So now what happens to Zimbra?
Reading through this Wall Street Journal article, I'm increasingly worried about Zimbra. The article traces Microsoft's efforts to buy Yahoo!'s search business while leaving the rest of its business(es) to an AOL Time Warner or News Corp. This might be good for Microsoft, and it might be good for Yahoo!, but where would it leave Zimbra?
Zimbra doesn't fit any of these companies. Arguably, it could fit well inside Microsoft (if Microsoft wanted a serious upgrade to its web-based Outlook, something extensible that could attract a development community, contrary to Paula's well-reasoned opinion), and still has a future within Yahoo!. But these others?
It's not about what happens to Zimbra users' data should Microsoft acquire Yahoo! and take Zimbra along with it. It's what happens to Zimbra, the product, should anything other than wholesale Yahoo! acquisition happen.
Microsoft is smart enough to recognize great technology: I can't see it dumping Zimbra. But if a News Corp. were to acquire the Zimbra assets, what would it possibly do with them? The best we could hope for would be an asset sale that would see Zimbra move to, say, Google, Apple, or Adobe.
As a Zimbra customer, I want it to stick around. I love the Zimbra experience, even despite some glitches. With a Yahoo! bifurcation into search/everything else, however, I'm worried about what will happen to Zimbra.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
WinFS and Exchange/SQL both pose an elusive challenge in term of performance and resource usage. Zimbra can do a lot of what Exchange clumsily tries to do, does it fast, and can integrate with a lot of solutions(including Asterix). It has a multi-platform client which is much better than Vista's mail and calendar apps.
Furthermore, Microsoft said many times that what they wanted in Yahoo were the people (the search angle came afterwards). Which people? Why not Zimbra's?
The income stream that Microsoft generates from their Exchange is the one thing that is not threatened by their waning dominance in the OS market. While it is possible that they may see it as "Great Technology", if I were in MIcrosoft's board room I'd see a threat.
A startup like Zimbra which in a few years has demonstrated an ability to successfully interoperate with their client connections from their own server and provide a web- based groupware offering that surpasses their own is something that could seriously compromise their future strategy if not their existing business model.