Yahoo Acquires Zimbra for $350 Million

TechCrunch is reporting that Yahoo has acquired the open source office suite Zimbra for $350 Million in cash. Zimbra has been in and out of the news over the last couple of years for their office suite, and recently launched offline capabilities. "The company has raised $30.5 million over three rounds of funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Capital, Sumitomo and Duff, Ackerman & Goodrich. They announced 6 million paid mailboxes back in March, and more recently inked a deal with Comcast that brings another 12 million potential subscribers."

Yahoo & Open Source?

[ZephyrXero]

Perhaps I've missed something but isn't Yahoo usually not too fond of open source stuff? Perhaps they're changing their ways? Or maybe they just want to make Zimbra proprietary to kill any open souce competition? I guess time will only tell on this one...

Ugggh...Comcast

[us7892]

inked a deal with Comcast

This had me interested until I read that they made a deal with the devil.

But what happens if MSFT buys Yahoo?

[christian.einfeldt]

oooo, this could turn out bad. There has been a lot of talk of Microsoft buying Yahoo in an attempt to catch up to Google. And if MSFT does buy Yahoo, thereby acquiring Zimbra, it is another FOSS code base that we might lose time and effort on.

Of course, we don't want to speculate needlessly about a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo. This is exactly the wedge that we see Microsoft driving into the FOSS community with their deals with Novell, Xandros, and Linspire. Undoubtedly, one of the benefits to Microsoft of the Yahoo acquisition talks is that many members of the FOSS community will shy away from Yahoo, simply because they might become a Microsoft property. And even people who like Microsoft and its products might hesitate to use Yahoo products and services if they see Yahoo stumbling.

So I would like to see Yahoo get its financial house in order. I am really fond of Google and its products and services, and I tend to use Google tools and properties more than the Yahoo counterparts. But I wouldn't want to have competition in this area reduced to only two major players: Microsoft and Google.

So come on, Yahoo, get your act together! And stop talking with Microsoft about acquisitions! Ick!

Re:Not an "Office Suite"

[fm6]

We need as many quality "productivity suites"(ugh) as possible, as long as they support sensible formats.

You mean, as long as they all support the same format. Which they have to do so that people using different products can share files. These formats are, by their nature, messy, and without standardization you have no hope of going from WordBunny to WeaselWord to ZorkOffice without getting all your formats messed up. Fortunately, people are finally beginning to get this.

But forget "the more competition the better". The market's already saturated. Anybody who thinks they can add value at this late date is an idiot. And I've already wasted too much time with software designed by idiots.

Re:Yahoo & Open Source?

[bark]

Also to clarify, Yahoo's supported open source by hiring a whole slew of open source developers. One of the heavy weights is Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of php.