Hello I am will soon be getting a new Macbook for Christmas and need to sell off my just barely 1 year old MacBook to help pay off univeristy fees As you can see it is still in excellent condition. It has been recently refited with a brand new (UK) keyboard so it is still very clean and nice looking. Contact Details Mobile 07914625493 Email mashotnquinn yahoo.co.uk Email is the best way to contact me I answer quickest here Intel Macbook White Retail price £700) Technical Specs Intel graphics media accelrator x3100 Processor Slot loading optical drive Cd Dvd drive Built in Airport Extreme wireless internet card Fire Wire 200 and two Usb 2.0 ports Gigabit Ethernet Bluetooth 2.0 and Edr 13.3 inch Glossy Screen 2.0 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 80 Gb Hard Drive 1 Gb Memory Apple Remote Control Built in i Sight Camera for web chatting and movie making Software Complete I Life Package including o i Movie o i Dvd o i tunes o Garage Band musical composing) o i photo o i Web for Websight building Complete Microsoft package for Mac Retail price £269) o Microsoft Word o Microsoft office o Microsoft Exellel o Power Point Total Retail Price £969 Selling for £450 I would really like to sell before christmas and I m expecting it to go quick so please do not hesitate to make an offer

A blogger is making dormant rumors that Microsoft is looking to buy Yahoo active again after a Microsoft executive outlined plans this week for the company to improve its online search market share from about 10 percent to 30 percent.Former Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget, who writes for the popular liberal blog The Huffington Post, posited Friday that there is no way Microsoft could achieve this goal on its own, so an acquisition may be in the works. His comments come after Microsoft President of Platforms and Services Kevin Johnson outlined the company's online search goal at a UBS investor conference in Seattle on Thursday.In his blog posting, Blodget said Microsoft is no closer to succeeding online than it was when it began 12 years ago, and noted that the company's online division is still losing about $1 billion a year.Seeing as Microsoft still trails both Google and Yahoo for search market share and advertising revenue, and assuming that "Johnson is not a moron," Blodget wrote that the only way company executives think they can achieve the goal is by making a very specific purchase. According to site analytics firm Compete, Microsoft's online search market share was 9.2 percent in September compared to Yahoo's 19 percent and Google's 67 percent."How could Microsoft actually achieve the goals Kevin Johnson laid out?" he asked in his blog. "There's only one answer: Buy Yahoo. Buying Yahoo would give Microsoft 30 percent search share instantly."Yahoo shares closed up nearly 6 percent Friday on renewed speculation about a possible buyout by Microsoft. Company stock opened the day trading at $25.67 and closed at $26.82.Both Microsoft and Yahoo have said they will not comment on rumors or speculation about a deal, gossip that ran rampant in the industry earlier this year. At the height of the rumors, Microsoft purchased digital services agency aQuantive for about $6 billion in May, the largest acquisition the company has ever made.Still, though the aQuantive deal closed in Microsoft's fiscal first quarter, which ended Sept. 30, the revenue for Microsoft's Online Services Division (OSD) grew only 25 percent year over year, and analysts criticized the company for that performance. Even Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell at the time acknowledged that this kind of growth in OSD, despite all of Microsoft's investment to grow its online strategy, was "acceptable, but not stellar."Microsoft began to ramp up its investment in growing online advertising revenue and building out more online services in earnest in November 2005, and since then even overhauled and rebranded its Web search engine, Live Search. The company also has rolled out an entire portfolio of new and revamped online services under the brand Windows Live to compete in this area.If Microsoft does indeed purchase Yahoo, Blodget wrote that it would be a far better deal for the software giant than it would be for the struggling online services company. He said that the deal "would be disastrous for Yahoo, which is having enough trouble competing with Google on its own.""Imagine what would happen if it got swallowed by the Redmond whale," Blodget wrote. "In six months, all the remaining strong people would be gone."

