Yahoo! + Microsoft = Death of Zimbra?
February 3, 2008
There is enough being talked about Yahoo! and Microsoft. When you get into the details, some Yahoo! acquisitions might end up no where after the merger. The best example is Zimbra which Yahoo acquired for $350 Million.
If you look at Zimbra, it really is an Exchange competitor. Yahoo probably bought it to build a platform around email gaining from Zimbra’s expertise on email. When Microsoft completes the acquisition, we can safely assume that the exchange competition will no longer exist. Yahoo might integrate some goodies from Zimbra into its webmail client. But then, Microsoft has enough email client(s) in Outlook, Outlook Express, Outlook Web Access and ofcourse Hotmail with tighter integration with their software.
What do we see at the end of the day? There might be some client side JavaScript goodies integrated into Yahoo Mail and nothing much. All the server side stuff of Zimbra might die a quick death. That’d be my guess. We should revisit this topic a year later.
What do you think? Is Yahoo’s $350 Million investment in Zimbra wasted with Microsoft’s aquisition?
Here is something we all can do. This website is trying to get the word out.
http://www.freezimbranow.org/
There is also an online petition at : http://www.PetitionOnline.com/zimbra01/petition.html
Please go here to support zimbra and protect it from Microsoft