Summary: Carol Bartz is putting a major challenger of Microsoft's monopoly in the hands of former Microsoft employees who are running VMware

AFTER systematic bullying and disruption from Microsoft, Ballmer and the other thugs managed to get rid of Yang and put a Microsoft partner in charge of Yahoo! All along she was preparing to make a terrible, pathetic deal with Microsoft [1, 2, 3]. Zimbra, in the mean time, lost momentum due to Microsoft's threat to Yahoo! [1, 2, 3]. It all served Microsoft very well because without the Outlook/Exchange monopoly, its #1 cash cow (Microsoft Office) may become obsolete for many businesses.

According to to this report, Microsoft's former and existing partner Carol Bartz is continuing to destroy Yahoo! piece by piece, this time by passing Zimbra to former Microsoft employees.

According to ATD, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz personally approached VMware boss Paul Maritz after the web giant failed to attract substantial bids from other outfits.

For those who do now know what happened inside VMware, it was similar to Yahoo! They ousted the management tier and replaced it with former Microsoft executives. More information about what came later can be found in:

• No Point to Microsoft's New Datacentres, Microsoft-dominated VMware Comes to Redmond's Back Garden
• VMware Turns Sour After Microsoft Intervention
• What is Going on at VMware?

Here is Kara's report on the Zimbra deal which other sources are already confirming.

Yahoo is close to selling its Zimbra unit to VMware, according to several sources close to the situation.

Sources said the deal could be announced soon, but the price for the open-source email unit was still unclear.

But the price, sources said, is much lower than what Zimbra fetched when Yahoo bought the Silicon Valley start-up in late 2007 for $350 million.

What was Bartzmer [sic] thinking? As a former Microsoft partner, she ought to feel comfortable with VMware's new management, but the ramifications are negative when it comes to Free/open source software. Once again, Microsoft managed to grab hold of its Exchange competition too, just as it did with VMware's hypervisor (to an extent). They can control/restrain the competition because they know the managers.

Here are some thoughts from a Zimbra user who is not particularly concerned about the news.

This is where Zimbra comes in. The company's technology was designed from the start as a cloud application, and it should give VMware a viable contender to Microsoft Exchange to offer hosting and service providers, rather than having to peddle applications from cloud competitors like Microsoft and IBM.

With SpringSource, Hyperic, and its adoption of Linux, VMware was already increasingly the open alternative to the closed cloud offerings from Microsoft, IBM, and others. Now, with Zimbra, it is adding its ability to compete at the application level, while retaining its open-source approach.

The author of this, Matt Asay, has clearly not been paying attention to what VMware is doing. It has become just another Microsoft shell in a sense, just like Novell (there is former Microsoft staff inside Novell too). ⬆