When Jeneane Sessum logged into her Gmail account on the afternoon of Oct. 27, she was greeted with a horrifying sight: an empty inbox.A Gmail user since 2004, Sessum, a social media consultant and writer in Atlanta, had thousands of messages there, enough to use up almost 30 percent of her allotted storage space.Because Gmail is her primary work and personal e-mail service, Sessum lost many important messages, including some she needed at that moment for a project.Days earlier in Chicago, Jessica Squazzo, a writer and editor, accessed Gmail and stared at her computer screen in disbelief: All messages from 2007 had disappeared from her inbox.Sessum and Squazzo are just two of a small but steady stream of Gmail users who regularly report losing some, many, or all of their messages without a clue as to why.It seems that hardly a week goes by without at least several users reporting this problem on discussion boards, such as the official Gmail Help forum.Asked to comment about multiple lost-message reports in 11 different threads created in September and October in the Gmail Help forum, a Google spokesman declined to address any of the specific situations, citing privacy reasons.However, he did emphasize that, as far as Google is concerned, "most issues like this are a result of phishing attacks or compromised passwords -- or sometimes simply messages mistakenly deleted or marked as spam -- not a data corruption issue."That explanation makes little sense to savvy and experienced Internet users like Sessum and Squazzo, who are aware of phishing scams and know better than to reply to suspicious messages -- let alone include in them confidential, sensitive information, such as passwords. In addition, they say they are the only ones with access to their respective accounts.Moreover, both Sessum and Squazzo, interviewed separately, question why a malicious hacker would go through the trouble of trying to access someone's e-mail account in order to delete messages, instead of acting stealthily to harvest information they could exploit like credit card numbers."If someone had hacked into my account, why would they have just erased some of my e-mail and not all? The fact that precisely all my e-mail from 2007 -- and no earlier mail -- was wiped out leads me to still conclude that it must have been some technical error on Gmail's servers, whether they want to admit that or not," said Squazzo, who has used Gmail for personal communications since 2005.In the case of Sessum, while the inbox was empty, she still had copies of messages she had sent in the "All Mail" file of her account, along with saved transcripts of instant messaging chats she had conducted using Google Talk.For the sake of comparison, a review of discussion forums for users of Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Hotmail reveals far fewer reports of lost or disappearing inbox messages than for Gmail, even though those rival services have larger user bases.Matt Cain, a Gartner vice president and lead e-mail analyst, hasn't investigated reports of lost messages in Gmail but said the problem hasn't been observed as a common one in Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, both of which have traditionally enjoyed a high degree of data integrity in their message repositories."I can't validate [that this is a problem with Gmail] but if it's true, it's coming at an unfortunate time for Google because the company is aggressively pushing into the enterprise e-mail space," Cain said, referring to the Gmail component of the Google Apps hosted collaboration and communication application suite, designed for organizations of all sizes, including large ones with its Premier edition.A review of the Gmail Help forum reveals that reports of lost messages have become more common in the past year with a higher volume of complaints occurring since July.Another user who encountered this problem was Gary S. Moore of Fort Worth, Texas, who had used Gmail without problems for two years until one day last month, when he noticed all his archived messages had vanished from his account, including more than 100 photos.In Greenwood, Missouri, Monroe Johnson was also affected, when a portion of his stored messages disappeared in October. Johnson, like Sessum and Squazzo, doesn't believe an error on his part or a compromised account might be to blame."I doubt it. I have been working with computers since 1997," Johnson said. He's the only one who has access to his account, he said.Like other interviewed users who contacted Google seeking help and technical support, Sessum only received a canned reply saying Google had determined that her problem wasn't due to a technical issue with Google systems and that she should change her Gmail password."I guess they are insinuating someone bothered to break into my Gmail account with the express purpose of deleting my incoming mail while deciding to leave my chats and sent mail. Not likely," she said.Sessum, who also uses the hosted Google Docs applications and other Google services, expected a more helpful answer from the company, considering the extent of her data loss."In many respects, I'm building my small business on the back of Google. And I believe that's what Google wants us to do. So it's imperative that they provide at least a little support when something goes wrong," said Sessum, who hosts her blog on Google's Blogger service.Although consumer Webmail services such as Gmail are generally free, the user expectation is that the data stored in them will not be corrupted, Gartner's Cain said.In fact, one of Gmail's innovations when it was introduced in April 2004 was the size of its inbox -- 1GB, huge by the standards at that time -- so that users wouldn't have to bother deleting messages if they didn't want to.Google didn't deliver POP3 support for Gmail until November 2004 and didn't offer IMAP support until late last month. POP3 and IMAP are protocols that let users download e-mail messages from servers to desktop PC software.There doesn't seem to be a pattern to the reports of lost Gmail messages as the problem has hit users with a variety of PCs, operating systems, and browsers, according to interviews and discussion forum messages.For example, Sessum uses a Mac computer and the Firefox browser and doesn't synchronize her Gmail account with a desktop e-mail software. Meanwhile, Johnson accesses Gmail from a Windows Vista PC and downloads the messages to his computer, although he keeps copies of them on the Google servers.Sessum, echoing other users, is hoping Google will look deeper into this problem of disappearing e-mail messages. Its users deserve a better explanation, she said."Google's back-end support function is MIA. You can't find a number to call. You have to tap our personal network of friends to find a name and a way in through the back door, do a dance and rub a stone for good luck, and hope that someone will help," she said.It's also in Google's best interest to beef up this support part of its business because even users who don't pay Google for services or software contribute significantly to the company's success, she said."Google makes it easier for us to collaborate, work, and publish. We provide the content, the searches, the clicks, and the destinations for those clicks. It's a win-win. Until you lose something important -- like all your data," she said.A sampling of recent threads in the Gmail Help forum devoted to lost messages follows:http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/aad47e2819f32e6e/0b8a9de3f9cc0e3fhttp://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-ABCs/browse_thread/thread/7fb4071b94277d55/4a750e40abcb32efhttp://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/7443d36a2b43c860/4ab72b69f9f1a05bhttp://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/948d861de7128acc/64641f442d477c0ehttp://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/ac9d1426cfe68e0e/c415516eb06804b6http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/bc16fb2ca342e5fe/80e3a3c44d6041fahttp://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/419226013062111c/7119b58486ba0a4chttp://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/8ca49192d1691828/bf0c9663b9b3c652http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/1fbe0cf09a8c674d/dfee6cac24f520eahttp://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/55ce3198c3a821e3/71e11cf6e1e5c56a

