Microsoft Downplays Yahoo’s Zimbra

Zimbra was just a simple Ajax-based software used by popular universities in US. This program was favored by students and professors since the program is an open-source software. You can use the program to fetch your e-mail, create contacts and manage your schedule. Since it uses Ajax, streamlining of information is faster.

Ajax is not bandwidth intensive and given that universities has thousands of students, the Ajax based program will work just fine in this condition. This free tool has become the unofficial e-mail program by US universities. As it’s an open source program, various versions were created but they all use the same philosophy in implementing this Ajax based program. Zimbra caught a big break when the company was bought by Yahoo for the hefty price tag of 150 Million USD. We really don’t know what prompted Yahoo to acquire Zimbra. But what we know, the race to become the king of Ajax technology is there and the race is led by Google. Yahoo may lag far behind the race but maybe it’s hoping that Zimbra will take them to places just as Gmail has catapulted Google not only the leader in Ajax but also in search engines at the same time. With Yahoo and Google already on the bandwagon, we were hoping that MSN could join in the race, but they are not there. If you ask why, this is the reason: There’s a blog released that leaked the information on what Microsoft thinks about Zimbra. To put it simply, Microsoft don’t mind the existence of Zimbra in Yahoo. Microsoft doesn’t really care about Zimbra because it’s too small and it doesn’t go well with popular Microsoft back-end softwares such as Microsoft Server. Zimbra is able to migrate things from exchange from Zimbra but it can’t do Zimbra to MS Exchange. In short, Microsoft is belittling Yahoo’s software. But if you take a look at Zimbra closely, Microsoft has to feel threatened with this technology. As the company was purchased by Yahoo, it just means it can do things…lots of things. With the use of Ajax technology, it can run faster than common e-mail programs. Right now if you compare hotmail with Gmail, you’ll see a big difference with their interface and load times. If you compare that speed to Yahoo, you will clearly see how things could be better for Yahoo’s mail. Hopefully, its interface will be simple enough by removing things that will lag the loading time. This just goes to show that Microsoft is once again trying to downplay their competition. If they continue to do that, they are going to face a very serious competition especially for their Outlook software. Yahoo’s Zimbra could be run as an Ajax based software and could be purely online – no software needed. That means it could be sold to corporations in a much cheaper price. Microsoft has to acknowledge this competition and other competitions, such as Google and other open source technologies. If this would have happened 10 years ago, then we are just at their mercy but were smarter and more alternatives are coming out. They have to move and get more things done before they will be drowned by competition.