To the list of books about transformative technology companies and their visionary leaders we can now add one about Silicon¹ Valley’s wayward soul and would-be savior: Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer.

关于变化中的技术公司，以及它们富于远见卓识的领导的出版物名单中，如今又多了一本——写的是硅谷性格倔强的灵魂人物与可能的救星——雅虎的玛丽莎·梅耶尔(Marissa Mayer)。

Ms. Mayer — “Yahoo’s Geek Goddess,” as Vanity Fair has called her — is not the first well-known executive brought in to reinvent Yahoo, but she certainly arrived with the most fanfare². When Yahoo hired her away from Google in 2012, she was only 37, making her the youngest woman to lead a Fortune 500 company. Valerie Jarrett and Nancy Pelosi were among those who called to congratulate her on her new job. Adding to the excitement was the news that Ms. Mayer was five months pregnant.

名利场》(Vanity Fair)杂志称梅耶尔女士为“雅虎的极客女神”，她并不是雅虎为图革新而引入的第一位著名经理人，但她的到来显然是动静最大的。2012年，雅虎把她从谷歌挖来时，她才只有37岁，成了《财富》(Fortune)500强企业的女领导者中最年轻的一位。瓦莱丽·贾勒特(Valerie Jarrett)和南希·佩洛西(Nancy Pelosi)等人都致电庆贺她的新工作。更为这个消息锦上添花的是，她当时已有五个月的身孕。

Expectations were high, to say the least. In Nicholas Carlson’s “Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!,” we learn that when Yahoo’s new chief executive showed up for her first day of work, she was greeted by posters of her face, done in the style of Shepard Fairey’s Barack Obama poster — complete with the word “hope.” At Yahoo, they have a term to describe things that don’t feel like they should be part of the so-called user experience: “yawful.”

至少人们对她的期望很高。从尼古拉斯·卡尔森(Nicholas Carlson)的《玛丽莎·梅耶尔与拯救雅虎之战》(Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!)一书中，我们得知，当这位雅虎的新任首席执行官第一天上班时，迎接她的有印着她头像的海报，是谢帕德·费雷(Shepard Fairey)为贝拉克·奥巴马(Barack Obama)做的海报的那种样式，上面还写着“希望”的字样。在雅虎，他们用一个自己造的字眼来描述那种似乎不应当成为所谓用户体验的东西：“yawful”。

“Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!” was excerpted in The New York Times Magazine, and in many ways it reads more like an overgrown article than a book. This is partly a function of Mr. Carlson’s informal tone and personality-driven approach. But it’s also a function of the subject. Yahoo is a big company, but it’s not what you would call an American institution, or even really a relevant force in our culture. And it’s not clear that there’s much more of substance to say about Ms. Mayer that hasn’t already been said in the many profiles of her.

纽约时报杂志》刊登了《玛丽莎·梅耶尔与拯救雅虎之战》的节选，它在很多方面读起来更像一篇拉长的文章，而不像是一本书。部分是由于作者卡尔森那种随意的口吻，以及以人物为主导的方式。但是这也和本书的题材有关。雅虎是个大公司，但并不是一个典型的美国机构，甚至也不是我们的文化中的重要力量。关于梅耶尔的特写报道已经有了很多，似乎没有更多实质性内容是这些报道所不曾涉及的。

That’s not to say that the book isn’t a lot of fun to read, or that Mr. Carlson isn’t steeped in his subject — an impressive feat³ considering that Ms. Mayer not only refused to cooperate with him, but actively⁴ interfered⁵ with his research and reporting. During her first day on the job at Yahoo, he writes in one of the news bites touted⁶ in the book’s news release, Ms. Mayer apparently⁷ mistook the company’s general counsel for the I.T. guy.

但这并不意味着这本书读起来没意思，也不是说卡尔森没有深入挖掘题材。鉴于梅耶尔不仅拒绝同他合作，而且百般阻挠他的研究和报道，这本书简直堪称了不起的成就。卡尔森在给这本书的新闻宣传稿中写了一句可供媒体引用的话：梅耶尔去雅虎上班第一天，就把公司的法律总顾问错认为IT工作人员。

Mr. Carlson, the chief correspondent for Business Insider, a website that covers technology and finance, doesn’t waste words lingering over details or musing⁸ on bigger themes — leadership, technology, the nature of innovation. He favors the short paragraph and the brief biographical sketch⁹. “She was a pompom girl and a debater,” he writes in his précis of Ms. Mayer’s childhood. “She was on the precision dance team.” The result, to borrow the digital media cliché, is corporate¹¹ history as snackable content.

