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.

[jmdunys]

I wrote about this about 2 months ago. I still personally believe that one of the Microsoft goal for purchasing Yahoo was/is to get hold of Zimbra.

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?

[haochela]

I think that the extent to which this aspect of the story has been under reported is reflective of how poorly understood and at the same time important the value proposition of Microsoft's CAL licensing and VAR programs really are. I think that it is not coincidental that in September of last year Yahoo paid $350 million for this company which not much earlier was scratching about for $30M in VC coin and that within a matter of months Microsoft was bidding top dollar for Yahoo! Was Zimbra just the straw on the camel's back or was it the camel?

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.