文章来源：【经济学人】Jul 28th 2022 期 Leaders 栏目
The era of big-tech exceptionalism may be over
大型科技例外论的时代可能结束了
Cloudburst
America’s technology giants are facing unfamiliar limits to growth
美国的科技巨头们正面临着陌生的增长限制
Jul 27th 2022
In the digital world, the laws of physics can be suspended on a programmer’s whim. Equally, that world’s corporate architects have seemed able to defy economic gravity. Since 2005 the digital share of American gdp has risen by a third, to 10%. America’s tech oligopoly—Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple (maama, if you will)—has outpaced even that breakneck growth. Collectively, maama’s revenues and profits have swelled by nearly 20% a year on average over the past decade, while America eked out nominal annual gdp growth of less than 4%. Covid-19 may have cramped physical lives, but it enriched digital ones—thereby also enriching big tech as never before.
在数字世界中，物理定律可以因程序员的突发奇想而被搁置。同样，这个世界的企业老板似乎能够无视经济规律。自2005年以来，数字在美国GDP中所占的份额上升了三分之一，达到10%。美国的科技寡头——Meta、Alphabet、亚马逊、微软和苹果(缩写为MAAMA，如果你愿意这样称呼的话)——甚至已经超过了这一高速增长。总的来说，在过去的十年里，MAAMA的收入和利润平均每年增长近20%，而美国竭力维持的名义GDP年增长率却只有不到4%。Covid-19可能限制了人们的物质生活，但它丰富了数字生活，从而也以前所未有的方式让大型科技公司富裕。
This year gravity has asserted itself once more. The tech-heavy nasdaq index is down by a quarter since January, half as much again as America’s broader stockmarket. Profitless not-so-big tech has been dragged down by anaemic revenue growth and high interest rates, which make the far-off earnings of firms like Snap look less valuable today. More surprising, despite generating piles of cash in the here and now, the giants are also feeling the tug of reality. On July 26th Alphabet reported its slowest quarterly sales growth since the bleak early months of the pandemic. Its share price rallied, though not enough to offset recent falls and only because expectations were even worse. A day later Meta said its sales fell year on year, for the first time ever.
今年，引力再次显示出其威力。以科技股为主的纳斯达克指数自一月份以来下跌了四分之一，跌幅是美国整体股市跌幅的一半。收入增长乏力和利率高企拖累了利润不高的不算大的科技公司，这让Snap等公司遥远的收益在今天看来不那么值钱。更令人惊讶的是，尽管这些巨头在此时此地获得了大量现金，但它们也感受到了现实的拉力。7月26日，Alphabet公布了自疫情前几个月惨淡销售增长以来最慢的季度销售增长。它的股价反弹，虽然不足以抵消最近的下跌，而且这只是因为市场预期更糟。一天后，Meta表示其销量首次同比下降。
America’s technology titans are suddenly having to contend with forces that have long plagued old-economy ceos: gummed-up supply chains, protectionism, worker shortages and competition. For maama, these constraints are something of a novelty. Its bosses had better get used to them.
突然之间，美国的科技巨头们不得不与长期困扰着传统经济的首席执行官们的各种力量作斗争：阻塞的供应链、贸易保护主义、工人短缺以及竞争。对于MAAMA来说，这些限制有些新奇。这些老板们最好习惯它们。
One limit is geography, often forgotten in a world of seamless global supply chains and largely borderless cyberspace. In so far as the tech giants peddle physical bits and bobs rather than digital bytes, they are sharing in the pain of supply disruptions. In April, Apple (which like Amazon was due to report its results after we went to press) warned that its revenues would be $4bn-8bn lower than expected in the second quarter, chiefly because of supply-chain snags in [...], where factories are locked down with unnerving severity every time a case of covid turns up. Ingenious inventory-management software has not spared Amazon—which, like conventional retailers such as Walmart, misjudged what shoppers wanted and when—from extra costs.
地理因素食一个限制，在一个全球供应链无缝衔接、网络空间基本无界的世界里，地理因素常常被遗忘。只要科技巨头们兜售零零碎碎的实物，而不是数字字节，他们就会承受供应中断的痛苦。今年4月，苹果(与亚马逊一样，在我们付印后也将公布业绩)警告称，其第二季度营收将比预期低40亿至80亿美元，主要原因是供应链受阻。每当出现新冠肺炎病例，工厂就会以令人不安的严重程度封锁。精妙的库存管理软件并没有让亚马逊免于额外的成本，就像沃尔玛这样的传统零售商一样，它错误地判断了顾客想要什么以及何时需要。
Barriers are being put up on the internet, too, as places from the European Union to India become more protective of their citizens’ data and of their own digital darlings. That is a worry for Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft, which, outside firewalled [...] at least, face few barriers to selling their digital services.
