[nylug-talk] The future of Zimbra after Microsoft's bid for Yahoo!

[Ron Guerin]

Carl Friedberg wrote:
> Ron,
> 
>> ...  Anyone remember the debacle when Microsoft
>> bought Hotmail?  This is going to be orders of 
>> magnitude worse.
> 
> I was not a Hotmail user at that time. I did,
> however, follow some discussions back then.
> 
> At first, MS left Hotmail alone. I believe the
> integration to an MS backend was just after IIS
> 5.0 was released (so it was Windows 2000, or
> perhaps a bit earlier).
> 
> MS did have to put a significant effort into
> moving from *N*X to MS ware. As a result, they
> rewrote IIS 6, and included an XML configurator
> instead of the binary configuration files which
> were used earlier.
> 
> Microsoft might learn even more when they try to 
> integrate Yahoo. MS will pay to move an awful
> lot of content to Windows Server, IIS, etc.
> technologies. Aside from the rock around the neck, 
> it is conceivable that some of the MS products 
> will become more stable and more usable when MS 
> has to eat more of their disgusting dogfood.
> 
> Just a thought.

Realistically, Microsoft can survive quite a lot.  As for Google, I 
Google doth protest too much about this possible marriage of a genuine 
competitor of theirs to their psycho stalker.  It will keep both out of 
Google's hair for a while, and the resulting combination, even if all 
goes well for Microhoo, doesn't sound all that scary, based on the 
numbers I was hearing.

I just think it's a distraction, it's Microsoft doing what it wants to 
do instead of what it needs to do.  Anyone who's had the misfortune of 
working on a Vista box (as I have) would tell you Microsoft's biggest 
problem isn't Google or Yahoo.  It's a lot closer to home.

- Ron