经济学人2019.5.4/Facebook’s future/part2（完）

Older. And wiser?

老当益壮？

Facebook’s core business is maturing, as its boss clearly sees. Its operating margins—42%, excluding $3bn set aside to cover an expected fine by America’s Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations—remain the envy of the tech world (see article). In the latest quarter revenue grew by 26% compared with the previous year, exceeding $15bn. But user growth is slowing. In some rich countries, especially European ones, it is flat. The young prefer social media which are more “intimate” and “ephemeral”, like Snapchat, which pioneered “stories”, messages and pictures that disappear after 24 hours—and which Facebook aped. More than 500m users of Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp now post stories every day.

Facebook老板清楚地看到的那样，Facebook的核心业务正在成熟。它的营业利润率(42%，不包括30亿美元用于支付美国联邦贸易委员会(Federal Trade Commission)预计因侵犯隐私而处以的罚款)，仍然让科技界艳羡不已。最近一个季度的收入同比增长26%，超过150亿美元。但用户增长正在放缓。在一些富裕国家，尤其是欧洲国家，几乎没有增长。年轻人更喜欢更“亲密”、更“短暂”的社交媒体，比如Snapchat，它开创了“故事”、24小时后就会消失的消息和图片——Facebook也在效仿。Instagram、Messenger和WhatsApp的逾5亿用户现在每天都在发布故事。

词汇

operating margin/营业毛利

 

Mr Zuckerberg expects migration from the online “town square” to a digital “living room” to continue; stories may soon outnumber posts on Facebook’s newsfeed. The plan is to build it around WhatsApp, which already offers secure texting. It would let users find each other, pay digital and offline shopkeepers, or purchase a cornucopia of online services—perhaps one day using Facebook’s own currency. In time, the thinking goes, it may become as indispensable to Westerners as WeChat is in China.

扎克伯格预计，从在线“城镇广场”向数字“客厅”的迁移将继续下去;在Facebook的新闻推送中，故事的数量可能很快就会超过帖子。该公司计划围绕已经提供安全短信服务的WhatsApp开发这款应用。它将让用户找到彼此，支付数字和线下店主，或者购买丰富的在线服务——也许有一天会使用Facebook自己的货币。有人认为，假以时日，它可能会像微信在中国一样，成为西方人不可或缺的东西。

词汇

Cornucopia/丰饶的象征

Some elements of the new platform already exist; WhatsApp is testing a payment service in India. Others, such as new shopping features on Instagram, were launched in San Jose. All this falls short of a full-blown business plan. But the contours of Mr Zuckerberg’s vision are taking shape. The 34-year-old is proceeding more cautiously than in Facebook’s early years, when he was guided by the now infamous injunction to “move fast and break things”—but no less deliberately.

新平台的一些元素已经存在;WhatsApp正在印度测试一项支付服务。其他一些功能，比如Instagram上的新购物功能，则是在圣何塞推出的。所有这些都不足以形成一个完整的商业计划。但扎克伯格的愿景轮廓正在成形。现年34岁的扎克伯格比Facebook成立之初更加谨慎，当时他受到了如今臭名昭著的“快速行动，打破陈规”的指导——但依旧是很谨慎。

词汇

Contours/轮廓

no less /仍然；不相上下；依旧

deliberately/故意地；谨慎地；慎重地

That is just as well, for “platform shifts” are tricky. Microsoft did not see smartphones coming and Facebook itself almost missed the rise of mobile apps. To succeed, it must clear a number of hurdles. The first is technical. Facebook wants an Instagram user to be able to send a note directly to a friend on WhatsApp. Creating a common phone book for these services, with a combined total of 2.7bn users and different source codes, presents a knotty problem for programmers. Chris Cox, one of Mr Zuckerberg’s top lieutenants, is rumoured to have left the company in March because he did not think it could be done (this week Mr Cox attributed his departure to “artistic differences” with his boss).

这也无妨，因为“平台转移”是棘手的。微软没有预见到智能手机的到来，Facebook自己也几乎错过了移动应用的崛起。要想成功，它必须扫清一些障碍。第一个是技术上的。Facebook希望Instagram用户能够直接向WhatsApp上的朋友发送短信。为这些服务创建一个共有27亿用户和不同源代码的公用电话簿，对程序员来说是一个棘手的问题。有传言称，扎克伯格的高级助手之一克里斯•考克斯(Chris Cox)已于今年3月离开facebook，因为他认为这是不可能的(本周，考克斯将他的离开归因于与老板的“艺术差异”)。

The second challenge is economic. WeChat could become the platform of choice on smartphones because China had no dominant app stores. Facebook must contend with incumbents such as Apple and Google. Since you can’t sell microtargeted adverts against encrypted messages your algorithms cannot see, the new platform will need a fresh way to make money. For all its ubiquity, WeChat is no cash cow (Tencent, its owner, makes most of its revenue from online games). Maintaining Facebook’s fat margins would require new revenue sources, such as charging businesses to contact users or taking a cut of any purchases, as credit-card issuers do.