卡尔森是技术与金融业网站“Business Insider”的首席记者，他没在细节上浪费笔墨，也没去思索关于领导力、技术与创新本质之类的宏大主题。他喜欢短小的段落与简短的传记式素描。“她是个拉拉队长式的女孩，喜欢争论，”他在概括梅耶尔的童年时这样写道。“她总在那个正确的舞蹈队里”。其结果，用一句数字媒体的俗话来说，就是把公司的历史变成了快餐式内容。

Today’s Yahoo is a sprawling¹² hodgepodge of products and services, none indispensable. It is a company adrift, a well-capitalized mess. But as Mr. Carlson reminds us, Yahoo was a pioneer of the Valley. In its earliest incarnation, Yahoo was the digital equivalent of TV Guide, providing an advertising-supported directory of web pages for the still nascent¹³ Internet. Before it became known as Yahoo, it was called David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web, after the company’s founders¹⁴, David Filo and Jerry Yang.

如今的雅虎是各种产品与服务的大杂烩，但没有提供什么不可或缺的东西。这是一个随波逐流的公司，一团盈利良好的混乱。但卡尔森提醒我们，雅虎曾是硅谷的先锋。在早期，雅虎就相当于数字界的TV Guide，为仍处于早期时代的互联网提供有广告支持的网页索引。在以“雅虎”这个名字成名之前，它的名字是“大卫与杰里的万维网指南”(David and Jerry ’s Guide to the World Wide Web)——这名字来自公司的两位创始人，大卫·费罗(David Filo)与杨致远(Jerry Yang)。

They had no trouble monetizing their new business. Yahoo nearly tripled its revenues from 1997 to 1998. Its founders became very rich, very quickly. “It takes a female elephant 22 months to gestate a calf,” Mr. Carlson writes. “Filo and Yang made their first $100 million in less than half that time.”

新公司毫不困难地实现了盈利，从1997到1998年，雅虎的利润几乎增长了三倍。创始人迅速暴富。“母象要怀胎22个月才能生出一头小象，”卡尔森写道，“而费罗和杨不到11个月就赚了一个亿。”

For a little while, anyway, the Yahoo logo was everywhere — on Ben & Jerry’s ice cream containers, on Visa cards, on the Zamboni machines at professional hockey games. Then things started to fall apart. Yahoo was the victim of larger economic forces, specifically the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001. But it also failed to evolve or innovate¹⁵. As such, it gradually lost market share to its growing number of competitors. And it became deeply uncool, the Reebok to Google’s Nike.

有一段时间，雅虎的logo到处都是——“本与杰里”的冰淇淋柜上、银行卡上、职业冰球比赛的赞博尼磨冰机上。后来一切开始分崩离析。雅虎成了更大的经济力量的牺牲品，特别是2001年互联网公司泡沫的爆发。但它也没有能够实现进步或革新。这样，雅虎便逐渐丧失了市场份额，让位给日益崛起的竞争对手们。它变得越来越不酷，如果说谷歌是耐克，那雅虎就相当于锐步。

Enter Yahoo 2.0, the first of many attempts to turn around the company. The names, at least, would get more creative. There was, for example, Project Godfather, the 2002 plan to rub out Yahoo’s competition in the Internet search business. Several years later the company resolved to stop spreading itself so thin, like peanut butter. The Wall Street Journal labeled this Yahoo’s Peanut Butter Manifesto¹⁶.

雅虎2.0是公司为自救采取的诸多尝试中的第一个。至少这些尝试的名字更有创意了。比如说2002年的“教父计划”，旨在让雅虎在网络搜索领域内的竞争中脱颖而出。几年后，公司决心不再让公司到处扩张，像花生酱那样摊成薄薄的一层。《华尔街日报》(The Wall Street Journal)称之为雅虎的“花生酱宣言”。

In Mr. Carlson’s breezy retelling, these hapless efforts to recapture the company’s former glory amount to almost comic exercises in futility¹⁷. Yahoo is Silicon Valley’s version of the New York Knicks. Its string of well-compensated leaders can’t seem to get anything right. Presented with the chance to buy Google for $1 million in 1997, the company passed. Years later, it could have had Facebook, which is now valued at more than $200 billion, for $1 billion. Yahoo drew the line at $850 million.

