.
如今的雅虎是各種產品與服務的大雜燴，但沒有提供什麼不可或缺的東西。這是一個隨波逐流的公司，一團盈利良好的混亂。但卡爾森提醒我們，雅虎曾是硅谷的先鋒。在早期，雅虎就相當於數字界的TV Guide，爲仍處於早期時代的互聯網提供有廣告支持的網頁索引。在以“雅虎”這個名字成名之前，它的名字是“大衛與傑裏的萬維網指南”(David and Jerry ’s Guide to the World Wide Web)——這名字來自公司的兩位創始人，大衛·費羅(David Filo)與楊致遠(Jerry Yang)。They had no trouble monetizing their new business. Yahoo nearly tripled its revenues from 1997 to 1998. Its founders became very rich, very quickly. “It takes a female elephant 22 months to gestate a calf,” Mr. Carlson writes. “Filo and Yang made their first $100 million in less than half that time.”
新公司毫不困難地實現了盈利，從1997到1998年，雅虎的利潤幾乎增長了三倍。創始人迅速暴富。“母象要懷胎22個月才能生出一頭小象，”卡爾森寫道，“而費羅和楊不到11個月就賺了一個億。”For a little while, anyway, the Yahoo logo was everywhere — on Ben & Jerry’s ice cream containers, on Visa cards, on the Zamboni machines at professional hockey games. Then things started to fall apart. Yahoo was the victim of larger economic forces, specifically the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001. But it also failed to evolve or innovate. As such, it gradually lost market share to its growing number of competitors. And it became deeply uncool, the Reebok to Google’s Nike.
有一段時間，雅虎的logo到處都是——“本與傑裏”的冰淇淋櫃上、銀行卡上、職業冰球比賽的贊博尼磨冰機上。後來一切開始分崩離析。雅虎成了更大的經濟力量的犧牲品，特別是2001年互聯網公司泡沫的爆發。但它也沒有能夠實現進步或革新。這樣，雅虎便逐漸喪失了市場份額，讓位給日益崛起的競爭對手們。它變得越來越不酷，如果說谷歌是耐克，那雅虎就相當於銳步。Enter Yahoo 2.0, the first of many attempts to turn around the company. The names, at least, would get more creative. There was, for example, Project Godfather, the 2002 plan to rub out Yahoo’s competition in the Internet search business. Several years later the company resolved to stop spreading itself so thin, like peanut butter. The Wall Street Journal labeled this Yahoo’s Peanut Butter Manifesto.
雅虎2.0是公司爲自救採取的諸多嘗試中的第一個。至少這些嘗試的名字更有創意了。比如說2002年的“教父計劃”，旨在讓雅虎在網絡搜索領域內的競爭中脫穎而出。幾年後，公司決心不再讓公司到處擴張，像花生醬那樣攤成薄薄的一層。《華爾街日報》(The Wall Street Journal)稱之爲雅虎的“花生醬宣言”。In Mr. Carlson’s breezy retelling, these hapless efforts to recapture the company’s former glory amount to almost comic exercises in futility. Yahoo is Silicon Valley’s version of the New York Knicks. Its string of well-compensated leaders can’t seem to get anything right. Presented with the chance to buy Google for $1 million in 1997, the company passed. Years later, it could have had Facebook, which is now valued at more than $200 billion, for $1 billion. Yahoo drew the line at $850 million.
卡爾森以輕鬆活潑的敘事講述了雅虎公司爲恢復往日輝煌的不幸嘗試，它們幾乎成了完全無用的笑話。雅虎在硅谷，就像紐約尼克斯隊在籃球界一樣。一系列支取高薪的領導人物似乎也未能力挽狂瀾。1997年，公司本有機會以100萬美元的價格收購谷歌，但錯失了這個機會。幾年後，它又有可能收購Facebook，這家公司目前的價值已經超過2000億美元，當時標價僅10億美元，但雅虎的底價是8.5億美元。Ms. Mayer emerges from this book’s pages less as a Geek Goddess, or even a computer science nerd made good, than as a kind of cyborg, a tone-deaf workaholic who has trouble making eye contact and requires only four hours of sleep a night. In other words, it turns out she’s no different from your stereotypical male tech executive. Mr. Carlson describes her management style as “dictatorial” and her manner of speaking as “staccato verbosity.” At one point, he goes so far as to suggest that she may have Asperger’s syndrome. Mr. Carlson issues a similarly harsh judgment on Ms. Mayer’s tenure at Yahoo. Among many other things, he faults her for trying to take the company’s “middle-America, Walmart-esque brand” upmarket by hiring Katie Couric as its Global Anchor for $5 million a year. As Mr. Carlson recounts it, the decision was prompted by a breakfast with the Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who described Yahoo’s women’s site as “dreadful.”
在這本書中，梅耶爾的形象並不像極客女神，甚至也不像那種獲得了成功的電腦科學狂人；在這本書中，她更像是一個電子人，有點音盲的工作狂，不願與人四目相對，每天只睡四小時。換言之，她和你心目中那種典型的男性技術執行官的形象沒什麼兩樣。卡爾森描寫她的管理風格是“獨裁專斷”，她的說話方式是“斷奏般的長篇大論”。在某一段裏，他甚至認爲她可能患有阿斯波哥爾綜合徵（一種不善交際、興趣偏狹的內向症狀——編注）。對於梅耶爾在雅虎的工作，卡爾森也給出了同樣嚴厲的論斷。比如，他指責她以500萬美元年薪僱傭凱蒂·庫裏克(Katie Couric)作爲雅虎的全球主播，以便提升公司的“中部美國，沃爾瑪式品牌形象”。據卡爾森描述，這個決定是一次早餐會上，由《Vogue》的主編安娜·溫圖爾(Anna Wintour)提出來的，她說雅虎網站的“女性”板塊“太枯燥”。Wall Street seems to agree with Mr. Carlson’s assessment. Yahoo has a market capitalization of about $44 billion. But when you take out its large investment in the Chinese Internet company Alibaba, Yahoo’s core business is currently being valued at less than zero dollars.
華爾街似乎對卡爾森的評估心有慼慼。雅虎的市場資本總值約在440億美元。但是除去它的最大一筆投資，也就是在中國互聯網公司阿里巴巴上的投資，雅虎的核心企業目前一文不值。Ms. Mayer is still running Yahoo, though it’s anyone’s guess how much longer she will remain. The company’s last chief executive was deposed by the head of a powerful hedge fund with a large position in Yahoo. In the book’s final pages, Mr. Carlson writes about a similar campaign introduced recently by a major stockholder who criticized Ms. Mayer for failing to cut costs and for spending too much on acquisitions that haven’t added to revenues. This stockholder said the smartest thing for Yahoo to do at this point would be to sell off its assets and return the proceeds to shareholders.
梅耶爾目前仍然在執掌雅虎，儘管所有人都認爲她已經呆不長久了。雅虎公司的上一任首席執行官是被一個很強大、在雅虎很有地位的對衝基金的領導者罷免的。在本書的結尾部分，卡爾森寫到的事件非常類似，最近，一位雅虎重要的股東批評梅耶爾沒能降低公司成本，將太多資金用於不能爲公司盈利的收購。這位股東說，目前雅虎最明智的做法或許是賣掉自己的全部資產，把收入返還給股東。Maybe the fight to save Yahoo is almost over. Or maybe the company is just coming to the end of another losing season.
或許拯救雅虎的戰役還未結束，抑或這家公司已經走入又一波失敗的終點。
