

Yahoo Acquires Zimbra For $350 million in Cash - nickb
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/17/breaking-yahoo-acquires-zimbra-for-350-million/

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SwellJoe
I like these numbers. As someone pushing an Open Source based business along,
Open Source businesses selling for huge prices is a nice thing for me to
see...XenSource went for 500mil not more than a month ago. Zimbra 350mil. Both
sit either side of us on the continuum of applications (and we've got a mail
stack with webmail like Zimbra, though not as advanced, and a virtualization
management product more feature-laden than XenSource have).

I'm gonna act like I don't know any of y'all when I'm cruising around on my
mega-yacht. That's all I'm saying.

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prakash
cool. now we can wait for 2010 before they integrate it into Y!mail --
considering yahoo bought oddpost in 2004 and it took 3 years for the new yahoo
mail to come out of beta....

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cellis
Oddpost -25 million. I remember that very well. Because it was on the cover of
Business 2.0 - 'the new road to riches', or something like that.

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bharath
Its interesting to see Google try and accomplish the same goals (marketshare
in the online office space) through much smaller acquisitions (writely,
zenter).

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aston
Implicit suggestion here: That Yahoo's wasting their money.

Zimbra's a very mature product that's already making money. The company's also
reasonably old. Compare that to Writely and Zenter, which were both purchased
before large-scale release and while the companies were brand new. I think
this is probably a pretty good buy for Yahoo.

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zandorg
I think that with the figures Paul Graham gave us on Yahoo Store, that
acquisition payed for itself around 2 years ago.

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ratsbane
At the first Startup School in Boston someone mentioned that Yahoo Store had
about 235,000 stores and $5 billion/year in store revenue, if I'm remembering
correctly. The smallest available monthly fee(1) is currently $40 and the
smallest transaction fee is 0.75% thus their annual revenue must be greater
than (235000 x 40)+($5 billion x 0.75%)=$46.9 million. I'm guessing it's
rather a bit more than that.

1) <http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/plans.php>

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pg
It is unlikely they have 235,000 stores. I would guess at most 30-50,000.

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ratsbane
Now I'm curious about this. They list 71,245 under "shop by store."(1)
However, I think this number may be low.

Are inactive stores listed in that directory? I'm sure Yahoo is billing for
more than a few stores which never got beyond intentions.(2) We set up a test
store a few hours ago "filmat16.com."(3) It's not been published yet so
there's nothing there. It's also not listed in the directory by name (although
this may be a function of time.)

If the $5b sales figure is correct (and I wish I could remember the original
source of those numbers) and we use the 71,245 store count that's $70,180 per
store/year. Reasonable?

Also my original estimate didn't take into account the (currently) $50 setup
fee or fees for credit card processing (outsourced, but surely they make a bit
from that), DNS fees, advertising revenue, etc.

In any case I think Yahoo has made rather a lot of money from their purchase
of Viaweb - which is good for people creating startups which might be bought
by Yahoo etc.

1) <http://shopping.yahoo.com/stores/sd.html> Is it reasonable to assume every
store listed in that directory is a Yahoo store?

2) If that number is in any way related to the percentage of people who don't
send back rebate forms it could be huge.

3) Not a completely for testing purposes; we're going to sell some 16mm films
that have been sitting around in a closet for years.
<http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html>

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pg
> Is it reasonable to assume every store listed in that directory is a Yahoo
> store?

No. Any web store can be in Y! Shopping.

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ratsbane
You're right. I see that now. I would like to understand better how many Yahoo
stores there are, how many are inactive, how many use the different services Y
provides (shipping, inventory, etc.) Is it fair to say that Yahoo hasn't added
many features to the stores since Viaweb? There are a lot of functions which
Yahoo store operators have to perform which Yahoo has never added provisions
for.

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Goladus
Do they mean cash as opposed to equity? I don't know much about business
transactions of this nature, but "in cash" conjured up images of briefcases
filled with unmarked bills.

