雅虎衰落探因：短视收入与身份错位
Paul Graham 基于亲身经历，剖析雅虎失败的两大根源。其一，雅虎在 1998 年依赖品牌广告泡沫（庞氏骗局）和互联网初创公司的广告投放，轻松赚取暴利，从而忽视了搜索的真正价值——即使 Revenue Loop 已展示广告排序优化潜力，Jerry Yang 也不以为意；搜索仅占 6% 流量，高层认为无须改进。其二，雅虎自视为“媒体公司”而非技术公司，刻意弱化编程角色，将程序员视为产品经理的代码执行者，导致无法吸引顶尖黑客，陷入技术平庸的死亡螺旋。文章适合技术公司创始人、管理者及关注科技企业文化的工程师，从中反思：任何需要优秀软件的公司都必须建立以黑客为中心的文化。
August 2010
When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be.
What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.
2010年8月
1998年雅虎收购我们的初创公司后，我加入雅虎工作，那时感觉它就像是世界的中心。它本该成为下一个大事件，本该成为后来的谷歌那样。
问题出在哪里？毁掉雅虎的问题可以追溯到很久以前，几乎从公司创立之初就存在。我在1998年加入时，这些已经非常明显。雅虎有两个谷歌没有的问题：唾手可得的金钱，以及对自己是否是一家科技公司的矛盾心态。
Money
The first time I met Jerry Yang, we thought we were meeting for different reasons. He thought we were meeting so he could check us out in person before buying us. I thought we were meeting so we could show him our new technology, Revenue Loop. It was a way of sorting shopping search results. Merchants bid a percentage of sales for traffic, but the results were sorted not by the bid but by the bid times the average amount a user would buy. It was like the algorithm Google uses now to sort ads, but this was in the spring of 1998, before Google was founded.
Revenue Loop was the optimal sort for shopping search, in the sense that it sorted in order of how much money Yahoo would make from each link. But it wasn't just optimal in that sense. Ranking search results by user behavior also makes search better. Users train the search: you can start out finding matches based on mere textual similarity, and as users buy more stuff the search results get better and better.
Jerry didn't seem to care. I was confused. I was showing him technology that extracted the maximum value from search traffic, and he didn't care? I couldn't tell whether I was explaining it badly, or he was just very poker faced.
I didn't realize the answer till later, after I went to work at Yahoo. It was neither of my guesses. The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If Yahoo merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less.
Hard as it is to believe now, the big money then was in banner ads. Advertisers were willing to pay ridiculous amounts for banner ads. So Yahoo's sales force had evolved to exploit this source of revenue. Led by a large and terrifyingly formidable man called Anil Singh, Yahoo's sales guys would fly out to Procter & Gamble and come back with million dollar orders for banner ad impressions.
The prices seemed cheap compared to print, which was what advertisers, for lack of any other reference, compared them to. But they were expensive compared to what they were worth. So these big, dumb companies were a dangerous source of revenue to depend on. But there was another source even more dangerous: other Internet startups.
金钱
我第一次见到杨致远时，我们以为见面目的不同。他认为见面是为了在收购前亲自考察我们；我认为是为了向他展示我们的新技术——收入循环（Revenue Loop）。这是一种对购物搜索结果进行排序的方法。商家为流量竞标销售百分比，但结果不是按出价排序，而是按出价乘以用户平均购买金额排序。这类似于谷歌现在用于排序广告的算法，但这是在1998年春天，谷歌尚未成立。
收入循环是购物搜索的最优排序，因为它按每个链接能为雅虎带来多少钱来排序。但它的优化不止于此。根据用户行为对搜索结果进行排序也能改善搜索质量。用户训练搜索：起初只是基于文本相似性匹配，随着用户购买更多商品，搜索结果会越来越好。
杨致远似乎并不在意。我很困惑。我向他展示能最大限度从搜索流量中提取价值的技术，他居然不关心？我不知道是自己解释得不好，还是他城府太深。
直到后来我到雅虎工作后才明白答案。并非我猜测的那样。雅虎不关心这种能充分提取流量价值的技术，原因是广告主已经为流量支付了过高的费用。如果雅虎仅仅提取实际价值，反而会赚得更少。
尽管现在难以相信，但当时的大头是横幅广告。广告主愿意为横幅广告支付离谱的价格。于是雅虎的销售团队演变为利用这一收入来源。在一位身材高大、令人畏惧的阿尼尔·辛格（Anil Singh）带领下，雅虎的销售人员会飞往宝洁公司，然后带回数百万美元的横幅广告展示订单。
与广告主缺乏其他参考而对比的印刷广告相比，这些价格似乎很便宜。但与实际价值相比，它们很昂贵。因此，这些大而愚蠢的公司是危险收入来源。但还有更危险的来源：其他互联网初创公司。
By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!"
