What Will Happen to Zimbra?
For those who don’t know Zimbra is a web based email / calendaring client one of the primary alternatives to Microsoft’s Exchange. But in light of Microsoft courting Yahoo! there are some questions as to what will happen to the project which is owned by Yahoo!.
If Microsoft were smart they would latch onto the Zimbra ajax interface and slap it onto Exchange 2007. There are a dozen small open source webmail clients with a better UI and feature set than the latest Exchange release. Even the older 2003 had more functionality in its web client.
I’m not invested in Zimbra so it won’t directly effect me. But the ramifications of Microsoft’s buying up competition effects all technology users and especially business users who may eventually become scared to buy anything that’s NOT Microsoft as the product they choose could get bought up and withdrawn from the market. Or worse the licensing model change in such a way as to throw the ROI on which the purchasing decsion was made right out the window with some potentially heavy costs.
Time will tell what will happen but it bears watching. Closely.