給梅爾一個重振雅虎的機會 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)的三年裏，梅里莎蔠爾(Marissa Mayer)讓很多人賺得盆滿鉢盈。第一個是對衝基金經理丹勒布(Dan Loeb)。他在這個步履蹣跚的科技巨頭身上發現了機會，2011年開始買入雅虎的股票，並呼籲雅虎進行改革。他領導了一場運動，迫使時任首席執行官斯科特搠湬森(Scott Thompson)下臺，使硅谷最炙手可熱的高管之一梅爾入主了雅虎。到2013年，當勒布旗下的Third Point基金賣出雅虎股票時，這家基金賺入了10億美元。

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.

接着就是大衛慍湓(David Karp)，2013年他以11億美元把自己的博客平臺Tumblr賣給了雅虎。當年卡普27歲，擁有Tumblr 25%的股權，所以他整整賺到了2.75億美元。當雅虎以3000萬美元收購尼克德洛伊西奧(Nick D 'Aloisio)的新聞閱讀應用Summly時，他才17歲。不久前，他離開雅虎，專心在牛津大學(Oxford)攻讀學位。

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.

有些股東在梅爾成爲首席執行官前一天買入雅虎股票並一直持有，他們手中股票的價值漲了一倍多，儘管近來有所下跌。如果你同期持有標普500指數(S&P 500)，那麼你僅能獲得55%的回報。如果你同期持有蘋果(Apple)股票，那麼你的回報率相對而言低得可憐，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.

若是換作其他首席執行官，取得這樣的業績或許會受到讚美。但梅爾沒有。最初，《時尚》雜誌(Vogue)刊登了梅爾的許多照片，梅爾作爲少數攀登至科技行業頂峯的女士之一，也受到了推崇。接着，她由於堅持不讓員工在家中工作遭到抨擊。如今，她因雅虎戰略——主要是剝離所持中國電商創業企業阿里巴巴(Alibaba)股份的計劃——引起的困惑和她本人的薪酬受到攻擊。

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.

她是從谷歌(Google)跳槽至雅虎的，在很短的任職期間便賺到了約3億美元。2013年，雅虎支付給她的薪酬（包括股票獎勵和期權）爲2490萬美元，在2014年，主要得益於當時雅虎股價上漲，她的薪酬達到4200萬美元。對於雅虎這種規模的公司而言，這一切是相當正常的。

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.

問題在於，她到底做了什麼賺到這一切。儘管她“轉盤子”、收購、剝離和招聘的動作令人炫目，但人們看不出來梅爾爲改善雅虎做了多大貢獻。作爲全球瀏覽量最大的網站之一，雅虎仍然裹足不前，被谷歌、Facebook和YouTube拋在後面。與美國在線(AOL)一樣，它被視爲一種困在互聯網黑暗時代的服務。老奶奶會到雅虎上查看天氣。熱衷於Snapchat的年輕人不用雅虎。雅虎也不具有投資者最渴望的特徵：增長前景。

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.

幸運的是，雅虎一直受益於其創始人、前首席執行官楊致遠(Jerry Yang)所做的一項卓越投資。2005年，楊致遠購買了阿里巴巴10億美元的股份——如今價值310億美元。但現在的雅虎與其投資者就像一家人圍着一個有錢親戚的遺體爭吵。如何處理這筆意外之財？美國稅務當局當然不會輕易放過；因此，梅爾沒有設法去提升雅虎的產品以追趕Facebook和谷歌，而是花時間琢磨什麼樣的法律和公司漏洞能讓所持的阿里巴巴股份帶來最大回報，同時掃清核心業務周圍的障礙。

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.

梅爾這樣的工程師極爲崇尚簡化。但雅虎的缺點就是過於龐雜。它仍然是一個價值迥異的服務與資產的模糊組合。很難確切瞭解雅虎手中到底有什麼。每月10億的活躍用戶——是理想中的客戶嗎？50億美元的收入——還在增長嗎？對於一個稱職的管理團隊，有大量現金供他們賺取和投資。

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.

我們要理解梅爾的鉅額薪酬。她得到如此高的薪酬是因爲她在一開始接受了這一職位。授予她的期權是爲了聘用她而必須給她的“彩虹糖”。勒布及雅虎的其他投資者已經從她決定加入雅虎以及後來的股價上漲中獲得了異常豐厚的回報。她如今理應得到一個運營雅虎核心互聯網業務的機會，越快越好。只有這樣，我們纔有希望看出她是否配得上自己的薪酬。