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Google, Yahoo software moves may fuel Microsoft bid
06 февраля 2008 |
Business software units of Yahoo Inc and Google Inc are introducing beefed-up versions of their Web-based software that compete with Microsoft Outlook, offering yet another clue why Microsoft Corp made a $45 billion unsolicited bid for Yahoo.
While Microsoft views Yahoo as its path into the lucrative Web advertising market dominated by Google, Tuesday's software announcements by Yahoo and Google demonstrate that Microsoft also needs to fend off potential challenges to its business software franchises.
Yahoo's new Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 5.0 allows users to read
Microsoft Outlook e-mail alongside Yahoo Mail or Google's Gmail or
Zimbra's own branded e-mail.
In effect, Zimbra's upgrade lets users read work and personal e-mail side by side.
"We really think this is the next generation of Outlook that we are
announcing," said Satish Dharmaraj, co-founder and chief executive of
Zimbra.
Yahoo paid $350 million in September to buy Zimbra, a provider of
e-mail, calendar and contacts software that competes with Microsoft and
Google.
Around the same time, Google paid $625 million to acquire e-mail
security firm Postini to beef up Google Apps to make it more useful
inside businesses. Google Apps, a suite of software that competes with
Microsoft Office. counts 500,000 organizational customers and adds
2,000 customers a day.
"We replace the old world of installing software and dealing with
security patches and coming in late at night to restart computers,"
Scott Petry, founder of Postini in 1999 and now a Google product
manager, said of his company's impact.
Postini is releasing new business security software that allows
organizations to block spam, archive and encrypt e-mail and uphold
corporate e-mail policies.
One Postini service for e-mail search and discovery overturns the need
for network administrators to limit e-mail storage - a source of
frustration for many employees.
Web-Based Challengers
ZCS 5.0 can work offline and also allows users to use Zimbra on Apple
Inc's iPhone. It also now works with Research in Motion Ltd's
BlackBerry e-mail devices and Java-based phones, the company said.
Yahoo is using Zimbra to embed popular Web-programs - such as Flickr
photo-sharing, Web news feeds and Yahoo Finance or Yahoo search -
inside Yahoo Mail, the world's most popular consumer e-mail service.
Zimbra software is targeted at universities and small businesses and
Internet service providers such as Comcast Corp and Indiatimes, which
in turn can offer such e-mail services to millions of consumers.
Postini's services are hosted in Google's data centers, allowing
Postini to offer its security services at dramatically lower cost than
many existing e-mail security products.
Annually, Postini spam protection starts at 25 cents a month per user
while message filtering costs $1 a month. The software can work with
e-mail systems such as Microsoft Outlook, International Business
Machines Corp's Lotus Notes or Novell Inc's Groupwise.
Office workers can search back through years of e-mail as a free side
benefit when their companies buy Postini's legal discovery feature to
meet compliance requirements of laws aimed at preventing white-collar
crime. This feature costs $25 per user per year and $10 for each
additional year of archiving.
"It is really a shot across the bow of a lot of vendors," said Michael
Osterman of Osterman Research, a market researcher focused on e-mail
and collaboration software near Seattle. "It puts a lot of pressure on pricing of other vendors."
Источник: Reuters
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