雅虎险中求胜

    之前的举措已经让员工忧心忡忡，也让互联网同行敬而远之，但汤普森似乎还嫌这些不够，又做好了跟维权投资者第三点基金投资公司（Third Point）争夺代理权的准备。自称雅虎“最大外部股东”的第三点公司希望雅虎改组董事会，解决数年以来雅虎股东和董事会之间的矛盾。

    2月份，汤普森的观点让广告业巨头埃培智公司（Interpublic）同样感到不安。广告技术历来是雅虎核心市场的一部分。如果汤普森以另外的一种激进方案出售雅虎广告技术平台，可能并不会有太大影响。但汤普森表示，未来的增长点在于雅虎业务中的“数据库资源”。他认为，这些资源对于新产品和服务来说是“可以利用的”。.

    这一切都让汤普森领导下的雅虎公司糟糕透顶。但他的疯狂背后或许自有一番道理。争议终究会被人们逐渐淡忘。裁员对员工来说肯定难以接受，但硅谷正面临人才短缺的问题。专利战或许很难看，但并不是什么稀罕事，人们的记忆也会很快淡去（直到上周以前，大多数人都已经忘了，早在2004年Google公司公开上市之前，雅虎就对Google开展过类似的专利争夺战。）

    如果汤普森大胆激进，不择手段的举措的确能够扭转雅虎局势，所有争议都将最终平息。这样做要承担很大的风险，但它也可能是雅虎东山再起的绝佳机会。巴尔茨和杨致远曾经费劲九牛二虎之力，期望从逐步衰退的广告业务中获得利润增长，这几乎跟临终护理一样回天乏术。让雅虎重回互联网前沿的任务依然难以实现，但这种斗争精神起码带来了一线生机。

    雅虎公司扭转颓势的关键在于，汤普森开始将重点放在消费者数据和分析业务上，以此来取代逐渐衰落的展示广告业务。进入Facebook时代，跟踪消费者网上行为已经成为了制胜的秘诀。但这条路布满了隐私权的陷阱，毕竟，对于个人信息被利用，人们的态度越来越谨慎。

    因此，雅虎对“大数据”（Big Data）的投入也许能拯救公司，也可能会带来灭顶之灾。雅虎本月的举措已经引发众怒，但尚未波及消费者。但是，如果雅虎在利用用户数据方面过于激进，最终可能会让消费者也避之唯恐不及。如果连消费者也选择了放弃，雅虎就彻底玩完了。

    译者：李玫晓/汪皓

    As if distressing employees and alienating peers wasn't enough, Thompson is also gearing up for a proxy battle with activist investor Third Point, which wants new directors on the company's board. Third Point, which calls itself Yahoo's "largest outside owner," wants to tap into several years of shareholder frustration with Yahoo's board.

    And in February, comments from Thompson upset Interpublic, a major advertiser. That may not matter if Thompson follows through on another radical plan to sell off pieces of Yahoo's advertising technology, part of its historically core market. Thompson has said he sees future growth in the "wealth of data" in Yahoo's businesses, which he called "exploitable" for new products and services.

    All of this is making Yahoo under Thompson look very bad indeed. But there may be a method to his madness. Controversies blow over. Layoffs are always traumatic for workers, but Silicon Valley is facing a shortage of talent. Patent battles can get ugly, but they are so common the memory of them soon passes (Until last week, most people had forgotten that Yahoo held Google over a similar patent barrel before its 2004 IPO).

    If Thompson's bold, no-holds-barred approach turns Yahoo around, all these controversies will be forgotten. It's a huge risk to take, but it may just be Yahoo's best chance. In the end, the exhausting work of Bartz and Jerry Yang to extract growth from an aging ad business amounted to nothing more than hospice care. Returning Yahoo to the forefront of the web is still an unlikely outcome, but the new fighting spirit at least gives it an outside chance.

    The key to any Yahoo turnaround lies in Thompson's goal of supplanting a fading display-ad business with a new focus on customer data and analytics. In the age of Facebook, tracking users' behavior on the web is the real secret to success. But it's a road filled with privacy landmines. People are growing wary about having their personal data exploited.

    That's why Yahoo's push into "big data" could save it, or irreparably hurt it. If Yahoo is too aggressive in exploiting its user data, it could end up alienating the one constituency it hasn't angered this month: its customers. If they abandon Yahoo, the show is over.