Microsoft has just bought their first true open source business! No, not WSO2 :-).
Zimbra.
Assuming the Yahoo! deal goes through, MSFT will be the proud owner of Zimbra .. a company which gives its software away for free under an OSI approved license and makes (a lot of) money by offering a service. It also happens to be a serious Exchange alternative. So now it doesn't matter whether you stay with Exchange or not .. you'll still be paying Microsoft!
I don't see them changing Zimbra's business model at all- while the revenue may be trivially small by MSFT standards, they reportedly had tremendous revenue growth. Plus combined with the fact that whatever revenue they get from that is revenue they are probably losing from Exchange, its a sweet deal.
Interesting times .. but makes perfect sense to me. Open source is here to stay- I suspect this'll be the first of many open source purchases for MSFT .. and maybe not indirectly the next time around.
SAP is now the only major software vendor without an open source play of some sort. Who will it be?
1 comment:
I think every big ones now looking for open sourｃe ｃompanys. sun finished the deal with Mysql and now miｃrosoft done another.
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