Zimbra Purchased by Yahoo

Yahoo proudly announced it’s acquisition of Zimbra with a hefty price worth $350 million. Zimbra is a web based e-mail that uses the new and powerful programming Ajax. Aside from e-mail, Zimbra will enable to easily access their contacts and create schedule through the online calendar.  Zimbra is known throughout the country as being used by most colleges universities – making it one of the most used software that’s free for use.

Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo, expressed his happiness on the endeavor of ZImbra in creating software and it perfectly goes with the need of Yahoo. “Our industry-leading communications products, including Yahoo! Mail, are critical to the future growth and success of Yahoo. Zimbra’s tremendous talent and innovative technology will help to extend our core Mail offerings, further strengthening our strong leadership position in this space…Additionally, Zimbra’s successful relationships with large ISPs are key as we expand our worldwide partner network and continue to focus on our commitment to being the partner of choice,”

But one statement caught our attention. It’s the statement of Brad Garlnghouse, the Senior Vice President of Communications and Communities: “Zimbra is a global leader in email and collaboration software and its services are aimed at universities, businesses, and ISPs worldwide, which is a major driver of what made the company so attractive to us. We’re constantly being approached by these entities for our expertise in email and communications. Combining the best of Zimbra with what’s made Yahoo! Mail the top dog in web mail will not only allow us to cater to these markets better than anyone, it will allow us to expand our presence to partners and consumers at school, work, and home.”

If you read between the lines, Yahoo is slowly admitting that it needs to catch up with Google in the free e-mail competition. If you’ve been in the internet long enough, you should have e-mail accounts in Google and Yahoo and know why yahoo really lags behind in terms of e-mail services.

Even though yahoo has unlimited storage, Yahoo takes time to access the attached files and even with their beta version of e-mail (which looks like an outlook), doesn’t really help much. On Google’s side, anyone who competes with this company should be scared on what they can do.

Instead of Google following the trends of the search giants, it’s now clear than Google is now the trend setter. Best of all, most of the Google services is given for free, the rest still wants money instead of concentrating on the technology they have to offer. Another edge of Google’s mail that Yahoo is now trying to emulate is the mastery of Ajax.

Google has fully implemented everything online. It’s almost a web based desktop wherein you don’t need to have office applications. Let’s just wait and see what Yahoo Mail can do when Zimbra is fully implemented. Even though it can’t be the leader in e-mail services, they should make life easier for those who relies in yahoo for their e-mails.