Yahoo pays 350000000 US Dollars for Zimbra
Yahoo has just acquired Zimbra for US$ 350 million, in cash.
This is not peanuts, and it shows the relevance of the WebOffice market. A few weeks ago Jive Software received an investment of $15M from Sequoia Capital.
Most reporters are getting one thing wrong though. Two of my favorite blogs (TechCrunch and Read/WriteWeb) incorrectly call Zimbra Open Source.
If Zimbra was Open Source, we might have thought of doing some integration work with OpenGoo. But it isn’t, so that makes us the only real OS WebOffice. And we just released our second pre-alpha!
Now Yahoo is a player of the field. As Marshall said in R/WW, most eyes will be looking onto Zoho (those guys are serious: they are many, they are smart, and they gave me a cool hat at the Office 2.0 conference!). But Thinkfree seems to be doing well also. The space is crowded already, but, if we allow competition (Open Standards anyone?) there should be room for many more. Right?
I agree, all well put. Glad to read your thoughts on this.
September 17th, 2007 at 3:21 pmThanks for the kind words Marshall.
September 17th, 2007 at 5:44 pm