Zimbra now Yahoos! thoughts

[newmember]

Remember HPs OpenMail.
There used to be a free version under some license back in 2001.
OpenMail was sold to Samsung and became Samsung contact.
Welcome to Samsung Contact
Well Samsung contact has now shut down samsungcontact for 2007.
Maybe someone could get them to release the code to OSS.

Cheers

BTW: Zimbra rocks and my users love it.

[bigmudcake]

I see a common theme coming from this thread.

In a nushell,

We knew that Zimbra as a standalone single entity was 100% focused on Zimbra products because thats all they did and derived their income from.

Now, its a sub-department of a much larger company whos focus is not 100% Zimbra products but a much broader strategy.

I suppose what we need to see is a statement from Yahoo in regards to a long term committment to offset the risks that this change in company ownership brings.

I am sure a lot of Zimbra customers are thinking that Yahoo can kill off Zimbra products and still survive, which wasn't the case before Zimbra was owned by Yahoo.

I hope I make sense

[Dirk]

I'm less concerned about Yahoo 'killing Zimbra' as I just dont see it happening, but I am curious about what exactly Yahoo has purchased.

I mean, the Zimbra suite consists of numerous GPL'd apps that cannot be 'bought' so Yahoo cannot call them their own. The bulk of Zimbra is open sourced, so Yahoo's competitors can go and grab the whole thing and have a look at it, eliminating much of the competetive edge Yahoo may gain from the acquisition.

The main thing Yahoo get from this is the tech behind the Network Edition, which is not opensourced and not GPL'd so Yahoo now own all the NE code and can do what they want with it.

It's because of this that I dont see a problem for the OSS version of Zimbra, but rather see tight intergration of the NE with services offered by Yahoo.

Yahoo are unlikely to alienate the entire existing NE customer base by making the NE version unusable though, so is it unreasonable to think that the product will just remain the way it has been?

[kevindods]

I agree, I think they have bought the experience and knowledge along with the NE and related code.

So one reasonable scenario would be:
Without decent access to that knowledge it is more difficult for anyone else wanting to move the OSS version along. For a controlled more easily supportable return on investment the NE version is best suited to hosting not selling. So I suspect that as they control the pricing and they have a broad based resource available for hosting that they will make NE a hosted Yahoo! service. Over time this will cut out the current partner deals perhaps by services (eg Yahoo! themselves could mix'n'match NE and OSS for clients) or increased cost to third parties, pricing their offering too close to third party costs to allow a decent margin for current partners and then perhaps even an opportunity to buy back users to Yahoo! services.

MS is moving to rented software/services for mail applications. Google offers online services where no one needs the full code. Yahoo! and Google make their money on marketing information gathered by their services. If Google can read and index all your mail correspondence and present you with appropriate adverts on your searches or use it to bias the list results be sure Yahoo! would like this power to be enhanced too. But this requires more people hosting their email with you not just buying your software - hence the pressure perhaps to not sell NE as a separate product. Even now the ISP license does provide for intermediary services and ad revenue.

A hosted free OSS version could be used as a taster and to meet some demands for users to whom they can't/wouldn't sell to but don't want to lose entirely because of the value of the data collected. It wont be in their interests to improve the system too much as there will be little revenue from the move up if the OSS is too good. Staff will be set to improve the integration to Yahoo! administration and management for NE Zimbra and the new opportunities it presents. New developments will move to the NE version not OSS to widen the distinction. Eg the Zimbra desktop (not yet 'confirmed' as remaining OSS), considering the PDA sync which could be OSS yet isn't and I suspect that would be the pattern for much of the new core functionality.

I don't intend to make Yahoo! out to be an evil corporate monster, it will do what many would do to try to find ways to make money from OSS based software. Part of the problem is its more difficult to make money from software that you have no unique hold over ie if it is OSS. The differentiator with (F)OSS is based on the type of service you offer to clients and at what price rather than with internal and closed 'if you want it you can only get this from us'. The former can enable customer portability that encourages brilliant hosting and high levels of service for clients for retention. The latter, a pseudo monopoly that tends to reduce choice and minimise the level of service.

Anyhow, this is all air. No one really knows and we shall need to wait and see what really happens. In the mean time Zimbra is here now, working and to some extent fOSS. Thanks for showing it can be done Guys and hope you get to keep doing it!

K

[JoshuaPrismon]

There is a interesting write up from Gartner here:
Yahoo Targets Three E-Mail Market Segments With Zimbra Buy

[dijichi2]

There is a interesting write up from Gartner here:
Yahoo Targets Three E-Mail Market Segments With Zimbra Buy

That analysis sounds terribly pessemistic for zimbra as we know and love it now

[JoshuaPrismon]

Originally Posted by dijichi2

That analysis sounds terribly pessemistic for zimbra as we know and love it now

I didn't think it's particularly pessimistic, although I also didn't think that it was that rationally coherent either. I agree with their points. Let's see what Yahoo does for 6-12 months of stewardship.

[kevindods]

Sort of what I would have thought. I think we have to at least consider some other options, we wont have the economy of scale or get margin protection from the authors. They are lining up for a battle with big players not us small fry. Of course it may well open the email market up by moving corps away from MS....

[Rich Graves]

I for one (and I do seem to be the only one) welcome our new Yahoo! overlords.

Gartner doesn't know jack. They can be helpful to outline large-scale trends, both technological zeitgeist and regulatory things like SOX and HIPAA, but statements like "we think it unlikely that it will retain support for the fee-based on-premises version of Zimbra in the long run" were made in a complete vacuum. Gartner has no competence to make such judgments. One of the things that excites me about Zimbra is that there is no conflict between the way that Zimbra runs SaaS and the way that it runs in the enterprise. Exchange has until very recently had terrible trouble scaling to SaaS because of its architecture; carrier-grade email packages (which I don't know much about, because I've never been in that market) have never worked for the enterprise. But Zimbra does both.

I'd agree that current Zimbra SaaS providers have reason to worry in the long run -- if I were one, I'd be looking to be acquired by Yahoo -- but as a (very small) enterprise customer, I'm happy with this turn of events.

Given the origins of each company and the identity of each company's founder's, the notion that Yahoo is a dinosaur and Zimbra is a startup upstart whose culture is in jeopardy is laughable. Look, Roland and the Yahoo founders were both at Stanford at the same time, but had rather different job descriptions.

Zimbra was never a one-trick startup like MySpace or FaceBook or eGroups or YouTube or pre-1995 Yahoo. It is the fourth of fifth startup from people with *very* serious industry experience. The Zimbra founders were already reasonably financially secure and quite mature before they started the company. Their vision is quite succinctly described in the "Fixing Email" whitepaper. Nothing about the Yahoo acquisition changes that vision.

The long-term risk to Zimbra I always saw came from patent trolls. For me, the Yahoo acquisition and large-scale ISP deals greatly mitigates that worry.

Yeah, there's a risk that being folded into a larger company with its own interests might dampen innovation, interop, and choice (the most obvious, but ultimately meaningless, example being Google search -> Yahoo search). But Zimbra has always been about serious people applying solid engineering principles and best-of-breed open-source applications to the problem of Fixing Email, not about some teenager making an ultimately unsustainable splash with some truly novel web 2.0 site (for example).

[jholder]

There are many of us at Yahoo and Zimbra who look out for the community and our FOSS crowd.

Zimbra will do the right thing.