Some years ago, when the Google Books project, which aims to digitise all of the world's printed books, was getting under way, the two co-founders of Google were having a meeting with the librarian of one of the universities that had signed up for the plan. At one point in the conversation, the Google boys noticed that their collaborator had suddenly gone rather quiet. One of them asked him what was the matter. "Well", he replied, "I'm wondering what happens to all this stuff when Google no longer exists." Recounting the conversation to me later, he said: "I've never seen two young people looking so stunned: the idea that Google might not exist one day had never crossed their minds."
道Google倒闭的话这些会怎样”。他说：“他们看起来特害怕，好像从来没有想过Google会倒闭”
And yet, of course, the librarian was right. He had to think about the next 400 years. But the number of commercial companies that are more than a century old is vanishingly small. Entrusting the world's literary heritage to such transient organisations might not be entirely wise.
图书馆管理是对的，他得考虑400年之后的事。几乎没什么商业公司能活超过100年了，把世界图书遗产托付给这些短命的组织，不太明智。
Compared with my librarian friend, we have the attention span of newts. We are constantly overawed by the size, wealth and dominance of whatever happens to be the current corporate giant. At the moment, the four leading monsters are Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. Yet 18 years ago, Apple was weeks away from extinction, Amazon had just launched, Google was still three years away from incorporation and Facebook lay nine years into the future.
和他比，我们目光太短浅了，总是被巨大公司的规模、财富、统治力吓到。现在的巨头是苹果，Google，Facebook和亚马逊，18年前，苹果几乎要破产，亚马逊刚开始，Google要3年后才开始，Facebook要9年后。
At one level, all this proves is that in the technology world one can go from zero to hero is a very short time. (Or, in Apple's case, from hero to zero and back to hero again in 36 years). Some of the industry's greatest executives understood this very well. Andy Grove, for instance, who led Intel for 11 years, was famous for his mantra "Only the paranoid survive". For many years – when he led Microsoft and before he embarked on saving the world – Bill Gates appeared to have the same sentiment tattooed on his forehead. And in both cases they turned out to be right: though Intel and Microsoft are still significant companies, their dominance has ended. The processors that dominate the market for mobile devices are designed by ARM, a Cambridge company, not by Intel; and Microsoft's monopolistic grip on the desktop computing market turned out to be a wasting asset.
一定程度上说明了在科技世界，企业能飞速成长。（苹果辉煌，走下坡，重新辉煌不过用了36年）一些行业中的经理很懂得，统领英特尔11年的安迪·格罗夫有个名言“只有偏执狂才能生存”。比尔盖茨在拯救世界事业之前，在微软的那许多年里也明显具备这样的态度。这两个例子看来，英特尔和微软虽然还是大企业，但统治地位都不再，移动设备处理器主要由剑桥的ARM设计，微软在桌面计算机的垄断也不断消耗。
We understand pretty well the factors that determine the fortunes of companies that make things people buy – which is why, for example, one can predict that Apple won't be able indefinitely to sustain its huge profit margins on its iDevices. Likewise, it's pretty easy to predict where Amazon is headed: it aims to be the Walmart of the web, and is therefore likely to be around for quite a while. Google has a well understood and currently profitable business model and a huge technical infrastructure but ultimately is vulnerable to a well-resourced competitor armed with better search technology.
我们很理解制造业的企业怎么赚钱，所以，比如，我们知道苹果不能永远卖电子设备赚大钱。同理，亚马逊要当互联网的沃尔玛，于是会存在相当长的时间，Google有合理的盈利的商业模式，有技术基础设施，但是也怕搜索技术和资源更好的竞争对手。
This leaves Facebook, a company that has one billion products (called users) and earns its living by selling information about them to advertisers. Given that holders of Facebook accounts don't pay for the service – and are therefore free to depart at any point – you'd have thought that its long-term durability would be questionable. And yet lots of informed and canny investors disagree. They appear to regard the company as a sure-fire bet.
Facebook有10亿用户，通过卖用户信息赚钱。用户不花钱买服务，所以什么时候都可以离开Facebook，所以Facebook能存在多久很可疑。很多了解行业的精明的投资者不同意，他们觉得投资Facebook必火。
The two key factors that will determine Facebook's future are the power of network effects and the "stickiness" of its service – ie, the extent to which it can dissuade users from leaving. A network effect comes into play when the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of people using it. A telephone network with a million subscribers is infinitely more valuable then one with only 10. In technological ecosystems, network effects are very powerful: they explain, for example, how Microsoft came to dominate the market for desktop operating and office systems.
决定Facebook未来的两大因素是社交网络效应和服务黏性。服务黏性是它能多大程度把用户留住，社交网络效应是，用户数量对于产品或者服务的价值有影响，有10个用户的通信服务和有100万用户的肯定价值不同，微软能统治PC系统，也是同样道理。
In the early days of online social networking there were a range of different, incompatible networks – Friendster, Orkut, MySpace and Facebook. But, over time, Facebook won out by attracting more users and growing more quickly than the others. And the more quickly it grew, the more powerful the network effect became, with the result that it is now the de facto standard for social networking. In fact, it is now so dominant that millions of people around the world think that Facebook is the internet.
早前有很多社交网站，Friendster, Orkut, MySpace和 Facebook，现在Facebook胜出了，增长更快，增长越快，社交网络效应越强，已经成为事实上的社交网络标准。百万人甚至以为Facebook就是互联网。
If you put your faith in network effects, therefore, Facebook looks like a good investment because it'll be around for the long term. If people want to do social networking, then it'll be the only game in town. Facebook users will constitute a captive market and will be correspondingly exploited. And the company will be regulated as a monopoly.
要是指望社交网络效应，投资Facebook不错，它会比较长久地存在，如果人们想网络社交，它就是唯一选择， 成为了一个受约束市场（消费者只能从垄断企业获取服务、产品），这个市场会相应开发。
Which is where "stickiness" comes in. How much exploitation will users tolerate before they decide to quit? We know a lot about network effects but relatively little about this, which is why a new study by three scientists at the Swiss university ETH Zurich makes interesting reading. They examined several social networking services, seeking to identify what makes them resilient and what could cause them to decline. And they performed an empirical autopsy on a failed service – Friendster – using data gathered just before it closed. The key determinants of success or failure were (i) the average number of friends that users have and (ii) whether the difficulty of using the site comes to outweigh the perceived benefits. Facebook is doing OK on the first of these criteria but – in my experience – becoming increasingly vulnerable on the second as the company tries to "monetise" its users. If Mark Zuckerberg's empire can't square this circle then not even the power of network effects will save it in the long run.
这时黏性会起作用，用户被开发到什么程度会选择退出？我们研究了很多社交网络效应，却很少研究这个问题，最近苏黎世联邦理工学院三个科学家得到很好玩的结果，他们研究了几个社交网络服务，想研究他们为什么有活力，为什么衰败，以及用Friendster倒闭前的数据分析它的失败原因。主要因素有：1. 用户的平均好友数 2.用此服务的好处和用它的难度。Facebook做得还不错，不过它越来越多使用用户盈利，就要受制于第二个因素。如果扎克伯格不能平衡好的话，社交网络效应也不能让它永生。
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