随着欧盟和印度等地对本国公民的数据和自己的数字宠儿采取了更加严格的保护措施，互联网上也设置了障碍。这是Alphabet、Meta和微软的担忧，它们至少在设置了防火墙的[...]之外，在销售数字服务方面几乎没有障碍。
Another limit has to do with talent. Tech firms are not used to scrabbling around for the best programmers. However, having dislodged banks and consultancies as graduates’ dream employers, big tech is finding it hard to recruit. One reason is the sheer size of maama’s collective workforce , which has grown nearly seven-fold in the past ten years, to 2.2m. The bigger the payroll the harder it is to replenish, let alone expand. Big tech also faces stiffer competition from other industries, all of which these days manifest a degree of techiness minus the controversies that have sullied big tech’s reputation.
另一个限制与人才相关。科技公司不习惯四处寻找最好的程序员。然而，科技公司在取代了银行和咨询公司，成为毕业生的理想雇主之后，大型科技公司发现很难招到人。其中一个原因是MAAMA的集体劳动力规模，在过去十年中增长了近7倍，达到220万人。员工工资支出越多，就越难以补充，更不用说扩大规模了。大型科技公司还面临着来自其他行业的激烈竞争，这些行业如今都表现出一定程度的技术性，并且没有出现损害大型科技公司声誉的争议。
The last limit is maama’s markets. As businesses such as e-commerce revert to pre-covid growth rates, the pandemic looks less like the start of an era of endless digitisation, and more like a one-off step-change. As they become commonplace, tech offerings are behaving like other staples. As Alphabet and Meta show, digital ads, once thought immune to the business cycle, may be turning as procyclical as the offline sort.
最后一个限制是MAAMA的市场。随着电商等企业恢复到新冠肺炎之前的增长速度，这场大流行看起来不太像无休止的数字化时代的开始，而更像是免洗的巨变。随着科技产品变得司空见惯，它们的表现与其它主要产品没什么两样。正如Alphabet和Meta所显示的那样，曾经被认为不受商业周期影响的数字广告，可能会像线下广告那样转向顺周期。
Be it online ads or shopping, the cloud or smartphones, tech markets are more mature—and mature markets grow more slowly, especially when regulators are no longer ignoring them. In many areas incumbents’ fat margins are being competed down. Amazon, for example, is investing heavily in its advertising business, Alphabet’s forte; Alphabet, meanwhile, is spending billions to get a foothold in the cloud, which is Amazon’s.
无论是在线广告还是购物，云计算还是智能手机，科技市场都更加成熟，而成熟的市场增长更缓慢，尤其是当监管机构不再忽视它们的时候。在许多领域，现有企业的丰厚利润正在被竞争压低。例如，亚马逊正在大力投资其广告业务(Alphabet的强项);与此同时，Alphabet正在花费数十亿美元在属于亚马逊强项的云计算领域站稳脚跟。
MAAMA mia, can you grow again?
The giants of tech may yet rediscover their reality-distorting magic. Amazon’s $3.9bn purchase this month of One Medical, an American health-care provider, is only the latest maama effort to conquer one of the last remaining under-digitised markets big enough to move the needle for a trillion-dollar firm. They may once again conjure up an all-new market, as Apple did with the iPhone’s app economy and hopes to repeat with augmented reality. Until that happens, though, the era of big-tech exceptionalism is probably over. ■
科技巨头们可能会重新发现他们扭曲现实的魔力。亚马逊本月斥资39亿美元收购了美国医疗服务提供商One Medical，这只是MAAMA的最新努力，其目的是征服仅存的几个数字化程度不高的市场之一，这个市场的规模足以影响一家市值高达万亿美元的公司。他们可能会再次创造出一个全新的市场，就像苹果在iPhone应用程序经济领域所做的那样，并希望在增强现实技术领域重复这一做法。然而，在这种情况发生之前，大型科技例外论的时代可能已经结束。■
