声音简介
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The parable of Yahoo
Yahoo is no longer an independent company. Its failure had many fathers
It was one of Silicon Valley’s most riveting success stories. Now it stands as a warning to others. Yahoo began in 1994 as a lark in Stanford’s dormitories, when two students, David Filo and Jerry Yang, assembled their favourite links on a page called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. The site, which they renamed Yahoo, quickly became the “portal” through which millions first encountered the internet. At its peak in 2000, Yahoo had a market value of $128 billion. In the dotcom version of Monopoly, Yahoo got the prime slot.
['rɪvɪtɪŋ] riveting adj.吸引人的
[mə'nɒp(ə)lɪ] Monopoly n. 垄断；垄断者；专卖权
This week its history as an independent firm came to an end. On July 25th Verizon, a telecoms giant, announced that it would pay around $4.8 billion to acquire Yahoo’s core business . The sale will come as a blessed relief to shareholders. Yahoo churned through four chief executives in the three years before the hiring of Marissa Mayer in 2012. Her efforts to turn the company round may have failed, but the seeds of this week’s sale were sown long before she arrived. Three problems explain the firm’s demise.
[kɔː] Core n. 核心；要点；果心；[计] 磁心
demise [dɪ'maɪz] n. 死亡，终止；转让；传位 vt. 遗赠；禅让
The first was a chronic lack of focus. Right from the start Yahoo was ambivalent about whether it should be a media or a technology company. As a result , whenever the internet zigged, Yahoo zagged. It could not decide whether search was a “commodity” business to be outsourced or an area worthy of heavy investment; its prevarication allowed Google to rise. It took too long to respond to the emergence of social media and the coming of the mobile internet. Ms Mayer, and the company’s toothless board, did nothing to resolve Yahoo’s split corporate personality.
chronic ['krɒnɪk] adj. 慢性的；长期的；习惯性的
ambivalent [æm'bɪv(ə)l(ə)nt] adj. 矛盾的；好恶相克的
commodity [kə'mɒdɪtɪ] n. 商品，货物；日用品
prevarication [pri-,væri'keiʃən] n. 搪塞；支吾
A second problem at Yahoo concerned dealmaking. Some of its purchases paid off: by the end, its stake in another web giant—Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce firm—was worth far more than its own internet properties. Others flopped: Ms Mayer, for example, bought Tumblr, a social-networking platform, for $1.1 billion in 2013, even though it was about to run out of money. But a company’s success depends as much on the deals it does not do as on the ones it does. Yahoo’s history is littered with transactions that should not have been passed up. It did not buy Google for $1m when it had the chance. It agreed to buy Facebook for $1 billion, but the deal fell through when Yahoo tried to negotiate down the price. It eschewed the chance to buy YouTube , and its purchase of eBay fell through because of clashing egos.
negotiate [nɪ'gəʊʃɪeɪt] vi. 谈判，交涉vt. 谈判，商议；转让；越过
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