Yahoo made a really smart move by purchasing Zimbra at over a Billion Ringgit, as this allows them to play catch-up with Google, along the lines that Michael Arrington (of TechCrunch) predicts will lead to them also laying their hands on Zoho:
Yahoo will announce the acquisition of open source online/offline office suite Zimbra this evening, we just heard through a very solid source. The price: $350 million, in cash, confirmed. The company has raised $30.5 million over three rounds of funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Capital, Sumitomo and Duff, Ackerman & Goodrich. They announced 6 million paid mailboxes back in March, and more recently inked a deal with Comcast that brings another 12 million potential subscribers.
In our opinion, the ownership of Zimbra only goes to further strengthen the age old question of Yahoo’s quality Vs Google’s Quantity, an unfathomable dilemma that Mashable recently brought back into light with their article regarding the recent compete study:
Quality over quantity is usually the way in which we’d like to consider certain things in life, like clothes or the number of tracks on an album. And many of you out there would agree that this mantra applies to search queries as well.
While we all know that Google takes the cake for dominating the market in terms of search quantity, it’s good to look at quality every once in a while, too. What Compete looked at were the referrals from search queries done across Yahoo, Google and MSN/Live. An entire third of search queries performed on Google led to a dead end, meaning people weren’t clicking on results.