Yahoo acquired open source email (complete with Ajax pixie dust) company Zimbra for $350 in cash. My most sincere congratulations Scott and Satish, as well as Brad Garlinghouse on the other side of the table. Good move.
This isn't just about competing with Google's Gmail. It builds upon Yahoo's native email development plus acquisitions such as Oddpost and Stata Labs to build a credible web-native alternative to Outlook and Exchange. At Socialtext we are moving to Zimbra for at least shared calendaring. It will be interesting to see Google's offline moves as it will now need to play catch up.
But this isn't just about email and calendaring. This is another significant commercial open source acquisition. This also raises a time honored question when it comes to Yahoo, and how it relates to the enterprise. Both Satish and Brad's posts highlight their partner network (mostly ISPs). Selling and servicing enterprises is not the competency of Yahoo, but as Google has VARs for Appliances so to does this XYZ combination. If this is a direction for Yahoo, their number of acronyms will exponentially expand.