Both the Internet startups and the Procter & Gambles were doing brand advertising. They didn't care about targeting. They just wanted lots of people to see their ads. So traffic became the thing to get at Yahoo. It didn't matter what type.
到1998年，雅虎已是一个事实上的庞氏骗局的受益者。投资者对互联网感到兴奋，原因之一是雅虎的收入增长。于是他们投资新的互联网初创公司，这些初创公司又用这些钱在雅虎购买广告以获取流量。这又进一步推动了雅虎的收入增长，让投资者更加确信互联网值得投资。有一天，我坐在隔间里意识到这一点，像阿基米德在浴缸里一样跳了起来，不过喊的不是“尤里卡！”，而是“卖掉！”
无论是互联网初创公司还是宝洁这样的传统企业，都是在做品牌广告。他们不关心定向投放，只希望大量人群看到他们的广告。因此，流量成了雅虎追求的目标，什么类型的流量都无所谓。
[1]
It wasn't just Yahoo. All the search engines were doing it. This was why they were trying to get people to start calling them "portals" instead of "search engines." Despite the actual meaning of the word portal, what they meant by it was a site where users would find what they wanted on the site itself, instead of just passing through on their way to other destinations, as they did at a search engine.
I remember telling David Filo in late 1998 or early 1999 that Yahoo should buy Google, because I and most of the other programmers in the company were using it instead of Yahoo for search. He told me that it wasn't worth worrying about. Search was only 6% of our traffic, and we were growing at 10% a month. It wasn't worth doing better.
[1]
不仅是雅虎，所有搜索引擎都在这么做。这就是为什么他们试图让人们开始称他们为“门户”而不是“搜索引擎”。尽管“门户”这个词的实际含义，但他们所谓的门户是指用户可以在网站本身找到所需内容，而不是像在搜索引擎上那样只是经过。
我记得在1998年底或1999年初告诉大卫·费罗，雅虎应该收购谷歌，因为我和公司里大多数其他程序员都用谷歌搜索，而不是雅虎。他告诉我这不值得担心。搜索只占我们流量的6%，而我们每月增长10%。不值得做得更好。
I didn't say "But search traffic is worth more than other traffic!" I said "Oh, ok." Because I didn't realize either how much search traffic was worth. I'm not sure even Larry and Sergey did then. If they had, Google presumably wouldn't have expended any effort on enterprise search.
If circumstances had been different, the people running Yahoo might have realized sooner how important search was. But they had the most opaque obstacle in the world between them and the truth: money. As long as customers were writing big checks for banner ads, it was hard to take search seriously. Google didn't have that to distract them.
我没有说“但搜索流量比其他流量更有价值！”我说“哦，好吧。”因为我自己也没有意识到搜索流量的价值有多大。我不确定当时拉里和谢尔盖是否意识到了。如果他们意识到了，谷歌大概就不会在企业搜索上花力气了。
如果环境不同，雅虎的管理层可能更早意识到搜索的重要性。但他们与真相之间隔着一堵最不透明的墙：金钱。只要客户还在为横幅广告开大额支票，就很难认真对待搜索。谷歌没有这种干扰。
Hackers
But Yahoo also had another problem that made it hard to change directions. They'd been thrown off balance from the start by their ambivalence about being a technology company.
One of the weirdest things about Yahoo when I went to work there was the way they insisted on calling themselves a "media company." If you walked around their offices, it seemed like a software company. The cubicles were full of programmers writing code, product managers thinking about feature lists and ship dates, support people (yes, there were actually support people) telling users to restart their browsers, and so on, just like a software company. So why did they call themselves a media company?
One reason was the way they made money: by selling ads. In 1995 it was hard to imagine a technology company making money that way. Technology companies made money by selling their software to users. Media companies sold ads. So they must be a media company.
Another big factor was the fear of Microsoft. If anyone at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a technology company, the next thought would have been that Microsoft would crush them.
