How would MSFT-YHOO impact innovation in email?
Tim O’Reilly and Bill Tancer have commented on the email, especially webmail, market share that a combined Microsoft and Yahoo would have. So what does that mean for the email landscape and innovation in this area? Here are some numbers in terms of seats looking at the email assets of both companies: #1 corporate email: MS Outlook/Exchange >100 million seats worldwide (Radicati) #1 Webmail: Yahoo Mail >250 million seats worldwide (TechCrunch) #2 Webmail: MS Live/Hotmail >200 million seats worldwide (TechCrunch) open source: Yahoo Zimbra >8 million paid seats worldwide (Zimbra) That’s about as broad a spectrum of dominance as you can get in a market. Microsoft makes over a billion dollars a year selling Exchange server according to Radicati. Zimbra was created to provide an open source competitor to Exchange that could beat it based on price, deployment cost, hardware requirements, etc. – basically all element total cost of ownership. On top of that, Zimbra has really been innovating in
