雅虎衰退不可逆转，巴茨已是最佳掌门

    “我们始终认为，我们不可能找到比卡罗尔更好的首席执行官了。”

    上述评价出自卡罗尔•巴茨昔日执掌的一家公司的董事会成员之口。也许你猜得到，这家公司肯定不是雅虎（Yahoo），因为该公司董事会刚刚在上周二突然解雇了巴茨。说这话的是数字化设计技术公司欧特克（Autodesk）的人。2004年，G•帕斯卡尔•扎卡里曾在为巴茨写的小传里指出，在巴茨的领导下，欧特克的经营状况出现了明显好转，一年内，其股票升了5倍。尽管花费了几年的时间，而且其间亦不断受挫，但这一切最终都得到了回报。

    至于雅虎，现在该说的都说了，该做的也都做了，雅虎董事会的成员们最终可能不得不承认这名欧特克董事的观点：也许对于雅虎而言，不可能再找到比卡罗尔•巴茨更好的首席执行官了。言外之意是，雅虎的经营状况根本就不可能出现逆转。罢免巴茨之后，董事会也提出了几名候选人来接替她，但在支持工程师、鼓励创新、以及引领雅虎重返互联网业核心方面，他们无一令人信服能胜过巴茨。

    雅虎股东们也普遍持相近的观点。上周三，雅虎股票开盘时曾升至13.93美元之高，比上周二的收盘价高出8%，但是随即就慢慢降至13.30美元。

    巴茨在雅虎的业绩毁誉参半，并逐渐下滑，最终惨遭罢免。2009年1月，巴茨加盟雅虎，担任首席执行官。彼时，雅虎股票的交易价在12美元/股左右，比其今天的水平略低。此后，雅虎股票的市场表现远远落后于同行。巴茨执掌雅虎期间，公司的纳斯达克（Nasdaq）指数上升了61%，而谷歌公司（Google）和亚马逊公司（Amazon）则分别增长了70%和292%。

    更糟的是，巴茨加入雅虎时，公司董事会承诺，如果她能够让公司的股票价格回升到25美元/股（巴茨的一位前任特里•塞米尔在6年内共从雅虎领取薪酬5.7亿美元）的话，4年内她将总共赚得1.87亿美元。2009年，据美联社（AP）报道，在标准普尔指数覆盖的500家公司的领导人中，巴茨是收入最高的首席执行官，年收入4,720万美元。一年后，其薪水被削减了75%。

    正如麦奎尔•海尔夫特所言，巴茨上任伊始，采取了一些大胆举措，其中包括关闭过时的GeoCities站点，停止与微软（Microsoft）共同开发搜索引擎的合作关系，但这些对于改变公司的经营状况均收效甚微。很快，工程人才开始再次外流。今夏，巴茨在雅虎员工中的支持率由上任之初的90%下降到了24%。而且，雅虎还与马云为争夺支付宝（AliPay）而发生了一场声名狼藉的“激战”。除此惨痛失败之外，雅虎今年第二季度的营业额亦未实现预期。有些分析师认为，巴茨被炒意味着，公司第三季度财务数字依然惨不忍睹。

    尽管人们对巴茨在雅虎任职期间的表现进行了长篇累牍的分析，但却普遍忽视了一点，那就是，在股东的眼里，她在雅虎其实已经做到了极致。一如《大西洋月刊》（Atlantic）的阿莱克西斯•马德里加尔所言，巴茨“已经尽了自己的本分，尽力从一棵枯萎将死的摇钱树上多榨取一点钱。”巴茨上任后的10个季度里，与其上任之前的10个季度相比，雅虎的净收入增长了52%。

    2011年，互联网行业其实只有两类公司。一类是精悍的初创公司，推动其前进的是一群极具创新精神的工程师，其愿景轻易成功或失败的比例各占一半。另一类是典型的大公司，这些公司沿用的仍是数年前甚至几十年前确立的服务大杂烩模式。

    雅虎明显属于后者。它永远也无法通过创新走出困境；它再也不会像从前那样，建立供其他公司遵循的业界标准；过去它曾试图将图片分享网站Flickr和网站收藏共享服务delicio.us等名副其实地树立了创新标准的公司收之麾下，但最终均以失败收场。如今，雅虎仍然提供利润丰厚的广告内容，它只需要继续做好这件事就行了。它再也无法重现1999年的光辉岁月，要阻止谷歌和Facebook从大型广告客户手中抢走大量生意，难如登天。