黑客文化
但雅虎还有另一个问题，使其难以改变方向。从一开始，他们就被对成为科技公司的矛盾心态打乱了阵脚。
我在雅虎工作时，最奇怪的一点是他们坚持称自己为“媒体公司”。如果你在办公室走一圈，它看起来像一家软件公司。隔间里满是写代码的程序员、思考功能列表和发布日期的产品经理、告诉用户重启浏览器的支持人员（没错，真的有支持人员），等等，就像一家软件公司。那么他们为什么称自己为媒体公司呢？
一个原因在于他们赚钱的方式：通过卖广告。在1995年，很难想象一家科技公司会这样赚钱。科技公司通过向用户销售软件来赚钱，而媒体公司卖广告。所以他们一定是媒体公司。
另一个重要因素是对微软的恐惧。如果雅虎有人考虑应该成为一家科技公司，下一个念头就是微软会碾压他们。
It's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a company with several times the power Google has now, but way meaner. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of them. Yahoo watched them crush the first hot Internet company, Netscape. It was reasonable to worry that if they tried to be the next Netscape, they'd suffer the same fate. How were they to know that Netscape would turn out to be Microsoft's last victim?
It would have been a clever move to pretend to be a media company to throw Microsoft off their scent. But unfortunately Yahoo actually tried to be one, sort of. Project managers at Yahoo were called "producers," for example, and the different parts of the company were called "properties." But what Yahoo really needed to be was a technology company, and by trying to be something else, they ended up being something that was neither here nor there. That's why Yahoo as a company has never had a sharply defined identity.
对于比我年轻得多的人来说，很难理解1995年微软仍然激起的恐惧。想象一家公司，拥有比现在谷歌还强几倍的力量，但更加凶狠。对他们感到恐惧是完全合理的。雅虎亲眼目睹他们碾碎了第一家热门互联网公司网景。担心如果他们试图成为下一个网景，就会遭遇同样命运，这很合理。他们怎么知道网景竟是微软的最后一个受害者？
假装成媒体公司来转移微软的视线本应是明智之举。但不幸的是，雅虎确实尝试成为媒体公司——有那么一点。例如，雅虎的项目经理被称为“制片人”，公司的不同部门被称为“资产”。但雅虎真正需要成为的是一家科技公司，而试图成为别的东西，结果变得不伦不类。这就是为什么雅虎作为一家公司从未有过清晰定义的身份。
The worst consequence of trying to be a media company was that they didn't take programming seriously enough. Microsoft (back in the day), Google, and Facebook have all had hacker-centric cultures. But Yahoo treated programming as a commodity. At Yahoo, user-facing software was controlled by product managers and designers. The job of programmers was just to take the work of the product managers and designers the final step, by translating it into code.
One obvious result of this practice was that when Yahoo built things, they often weren't very good. But that wasn't the worst problem. The worst problem was that they hired bad programmers.
Microsoft (back in the day), Google, and Facebook have all been obsessed with hiring the best programmers. Yahoo wasn't. They preferred good programmers to bad ones, but they didn't have the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had. And when you consider how much competition there was for programmers when they were hiring, during the Bubble, it's not surprising that the quality of their programmers was uneven.
试图成为媒体公司的最严重后果是，他们没有足够重视编程。微软（当年）、谷歌和Facebook都拥有以黑客为中心的文化。但雅虎把编程当作商品。在雅虎，面向用户的软件由产品经理和设计师控制。程序员的工作只是将产品经理和设计师的工作进行最后一步，即翻译成代码。
这种做法的一个明显结果是，雅虎造出来的东西往往不怎么样。但这还不是最糟糕的问题。最糟糕的问题是，他们雇用了糟糕的程序员。
微软（当年）、谷歌和Facebook都痴迷于招聘最好的程序员。雅虎没有。他们当然更喜欢好程序员而非差程序员，但他们没有那种一心一意、近乎令人反感的精英主义招聘最聪明人才的专注力，而这正是那些大赢家所具备的。考虑到他们在泡沫期间招聘程序员时面临的竞争，程序员质量参差不齐也就不足为奇了。
In technology, once you have bad programmers, you're doomed. I can't think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered. Good programmers want to work with other good programmers. So once the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no recovery.
[2]
At Yahoo this death spiral started early. If there was ever a time when Yahoo was a Google-style talent magnet, it was over by the time I got there in 1998.
The company felt prematurely old. Most technology companies eventually get taken over by suits and middle managers. At Yahoo it felt as if they'd deliberately accelerated this process. They didn't want to be a bunch of hackers. They wanted to be suits. A media company should be run by suits.
The first time I visited Google, they had about 500 people, the same number Yahoo had when I went to work there. But boy did things seem different. It was still very much a hacker-centric culture. I remember talking to some programmers in the cafeteria about the problem of gaming search results (now known as SEO), and they asked "what should we do?" Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that. Theirs was not to reason why; theirs was to build what product managers spec'd. I remember coming away from Google thinking "Wow, it's still a startup."