第二个挑战是经济。微信可能成为智能手机的首选平台，因为中国没有占据主导地位的应用商店。Facebook必须与苹果(Apple)和谷歌等现有公司竞争。由于你无法推广针对算法无法看到的加密信息而推算出的导向型广告，新平台将需要一种新的赚钱方式。尽管微信无处不在，但它并不是摇钱树(其所有者腾讯的大部分收入来自网络游戏)。维持Facebook的高利润率需要新的收入来源，比如向联系用户的企业收取费用，或者像信用卡发行商那样从任何购买行为中抽取一定油水。

词汇

Incumbent/在职者；现任者；领圣俸者

 

Lastly, there are the entwined issues of privacy and competition. Mr Zuckerberg accepts that a lot of people dismiss Facebook’s sincerity here—his recent article in the Washington Post, imploring governments to regulate social media, notwithstanding. It will continue to collect plenty of data. Integrating these, and the underlying apps, could in turn enable Facebook to convert its dominance in public social networking into power over private messaging. This reminds seasoned competition regulators of Microsoft’s attempts to bundle its operating system with a web browser in the mid-1990s in a bid to control cyberspace. With the internet’s rise, the stakes today are bigger: no country wants one firm to become society’s de facto operating system.

最后，还有隐私和竞争这两个相互交织的问题。扎克伯格承认，很多人对Facebook的诚意不屑一顾——尽管他最近在《华盛顿邮报》上发表了一篇文章，呼吁政府监管社交媒体。它将继续收集大量数据。整合这些应用程序和底层应用程序，可以反过来让Facebook将其在公共社交网络领域的主导地位转变为对私人信息的控制。这让经验丰富的竞争监管机构想起，上世纪90年代中期，微软曾试图将其操作系统与网络浏览器捆绑销售，以求控制网络空间。随着互联网的崛起，如今的风险更大:没有哪个国家希望一家公司成为社会事实上的操作系统。

词汇

Entwined/缠住；盘绕

Implore/恳求

Notwithstanding/尽管，虽然

Bundle/捆

 

Since its services cost nothing, Facebook says, it is not gouging users. It could argue that a single dominant social network is easier to police than lots of smaller ones and has greater financial and technical capacity to keep users safe from harmful content. And it would be a bulwark against WeChat, which might otherwise become a force outside China—bringing the Chinese surveillance state with it.

Facebook说，由于它的服务不收费，所以它没有欺骗用户。它可能会辩称，一个占主导地位的社交网络比许多规模较小的社交网络更容易被监管，而且拥有更大的财力和技术能力来保护用户免受有害内容的侵害。它将成为对抗微信的堡垒，否则——————。

词汇

Gouge/乱要价

Bulwark/壁垒；保障；防波堤

surveillance /监督；监视

Indeed, Mr Zuckerberg’s Washington Post article looks like a bid to broker a 21st-century version of the Kingsbury Commitment of 1913, when AT&T, then America’s telephone monopoly, accepted government oversight and agreed to spin off some of its businesses in exchange for not being nationalised or broken up. The difference is that, unlike AT&T, Facebook’s reach extends beyond America and spans a growing range of industries, from advertising to finance. It must grapple with politicians, regulators and rivals. If enough opponents gang up at once, even the most gifted aikido master may struggle to fend them off.

的确，扎克伯格在《华盛顿邮报》上发表的文章，看起来像是在为21世纪版的金斯伯里承诺做中间人。1913年，时任美国电话垄断企业的美国电话电报公司(AT&T)接受了政府的监督，同意剥离部分业务，以换取不被国有化或分拆。不同之处在于，与AT&T不同的是，Facebook的业务范围不仅限于美国，而且涵盖了从广告到金融等越来越多的行业。它必须与政界人士、监管机构和竞争对手竞争。如果有足够多的对手联合起来，即使是最有天赋的合气道大师也可能难以抵挡他们。

词汇

spin off /甩掉；剥离

grapple with/扭打；努力克服