Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon——The three survivors 

Jun 19th 2008 | SAN FRANCISCO|From The Economist print edition

What the diverging fates of Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon say about the internet

1．diverge v.开始有分歧，出现不一致;岔开，分开。这里的diverging fates就是雅虎、eBay和亚马逊三者的不同命运。             

AND so Yahoo! survives. The internet company—which, at the age of 14, is one of the oldest—appears in the end to have rebuffed Microsoft, the software Goliath that wanted to buy it. It has done so, in part, by surrendering to Google, the younger internet company that is its main rival. In a vague deal apparently designed to confuse antitrust regulators, Yahoo! is letting Google, the biggest force in web-search advertising, place text ads next to some of Yahoo!'s own search results. Google thus controls some or all of the ads on all the big search engines except Microsoft's. Yahoo! lives, but on the web's equivalent of life support.

1． AND so Yahoo! survives. 这句话可以用在别的地方。比如，小D争夺战当中：AND so our group survives.
2． rebuff v.拒绝
3． software Goliath 软件巨头

Yahoo!'s descent, first gradual then sudden, during this decade marks a surprising reversal of the fates of the only three big internet firms to have survived since the web's earliest days. Back in 1994 Jerry Yang and David Filo, truant PhD students at Stanford, started to publish a list, eventually named Yahoo!, of links to cool destinations on the nascent web. Around the same time, Jeff Bezos was writing his business plan for a website, soon to be called Amazon, for selling books online. The following year, Pierre Omidyar, a French-born Iranian-American, put an auction site on the web that would become eBay.

1． truant n.逃课生，旷课生
2． nascent adj.新生的，刚发展的

Even as hundreds of other dotcoms fell by the wayside at the turn of the century, these three made it through the great internet crisis and have since prospered, to varying degrees and at different times. Their fates have reflected the evolution of the web as a whole, and now suggest its future direction. For many years eBay and Yahoo! made more money than Amazon, which, as a capital-intensive retailer, struggled longer with losses and then made profits at lower margins (see chart). And yet, says Pip Coburn of Coburn Ventures, an investment adviser, Yahoo! is now drifting and eBay is a washed-up quasi-monopoly, whereas Amazon finds itself at the internet's cutting edge.

1．a capital-intensive retailer 资本密集型的零售商
2．washed-up quasi-monopoly 疲倦了的类垄断公司。 这里就是说 eBay有些疲软，而亚马逊却找到了自己的立足之地

Yahoo! set out to be a new sort of media company. To that end, it hired a Hollywood mogul, Terry Semel, during the internet depression in 2001. He had a backward-looking idea of the media business. Yahoo!'s site became a tawdry strip mall, with big, flashing advertisements next to users' e-mail inboxes. The firm slipped into a mindset of product silos, with the teams for the home-page, e-mail, finance and sports pages competing with each other and for advertisers, and confusing users.

1． mogul n.泰斗。。。Hollywood mogul 翻成好莱坞的大人物（No. 1 hotshot）比较好
2． tawdry adj. 廉价的 strip n.一块块狭长的土地。a tawdry strip mall 一个廉价狭长的购物点
3． slip into a mindset of product silos 渐渐地进入了产品储藏的思维定式
silo原义是储藏牲畜冬季用饲料的青贮塔（青贮塔适用于机械化水平较高、饲养规模较大、经济条件较好的饲养场。要有专业技术设计和施工的砖、石、水泥结构的永久性建筑。塔直径4～6m，高13～15m，塔顶有防雨设备。塔身一侧每隔2～3m留一60cm×60cm的窗口，装料时关闭，用完后开启。原料由机械吹入塔顶落下，塔内有专人踩实。饲料是由塔底层取料口取出。青贮塔封闭严实，原料下沉紧密，发酵充分，青贮质量较高。）

Yahoo!'s bigger mistake was not to see how the web was changing. Google, also founded by two truant Stanford PhD students, became the leader of a new generation with a vision that web search, rather than Yahoo!'s “portal” approach, would guide surfers around the internet. Google valued simplicity, interactivity and the collective intelligence gleaned from the web and its users. Yahoo! belatedly tried to keep up and bought sites such as flickr for photo-sharing and del.icio.us for bookmark-sharing, but it “put them in the curio cabinet” without transforming the company, says Jerry Michalski, a technology consultant. Yahoo! was “so bent on being the future”, he says, that it “missed the new”. Mr Yang replaced Mr Semel last year, but the crisis was so grave that he has now ended up surrendering to Google.

1． portal 大门，入口 这里rather than Yahoo!'s “portal” approach翻译成 和雅虎的“入口式”通道不同。
2． glean v.缓慢而艰难地搜集 Google崇尚简约之美、互动之便，它也注重互联网及其使用者的长期聚集的智慧。
3． curio 古董、珍品 近义：antique

EBay took a different route, recognising that its business—in effect, online yard sales—had potential network effects: in short, that sellers and buyers would flock to whichever site already did the most trading. The firm became a de facto monopoly, but with that came a culture that left many of its users disenchanted, and growth slowed. Some measures, such as the number of new listings of items for sale, are even in decline. Buyers and sellers increasingly rely on Google's search model, or online social networks, to find things and one another. EBay's new boss, John Donahoe, is not facing a crisis like Yahoo!'s—but neither does he appear to have a big idea for the future.

1．de facto （来自德语）事实上的

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