经济学人下载:微软天价收购Skype

Mr Ballmer sees other opportunities to boost Skype’s revenues, which hit $860m last year—in particular by helping it to sign up many more online advertisers. The snag with this is that people engrossed in video chatting may well resent being bombarded with ads. And having become accustomed to getting a wonderful service for nothing, they may be reluctant to pay for new products that Skype rolls out unless these are especially compelling.

鲍尔默先生注意到还有其他途径可以提高Skype的收益，去年该公司的利润为8.6亿美元——特别是帮助它和更多的网络广告商签订合同。其中潜在的困难是全神贯注于视频聊天的人可能讨厌受到广告的狂轰滥炸。 而且一旦他们已经习惯免费使用某种很棒的服务，也许就不乐意花钱使用Skype推出的新产品，除非新服务非常吸引他们。

Some observers think Microsoft may have been motivated by its desire to keep Skype’s know-how out of the hands of rivals such as Cisco and Google. Whether or not this is true, there is little doubt that Mr Ballmer was keen to get his hands on the company. Skype was heading for a stockmarket flotation until Microsoft’s boss lobbed in an unsolicited offer for it a couple of months ago and then moved quickly to close a deal.

一些观察者认为微软此举的动机来源于不想让思科、谷歌等竞争对手得知Skype的专业技术。无论真假与否，几乎毋庸置疑的一点是鲍尔默先生非常想掌控公司。几个月前，当Skype正准备股票上市时，微软老板就主动报价然后迅速行动完成交易。

The result has been a windfall for several investors in Skype, including Silver Lake, a private-equity firm, and Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital firm set up by Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape, and Ben Horowitz, with whom Mr Andreessen founded another company. Both outfits have made a habit of buying unusually big stakes in hot private companies that they reckon still have plenty of room to grow.

结果就是Skype的几位投资人获得一笔意外之财，包括私募股权公司银湖（Silver Lake）、由网景公司（Netscape）创始人之一的马克??安德森(Marc Andreessen)建立的风投公司安德森??霍洛维茨(Andreessen Horowitz)以及该公司的另一位创始人本????霍洛维茨（Ben Horowitz）。 银湖和安德森??霍洛维茨这两家公司都习惯于购买他们认为仍具大幅度增长空间的热门私有公司的大笔大笔的股票。

Some critics have accused the firms of inflating the share prices of large web companies, but their bets on Skype, at least, have paid off. Andreessen Horowitz has quadrupled the initial $50m it invested just 18 months ago when Skype’s then owner, eBay, sold a big chunk of its shares. Now other institutions such as hedge funds are piling into the market and hunting for similar opportunities. “The competitive intensity has definitely risen in the big internet brand names,” says Mr Andreessen. It is unlikely that all of these super-ambitious investors will end up making super-impressive returns.

某些批评者指责这些公司使大型网络公司的股票大幅上涨，但是至少它们花在在Skype上的投资得到了回报。据安德森??霍洛维茨最初购买Skype股票仅仅18个月后，安德森??霍洛维茨所持的股票价格就借Skype其时的拥有者eBay出售掉它的一大笔股票之际比最初的五千万美元的投资翻了三倍。现在例如对冲基金等其他的机构也挤进这个市场来寻觅类似的机会。“集中在这些大规模互联网知名公司身上的竞争密度绝对提高了”。安德森先生说。不可能所有雄心勃勃的投资者都以获得超高额的回报收场。