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Content Tagged with CrunchGear + yahoo
Zimbra Releases Version 3 Of Open Source Email Client, And It’s Awesome
Yahoo’s Zimbra launches version 3 of its open source desktop email client this morning that is designed to compete with Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mac Mail, etc. This is a new iteration of their browser-based offline product announced in March 2007.
Zimbra Desktop, which is built on Mozilla Prism, is available for Windows, Mac and linux machines. It weighs in at 40 MB, about double the size of Thunderbird. The product promises the robust features of Outlook, which are lacking in Outlook Express and Thunderbird. Users can access Yahoo mail accounts, Zimbra accounts, or any Pop/IMAP supported email boxes. Zimbra Desktop also includes a calendar, contact list and other features.
Based on limited testing (I set it up with Yahoo Mail only for now), the product is a winner. It’s responsive and quick, which is the most important feature for a desktop email client. I like the ability to tag items, collapse conversations, and perform web and local searches via the search bar in the top right corner of the app. If I wasn’t all Mac across the board to keep things synced properly, I’d use Zimbra permanently. Screen shots below.
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Yahoo: Three Weeks Away From Next Mass Exodus
We have been tracking the exodus of employees from Yahoo and have counted 114 executive-level departures since January 2007. The news isn’t going to get any better as we have learnt that of the executives remaining at the company, a large number of them are biding their time and waiting for a large vesting period that finishes up in the first week of August, the same time as the critical annual shareholder meeting.
The options grant was part of a retention initiative at Yahoo! and involved almost every employee at the company - from top executives down to the engineering level. Employees were granted options and restricted stock units based on merit. Grants ranged from 10,000 to up to 40,000 options with a vesting period of two years. These options are potentially worth up to $200,000 for some employees - certainly enough incentive for some who intended to leave to wait around a few more months before taking that new job with a startup, or Google or Microsoft. We understand that there are dozens and possibly up to another 100 people in director, VP level or higher positions who are ready to leave once this vesting period has completed in a few weeks time.
Yahoo has long had a retention problem, and they are known to pay higher base salaries and ocassionaly write out bonus options in an effort to retain employees. They also ran a very visible recruitment campaign until recently when they initiated a hiring freeze. Our list of executives who have left the company could easily double in the next month - and another mass exodus would not bode well for the morale of the remaining employees and executives.
We understand that some of these remaining executives are only coming into the office a day or two a week, and openly searching for new jobs with competitors or other companies. The image gives a good idea of just how tough the situation inside Yahoo! is at the moment - and the challenges facing upper management with their attempts to turn the company around without the help of Microsoft.
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Yahoo CTO: The ReOrg Is All About Moving Past The Microsoft Deal
What does Yahoo’s latest reorganization all mean, especially in light of the situation with Microsoft still being up in the air? Like yesterday’s assertive letter to shareholders defending its Google deal, Yahoo is trying to show that it is getting on with its life, thank you very much.
The announcement is clearly aimed at squashing any lingering hopes for a new Microsoft deal to emerge. I spoke today with Yahoo’s chief technology officer Ari Balogh, who says:
The signal you should take from this is we believe most of that is over. We need to run this for the long term. While the board was considering the Microsoft deal, it would have been foolish to do a major reorg.
There is some wiggle room there. (He said “most of that is over” not “all”). But Yahoo has to act independently and shore up its resolve going into its shareholder meeting on August 1.
The main goal of the reorganization is to separate product development (all the Yahoo properties and services that consumers use) from advertising sales. It makes sense as far as it goes, but is not a terribly new idea. Most media companies separate the development of their content from the selling of their content. So Yahoo is acknowledging what everybody knows—that it is in fact a media company.
The products and content that it makes, though, are technology products. And that’s where Balogh’s group comes in. (As CTO, he oversees all the hardcore engineers in search and elsewhere that support, but are separate from, the new product group under Ash Patel). Balogh is standardizing technologies and development platforms across Yahoo in a major push to make Yahoo more open. Separating out product groups from the business side, he says, will “accelerate our open and social strategy” and allow good ideas to bubble up faster, even if they won’t make money in the short term.
Yahoo is also standardizing Yahoo’s internal cloud computing platform across its different properties into one consistent set of technologies. (Apparently, it is still a hodgepodge across different parts of Yahoo). Will Yahoo open up its cloud computing infrastructure to outside companies and compete with Amazon’s Web Services or Google’s App Engine? Balogh hints as much, and more:
That decision has not been made, but Yahoo will use it. One thing we will do is open it up in a different way. When we do, you will be surprised by how much we make available to the world.
It is clear that he wants to open-source parts of Yahoo’s infrastructure. He is also making all of Yahoo’s API’s and apps work on a consistent development framework. All of this is supposed to lead to deeper engagement with developers and ultimately killer products.
And maybe it will. But Yahoo still has some bigger questions to resolve about its future. It may want to signal that it is ready to move on past its dalliance with Microsoft, but some of its biggest shareholders are not quite there yet.
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