    赶走巴茨之后，雅虎董事会有几个选择：从公司内部或者外部聘任一名新首席执行官，卖掉其亚洲资产，将部分收益分配给股东，或者将公司整个卖给私募机构或者另一家媒体公司。上述选择中有些听起来动静够大，但无论怎样，也无法改变现实：雅虎在逐渐衰亡，但在此前数年内，它仍然会持续赢利。这得归功于巴茨。

    尽管巴茨也犯下了不少过失，但没有她，从长远角度看，雅虎未来不可能赢利。而从另一方面看，巴茨离开了雅虎也许反而会过得更好，当然这要取决于她的新工作。

    译者：大海

    "We always concluded we couldn't find anyone better than Carol."

    That comment came from a board director of a company helmed by Carol Bartz. As you can imagine, the company wasn't Yahoo (YHOO) -- its board unceremoniously fired Bartz on Tuesday -- but Autodesk (ADSK). As a profile of Bartz by G. Pascal Zachary pointed out in 2004, Autodesk saw its stock rise fivefold in one year, thanks to Bartz' effort to turn the company around. That turnaround involved several years and multiple setbacks, but the payoff was well worth the wait.

    As for Yahoo, when all is said and done, its own board members might end up echoing the sentiment of that Autodesk director: maybe there wasn't a better CEO for Yahoo than Carol Bartz. Which is to say that Yahoo simply can't be turned around. A few names have been offered as replacements for Bartz, and none instill confidence that they'll be able to support engineers, foster innovation and move Yahoo back to the center of the web any better than Bartz did.

    You can see that sentiment sinking into the mindset of Yahoo shareholders. The stock initially rose as high as $13.93 Wednesday, or 8% above Tuesday's close, but drifted down to $13.30 as the day wore on.

    Bartz's track record at Yahoo is mixed, and grew increasingly spotty toward the end. When Bartz joined Yahoo as CEO in January 2009, the stock was trading around $12 a share, slightly below its level today. Yahoo has severely underperformed its peers since then. The Nasdaq is up 61% during the Bartz era, while Google (GOOG) is up 70% and Amazon (AMZN) is up 292%.

    Making matters worse, Bartz received a pay package that promised her $187 million over four years, provided she could revive Yahoo's stock price back to $25 a share (a predecessor, Terry Semel, earned $570 million over six years). In 2009, the AP calculated, she was the highest paid CEO among leaders of S&P 500 companies, receiving $47.2 million. A year later, she took a 75% pay cut.

    As Miguel Helft pointed out, Bartz's early bold moves -- shutting down the archaic GeoCities sites and the search partnership with Microsoft (MSFT) -- did little to turn things around. Soon, engineering talent was streaming out the doors again. Bartz's approval ratings among her employees slid from 90% after her arrival to 24% this summer. And if the ugly fight with Jack Ma over AliPay wasn't a bad enough failure, Yahoo's revenue disappointed in the second quarter of 2011. Some analysts took the firing of Bartz as a sign that the third quarter's numbers would be just as bleak.

    But overlooked in many of the post-mortems of Bartz's tenure at Yahoo is that, from a shareholder's perspective, she accomplished as much as anyone could have at Yahoo. As the Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal said, Bartz "milked money from a dying cash cow, like she was supposed to do," increasing Yahoo's net income by 52% in the last 10 quarters over the same period before her arrival.

    In 2011, there are really two types of companies in the web industry. One type is the lean startup, driven by a core group of creative engineers with a vision that could just as easily succeed as fail. The other is typically a larger company maintaining a patchwork of services designed years, perhaps decades, ago.

    Yahoo is clearly in the latter camp. It's never going to innovate its way out of its quagmire, it won't ever again set a standard for others to follow, and its past attempts to buy companies that did set an innovative standard -- like Flickr and delicious -- ended badly. Yahoo curates profitable ad content, and that's all it needs to do. It will never return to its glory days of 1999, it will be hard enough to keep Google and Facebook from stealing ad dollars from big advertisers.

    After Bartz, Yahoo's board has several options -- hiring a CEO from inside or outside the company, selling off Asian assets and distributing some gains to shareholders or selling the whole company to private equity firm or another media company. And as dramatic as some of these sound, they won't change the reality that Yahoo is dying very slowly, but it has years of profitable growth ahead of it. Which is what Bartz accomplished.

    For all Bartz's flaws, Yahoo is unlikely to be better off in the long run without her. Depending on where she lands in her next job, Bartz may be a lot better off without Yahoo.