What would Microsoft do with Zimbra? 
February 5th, 2008
Earlier this week, I speculated about what M$ might do with Yahoo!’s Zimbra property should they get acquired.
Mark Levitt from the IDC made these interesting comments. There might be too big a gulf, not only in a technological sense (Zimbra is a J2EE product), but also in a cultural sense (a lot of customers chose Zimbra to get away from Exchange and other M$ solutions). Microsoft might end-of-life Zimbra, or maybe re-engineer it to become a sort of .NET extension for Exchange-online.
| 
Del.icio.us
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 7:02 pm and is filed under .net, microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Entries (RSS)
and
February 6th, 2008 at 10:09 am
As professionals use groupware like Zimbra (whether sold by Yahoo, MS or whomever) to draft and negotiate legal and business transactions, issues will arise regarding record retention and discovery in litigation.
February 6th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
That’s an interesting point. But presumably the issue is more about professionals voluntarily destroying their records vs having them destroyed by a 3rd party, unless Zimbra has made some sort of warrantee for the preservation of their data – in which case could they be in trouble?
Before I say anything else, I should mention that I think Zimbra is an amazing product with huge long-term potential. In general I think there will be room in the marketplace for competing productivity suites (like Zimbra) as long as switching costs are not outrageous.
One way M$ could handle it is to wind Zimbra down through a cost-recovery approach of halting all new accounts and only providing service to existing clients to the extend that the cost of doing so does not exceed the revenue they earn. Over time, all their customers will trickle away at their own leisure and nobody is caught in the lurch.
March 17th, 2008 at 8:12 am
Here is something we all can do. This website is trying to get the word out.
http://www.freezimbranow.org/
There is also an online petition at : http://www.PetitionOnline.com/zimbra01/petition.html
Please go here to support zimbra and protect it from Microsoft
March 26th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Cool! Thanks for the info Will.