在科技领域，一旦你有了糟糕的程序员，就注定失败。我想不出有任何一家公司陷入技术平庸后还能恢复。好程序员愿意与其他好程序员一起工作。因此，一旦公司程序员的素质开始下降，就会进入一个无法恢复的死亡螺旋。
[2]
在雅虎，这个死亡螺旋很早就开始了。如果说雅虎曾经有过谷歌式的人才吸引力，那么在我1998年加入时已经结束了。
公司给人一种过早老化的感觉。大多数科技公司最终会被西装革履的管理层和中层经理接管。在雅虎，感觉他们故意加速了这个过程。他们不想成为一帮黑客，他们想成为穿西装的人。媒体公司应该由穿西装的人管理。
我第一次访问谷歌时，他们有大约500人，与雅虎在我入职时的人数相同。但天哪，情况大不相同。那仍然是一个以黑客为中心的文化。我记得在食堂和几个程序员讨论操纵搜索结果的问题（现在称为SEO），他们问“我们该怎么办？”雅虎的程序员不会问这个。他们的任务不是追问原因；而是根据产品经理的规格说明进行构建。我记得离开谷歌时想：“哇，它仍然是一家初创公司。”
There's not much we can learn from Yahoo's first fatal flaw. It's probably too much to hope any company could avoid being damaged by depending on a bogus source of revenue. But startups can learn an important lesson from the second one. In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture.
Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a hacker-centric culture came from Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke at Startup School in 2007. He said that in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing.
So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture? Which companies are "in the software business" in this respect? As Yahoo discovered, the area covered by this rule is bigger than most people realize. The answer is: any company that needs to have good software.
Why would great programmers want to work for a company that didn't have a hacker-centric culture, as long as there were others that did? I can imagine two reasons: if they were paid a huge amount, or if the domain was interesting and none of the companies in it were hacker-centric. Otherwise you can't attract good programmers to work in a suit-centric culture. And without good programmers you won't get good software, no matter how many people you put on a task, or how many procedures you establish to ensure "quality."
Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example.
我们从雅虎的第一个致命缺陷中学不到太多。指望任何公司都能避免因依赖虚假收入源而受损，可能期望过高。但初创公司可以从第二个教训中学到重要的一课。在软件业务中，你承受不起没有黑客中心文化的代价。
我听过的最令人印象深刻的对黑客中心文化的承诺，来自马克·扎克伯格在2007年创业学校上的演讲。他说，在Facebook早期，他们坚持招聘程序员来担任通常不属于编程的职位，比如人力资源和市场营销。
那么哪些公司需要拥有黑客中心文化？哪些公司在这方面属于“软件业务”？正如雅虎所发现的，这条规则覆盖的范围比大多数人意识到的要大。答案是：任何需要拥有优秀软件的公司。
为什么优秀的程序员会愿意为一家没有黑客中心文化的公司工作，只要有其他公司有？我能想到两个原因：如果报酬极其丰厚，或者领域很有趣且该领域内没有公司是黑客中心文化。否则，你无法吸引优秀程序员在西装中心文化中工作。而没有优秀的程序员，你就无法获得优秀的软件，无论你投入多少人，或者建立多少流程来确保“质量”。
黑客文化常常看起来有点不负责任。这就是为什么那些试图摧毁它的人会用“成人监督”这样的词。雅虎用的就是这个词。但比起看起来不负责任，还有更糟糕的事情。比如，输掉。
Notes
[1] The closest we got to targeting when I was there was when we created pets.yahoo.com in order to provoke a bidding war between 3 pet supply startups for the spot as top sponsor.
[2] In theory you could beat the death spiral by buying good programmers instead of hiring them. You can get programmers who would never have come to you as employees by buying their startups. But so far the only companies smart enough to do this are companies smart enough not to need to.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this.
注释
[1] 我在那里时，我们最接近定向投放的一次是创建了pets.yahoo.com，目的是引发三家宠物用品初创公司之间对顶级赞助商位置的竞标战。
[2] 理论上，你可以通过收购好的程序员而不是雇用他们来打破死亡螺旋。你可以通过收购他们的初创公司，获得那些永远不会以员工身份加入你的程序员。但到目前为止，唯一聪明到足以做到这一点的公司，是那些聪明到不需要这样做的公司。
感谢Trevor Blackwell、Jessica Livingston和Geoff Ralston对本文初稿的审阅。