雅虎不应收购Tumblr的五大理由

    （4）很多Tumblr用户都对广告很不感冒。我会把这个问题留给山姆•比德尔在“硅谷闲话”博客上来解释。

    （5）我们现在还不清楚Tumblr是否具有可持续的竞争优势。根据我的媒体战略管理教授布鲁斯•格林沃德有关于竞争和媒体的著作，如果Tumblr既没有可持续的竞争优势，也不能阻止后来者进入它的市场，那么这笔收购就说不通。今天的Tumblr虽然很出色，是个卓越的博客平台，但并不代表明天它也出色、也卓越。在过去十年里，Blogger和WordPress都曾达到Tumblr今天的地位，后来都销声匿迹了。我相信Tumblr所在的市场空间的准入门槛很低，使它很容易受市场新进者影响。因此，我们现在很难精确预计Tumblr的增长率。

    这真是一个艰难的决定。假设这笔交易最终成交了，只有未来才能证明，当初支持这笔交易的种种理论和预测究竟算是远见卓识，还是一叶障目乃至是彻底的幻觉。像大多数事情一样，它可能会落在两者之间的什么地方。

    对我来说，战略性的担忧压倒了数学运算上的乐观。雅虎团队要想做出这笔收购很容易，但这样一来，无论是从现金、投资者还是从文化的角度，下一笔收购就要难得多了。

    与其收购Tumblr，我认为雅虎倒不如不要把现金花在购买点击量上，而是要围绕自己擅长的展示业务，通过收购或者研发建立某种不容易让后来者进入的壁垒（也就是巴菲特的壁垒理论）。这可能需要在产品和工艺上进行深入投资，以及对广告科技企业进行战略性收购。

    这些行为可能看起来不那么抓人眼球，但它们有可能会让雅虎在今后20年里再次振兴。而对于眼下这笔交易，由于存在各种固有的战略风险，很难看出收购Tumblr如何能建立雅虎真正需要的战略壁垒。（财富中文网）

    本文作者John Saroff是纽约市的一名媒体和科技高管，他曾是谷歌电视广告业务的战略伙伴关系负责人。

    译者：朴成奎

    4. Many tumblrs are unhospitable to advertising. I'll leave it to Sam Biddle over at Valleywag toexplain why.

    5. It is unclear if Tumblr has a sustainable competitive advantage. Channeling the lessons of my strategic management of media professor Bruce Greenwald and his books on competition and media, none of this makes sense if Tumblr doesn't have a sustainable competitive advantage and barriers for new entrants to enter its market. Just because Tumblr is wonderful and the preeminent blogging platform today doesn't mean it will be tomorrow. Over the course of the last ten years Blogger and WordPress have held the position that Tumblr holds now. I believe that the space in which Tumblr operates has very low barriers to entry, making Tumblr very susceptible to new entrants. This makes the growth rate very hard to predict with any degree of certainty.

    This is a tough call. Assuming the deal goes through, only the future will show whether the rationale and the projections that back it up are vision, delusion or hallucination. Like most things, the math behind the rationale and the projections will probably end up somewhere in the middle.

    To me, the strategic concerns overwhelm the math. Team Yahoo can make this acquisition easily, but it makes the next one harder from a cash, investor and culture perspective.

    Instead of Tumblr, I propose that Yahoo focus its cash not on bulk of pageviews, but on acquisitions and R&D that erect barriers to entry (Buffett's famous moat) around its already robust display business. Those likely take the form of deep investments in the product and engineering corps and strategic acquisitions of adtech businesses.

    Those maneuvers will be less sexy, but they have the potential to reinvigorate Yahoo for the next twenty years. It is hard to see how, with all of the strategic risks inherent in the deal, acquiring Tumblr builds the moat for Yahoo that I believe it needs.

    John Saroff (@saroff_nyc) is a media and tech executive based in New York City, and is a former head of strategic partnerships for Google's TV ads business.