.... I am in a complete panic over this. My experience, both from inside and after Yahoo and I parted ways, is that "whatever Yahoo purchases turns to crap". It's not unheard of for Yahoo to buy companies and then completely ignore them for two years straight with no funding or progress (see "WebRing"), or to completely torpedo a working business model (see "Broadcast.com"), or to take a product that people loved and turn it into something they hate (see "eGroups"). In at least one of those cases ("eGroups"), the incoming engineers were completely ignored, denigrated, etc., until they were basically all gone within 18 months, leaving Yahoo with a codebase it hadn't developed and didn't understand.
In all of these cases, we heard the platitudes of "we love the team we've bought", "this is a partnership, not an acquisition", blah blah blah. That's all press-release garbage, spun by marketing people. The proof is in the history, and Yahoo's history with regards to acquisitions is not good.
Maybe I'll feel warm and fuzzy after a call I've got scheduled with Zimbra this afternoon, but ... phew... he's got a lot to overcome on that front.
