经济学人下载:如何打破大型科技公司的垄断(3)

If good comparisons and financial data are absent, such estimates are more art than science, says Brian Wieser of Group m, the world’s largest advertising buyer. That makes it even harder to put a number on Google’s advertising business as a whole (Jefferies’ estimate is $539bn). Ms Warren wants to split it into an ad marketplace and services that operate in it. But valuing its constituent parts is guesswork. The firm is not forthcoming with numbers.
世界上最大的广告采购商m集团的 Brian Wieser 说，如果没有良好的比较和财务数据，这样的估计就更像是艺术而不是科学。这使得谷歌的广告业务整体数字更难确定(杰富瑞(Jefferies)估计为5390亿美元)。沃伦希望将其拆分为一个广告市场和在其中运营的服务。但对其组成部分的估值只是猜测。该公司不愿透露具体数字。

These are not the only problems. WhatsApp, despite the whopping price Facebook paid for it, does not make much money, which makes assessing its worth hard. Trying to estimate a price for Apple’s and Google’s apps would be hopeless.
这些还不是唯一的问题。尽管 Facebook 为 WhatsApp 支付了高昂的价格，但它并没有赚到多少钱，这使得评估它的价值变得很困难。试图估算苹果和谷歌应用程序的价格是没有希望的。

The fuzziness of Ms Warren’s plan also makes estimating a total break-up value difficult. If Facebook has to part with WhatsApp, why should it keep Messenger, its other instant-messaging service? Or why should Apple keep iMessage? Both may be regarded as services on top of a platform utility. It is similarly unclear what would happen to the app stores of Apple and Google or the cloud-computing arms of Amazon and Google (and Microsoft’s, for that matter, a rival to Amazon). A spin-off of Amazon Web Services, for example, would create the world’s second-mostvaluable corporate IT firm. It would be worth $438bn, says Morgan Stanley, a bank—about four times more than IBM.
沃伦计划的模糊性也使得估算拆分总额变得困难。如果Facebook不得不与WhatsApp 拆分，它为什么还要保留另一款即时通讯服务Messenger呢？或者苹果为什么要保留iMessage？两者都可以看作是平台实用程序之上的服务。同样不清楚的是，苹果和谷歌的应用商店、亚马逊和谷歌的云计算部门(就此而言，微软是亚马逊的竞争对手)会发生什么。例如，亚马逊网络服务的分拆将创造出世界上第二大最有价值的企业IT公司。摩根斯坦利表示，这个数字将达到4380亿美元，大约是IBM的四倍。