2021 Text 3（英语二）大公司的“先买再杀”策略

When Microsoft bought task management app Wunderlist and mobile calendar Sunrise in 2015, it picked up two newcomers that were attracting considerable buzz in Silicon Valley.

当微软在 2015 年收购任务管理应用程序 Wunderlist 和移动日历 Sunrise时，它拿下了两个在硅谷引起巨大反响的新公司。

Microsoft's own Office dominates the market for “productivity” software, but the start-ups represented a new wave of technology designed from the ground up for the smartphone world.

微软自己的 Office 在 “生产力” 软件市场上占主导地位，但这两家新公司代表了为智能手机世界从头设计的新一轮技术。

Both apps, however, were later scrapped, after Microsoft said it had used their best features in its own products.

然而，这两个应用程序后来都被取消了，因为微软说它已经在自己的产品中使用了它们的最佳功能。

Their teams of engineers stayed on, making them two of the many “acqui-hires” that the biggest companies have used to feed their insatiable hunger for tech talent.

他们的工程师团队留下来，使他们成为最大的公司用来满足他们对技术人才永不满足的渴望的众多“招聘人员”中的两个。

To Microsoft's critics, the fates of Wunderlist and Sunrise are examples of a remorseless drive by Big Tech to chew up any innovative companies that lie in their path.

在微软的批评者看来，Wunderlist 和 Sunrise 的命运是大科技公司无情地吞噬任何挡在他们面前的创新公司的例子。

“They bought the seedlings and closed them down,” complained Paul Arnold, a partner at San Francisco-based Switch Ventures, putting paid to businesses that might one day turn into competitors.

总部位于旧金山的 Switch Ventures 公司的合伙人保罗·阿诺德抱怨说，“他们买下了幼苗并扼杀了它们”，让那些有朝一日可能成为竞争对手的企业付出代价。

Microsoft declined to comment.

微软拒绝发表评论。

Like other start-up investors, Mr Arnold's own business often depends on selling start-ups to larger tech companies, though he admits to mixed feelings about the result.

与其他初创企业的投资者一样，阿诺德先生自己的业务经常依赖于将初创企业卖给大型科技公司，尽管他承认对这一结果有不同的感受。

“I think these things are good for me, if I put my selfish hat on. But are they good for the American economy? I don't know.”

“我认为，如果我戴上自私的帽子，这些事情对我来说是好事。但它们对美国经济有好处吗？我不知道。”

The US Federal Trade Commission says it wants to find the answer to that question.

美国联邦贸易委员会说，它想找到这个问题的答案。

This week, it asked the five most valuable US tech companies for information about their many small acquisitions over the past decade.

本周，它要求五家最有价值的美国科技公司提供关于他们在过去十年中的许多小型收购的信息。

Although only a research project at this stage, the request has raised the prospect of regulators wading into early-stage tech markets that until now have been beyond their reach.

尽管现阶段只是一个研究项目，但这一要求提出了监管机构涉足早期科技市场的前景，而直到现在，这些市场还在他们的掌控范围之外。

Given their combined market value of more than $5.5tn, rifling through such small deals — many of them much less prominent than Wunderlist and Sunrise — might seem beside the point.

考虑到它们的总市值超过 5.5 万亿美元，对这些小交易进行过滤（其中许多交易远没有 Wunderlist 和 Sunrise 那么突出）可能看起来无关紧要。

Between them, the five companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook) have spent an average of only $3.4bn a year on sub-$1bn acquisitions over the past five years — a drop in the ocean compared with their massive financial reserves, and the more than $130bn of venture capital that was invested in the US last year.

这五家公司（苹果、微软、谷歌、亚马逊和脸书）在过去五年中平均每年仅花费 34 亿美元进行 10 亿美元以下的收购——与它们庞大的资金储备以及去年在美国投资的超过 1300 亿美元的风险资本相比，只是沧海一粟。

However, critics say that the big companies use such deals to buy their most threatening potential competitors before their businesses have a chance to gain momentum, in some cases as part of a “buy and kill” tactic to simply close them down.

然而，批评人士表示，大公司利用此类交易在其业务有机会获得动力之前收购其最具威胁的潜在竞争对手，在某些情况下，作为 “先买再杀” 策略的一部分直接结束它们。