卡尔森以轻松活泼的叙事讲述了雅虎公司为恢复往日辉煌的不幸尝试，它们几乎成了完全无用的笑话。雅虎在硅谷，就像纽约尼克斯队在篮球界一样。一系列支取高薪的领导人物似乎也未能力挽狂澜。1997年，公司本有机会以100万美元的价格收购谷歌，但错失了这个机会。几年后，它又有可能收购Facebook，这家公司目前的价值已经超过2000亿美元，当时标价仅10亿美元，但雅虎的底价是8.5亿美元。

Ms. Mayer emerges from this book’s pages less as a Geek Goddess, or even a computer science nerd made good, than as a kind of cyborg, a tone-deaf workaholic who has trouble making eye contact and requires only four hours of sleep a night. In other words, it turns out she’s no different from your stereotypical¹⁸ male tech executive. Mr. Carlson describes her management style as “dictatorial¹⁹” and her manner of speaking as “staccato verbosity²⁰.” At one point, he goes so far as to suggest that she may have Asperger’s syndrome²¹. Mr. Carlson issues a similarly harsh judgment²² on Ms. Mayer’s tenure²³ at Yahoo. Among many other things, he faults her for trying to take the company’s “middle-America, Walmart-esque brand” upmarket by hiring Katie Couric as its Global Anchor for $5 million a year. As Mr. Carlson recounts it, the decision was prompted by a breakfast with the Vogue²⁴ editor Anna Wintour, who described Yahoo’s women’s site as “dreadful.”

在这本书中，梅耶尔的形象并不像极客女神，甚至也不像那种获得了成功的电脑科学狂人；在这本书中，她更像是一个电子人，有点音盲的工作狂，不愿与人四目相对，每天只睡四小时。换言之，她和你心目中那种典型的男性技术执行官的形象没什么两样。卡尔森描写她的管理风格是“独裁专断”，她的说话方式是“断奏般的长篇大论”。在某一段里，他甚至认为她可能患有阿斯波哥尔综合征（一种不善交际、兴趣偏狭的内向症状——编注）。对于梅耶尔在雅虎的工作，卡尔森也给出了同样严厉的论断。比如，他指责她以500万美元年薪雇佣凯蒂·库里克(Katie Couric)作为雅虎的全球主播，以便提升公司的“中部美国，沃尔玛式品牌形象”。据卡尔森描述，这个决定是一次早餐会上，由《Vogue》的主编安娜·温图尔(Anna Wintour)提出来的，她说雅虎网站的“女性”板块“太枯燥”。

Wall Street seems to agree with Mr. Carlson’s assessment²⁵. Yahoo has a market capitalization of about $44 billion. But when you take out its large investment in the Chinese Internet company Alibaba, Yahoo’s core business is currently being valued at less than zero dollars.

华尔街似乎对卡尔森的评估心有戚戚。雅虎的市场资本总值约在440亿美元。但是除去它的最大一笔投资，也就是在中国互联网公司阿里巴巴上的投资，雅虎的核心企业目前一文不值。

Ms. Mayer is still running Yahoo, though it’s anyone’s guess how much longer she will remain. The company’s last chief executive was deposed²⁶ by the head of a powerful hedge fund with a large position in Yahoo. In the book’s final pages, Mr. Carlson writes about a similar campaign introduced recently by a major stockholder who criticized Ms. Mayer for failing to cut costs and for spending too much on acquisitions that haven’t added to revenues. This stockholder said the smartest thing for Yahoo to do at this point would be to sell off its assets and return the proceeds to shareholders²⁷.

梅耶尔目前仍然在执掌雅虎，尽管所有人都认为她已经呆不长久了。雅虎公司的上一任首席执行官是被一个很强大、在雅虎很有地位的对冲基金的领导者罢免的。在本书的结尾部分，卡尔森写到的事件非常类似，最近，一位雅虎重要的股东批评梅耶尔没能降低公司成本，将太多资金用于不能为公司盈利的收购。这位股东说，目前雅虎最明智的做法或许是卖掉自己的全部资产，把收入返还给股东。

Maybe the fight to save Yahoo is almost over. Or maybe the company is just coming to the end of another losing season.

或许拯救雅虎的战役还未结束，抑或这家公司已经走入又一波失败的终点。