More Than Just Microsoft and Yahoo
不仅仅是微软和雅虎
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?
一如约翰麦凯恩很乐意看到希拉里跟奥巴马在决一死战一样，谷歌在过去的3个月里也在尽情地欣赏着其最强劲的竞争对手——雅虎和微软，争得你死我活。雅虎曾是互联网领域的领军企业，但是现在已在搜索引擎以及相关广告上远远落后于谷歌了。微软则依旧主导着台式电脑操作系统，但是随着软件在线化，微软则表现出不敌谷歌的势头。因此微软的老总史蒂夫巴默理直气壮的跟雅虎表示：即使不是完美的梦幻组合，至少也是共同努力的团队，这样的联合何错之有？
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，在经过一场让人失望的马拉松式的会议后，巴默放弃了收购。他的报价从1月31日的446亿美元提高到了475亿美元，这比在最开始竞标时雅虎的市值高出70%。雅虎的联合创始人和老板杨致远则觉得至少再多加50亿美元。巴默在给杨致远的一封信中挖苦地写道你和你的股东们没有在谈判桌上把握这个千载难逢的机会。而华尔街给出的最终报价则是在5月5日，雅虎的市值降至340亿美元。
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.
股价的下跌并没有想象的那么糟，主要显示出这笔交易还有再谈的可能。另一家软件公司——甲骨文，最近放弃收购一个较小的竞争对手——BEA系统，因为BEA的董事拒绝了对方的出价。但是最终在BEA愤怒的股东们的压力下，BEA公司董事会又回到谈判桌前与甲骨文谈判并达成了交易。在巴默对雅虎的告别信中详细列出了谈判中每一个令人尴尬的细节，这替准备给杨致远施压而迫使其回到谈判桌前雅虎的投资者们提供了有力武器。

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.
巴默不厌其烦地指责雅虎的行为只会使其成为不受微软欢迎的收购目标。于此他的言下之意是：杨致远的计划显然是将雅虎的搜索广告业务出乎意料地外包给谷歌。纯粹地从数学概念上来看的话,这样做确实令雅虎的市值有所上升。谷歌在搜索结果中嵌人相关广告并且从每次鼠标点击里获取更多利润。在这一点上，谷歌比雅虎和微软做得更好。
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.
然而这个战术依旧让人觉得奇怪。在近10年里雅虎屡战屡败，屡败屡战，就是想要在搜索广告领域赶上谷歌。他们的第一个重大错误就是没有出足够高的价格直接把谷歌买下来。另一次尝试是在2003年，雅虎买下搜索广告领域的先锋公司Overture，但那时谷歌在该领域已经是一马当先了。雅虎的一项同谷歌的外包业务的交易在经过商讨后也被拒绝了。在过去的两年里雅虎大量投资在一个名为“巴拿马”的项目上，最终目的还是为了追赶谷歌。
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.
据推测雅虎认为广告技术和搜索技术是互联网时代竞争优势的源泉，所以他们才竭尽全力去达到这些目标。微软肯定也是这么想的，于是微软买下在线广告专家aQuantive，建立起自己的搜索广告平台，称之为adCenter。雅虎和微软缺少的都是数量——参与搜索量和发布广告的广告商的量。合作也许能够对解决这个问题有所帮助，但是雅虎对谷歌的投降不过只是引来反垄断监管者对于谷歌控制领域的关注。
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.
杨致远可以将雅虎同美国在线合并（时代华纳的网络门户），但是美国在线已经把自己的搜索广告业务外包给了谷歌，所以这对于雅虎赶超谷歌没有任何帮助。杨致远断言雅虎凭自己的力量可成为网络的“起点”，但是它的广告业务，依然是名过于实。