Why is Yahoo surging when Google is still the No.1 search engine? We answer this question and more.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the public beta availability of Popfly, the company's mashup creation tool for non-technical users introduced in alpha form in May.During Ballmer's appearance on Thursday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, a Microsoft staffer gave a demo of Popfly in which he showed how the tool can be used to create applications for sites like Facebook's social network and Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces without the need to write code.Popfly is built on Silverlight, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering video and interactive applications. Silverlight is Microsoft's answer to Adobe's ubiquitous Flash technology.While acknowledging that Adobe has done "a good job in rich media" with Flash, Ballmer nonetheless said there are plenty of opportunities for Microsoft to innovate as Web applications "continue to get richer and richer."Speaking at the same event on Wednesday, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen downplayed Silverlight's threat to Flash, saying Flash has been around for 10 years, is widely adopted and has a broad ecosystem.Ballmer, who answered questions from conference chair John Battelle and from attendees, said that the clamor over Web-hosted office productivity applications like Google Apps and suites from Zimbra and Zoho as major threats to Microsoft Office is misguided.In the communication and collaboration software space, Microsoft is focused on making its applications accessible in whatever way customers require, and that the issue isn't a black-and-white opposition between packaged and hosted software.He acknowledged that Microsoft pays attention "to what the other guy is doing" and is receptive to implementing good ideas in its products.As the interest in hosted applications rises, critics have said Microsoft has been slow in responding with a hosted alternative to Microsoft Office, and that it risks missing an opportunity that others are eagerly pursuing.Asked if he was getting impatient with Microsoft's search and online advertising efforts, where the company lags far behind leader Google, Ballmer said he's confident his company will continue to improve in the coming years as it focuses on several key areas.For example, Microsoft will continue improving its search engines, because they are key for generating online ad revenues. It will also continue to strengthen its consumer communication services, like webmail and instant messaging.Key as well is having a strong ad platform, which is why Microsoft spent $6 billion on aQuantive, and a strong ad syndication business, he said. Ad syndication will go through a major transformation in the next five years as the focus shifts from matching ads based on a Web page's content to based on users' online behavior, he said.Ballmer declined to comment when asked about rumors Microsoft is buying a stake in Facebook, but he said the companies' existing online ad partnership is going very well.He dismissed questions about the consistent speculation that Microsoft might buy the embattled Yahoo, saying Microsoft is confident in its strategy to at some point generate 25 percent of its revenue from online advertising. "We believe in our independent path. We like what we're doing," Ballmer said.Microsoft also released at the event a beta version of the Windows Live Photo Gallery photo management tool that adds publishing support for Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site. As of Thursday, the Microsoft product has a "publish on Flickr" option in addition to its ability to post photos directly to the Windows Live Spaces blogging and social network. The Windows Live Photo Gallery is available on the Windows Live beta page .Microsoft further announced new features for its Live Search for Mobile search engine and launched Live Search 411, a toll-free directory assistance service accessible by calling (800) CALL-411 (800-225-5411).Additionally, Microsoft provided an update on the adoption of Silverlight, whose 1.0 version was released a month ago. The number of partners in the Microsoft Silverlight Partner Initiative has grown to more than 50 organizations, and more than 40 customers have delivered Silverlight applications.Microsoft also said that Silverlight 1.0 is now available in 10 languages, including simplified and traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese.

The most recent panel here at SMX Social Media was entitled Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing. With Wikipedia dominating the search results, many SEOs were really paying attention to the information here on the panel. Because of the many ways these systems influence search rankings, the panel was quite large. Here’s [...]

Web users rely on community-contributed-content sites such as Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers. These sites enable you to communicate directly with an engaged audience. But contribute to the conversation with care. Too much spin and you're credibility will be shot-and your...

Another topic Scoble and I talked about today was Facebook. I said I don't like Facebook, never have, and I finally figured out why. It's another one of those user generated content things, only this time I'm building up an address book that I can look at, but can only do things with it that Facebook lets me do. Why exactly do I need Facebook to get inbetween me and my address book? I mean, I understand why they want me to tell them everyone I know, but how about letting me download a copy to my computer, so I can back it up, use it on my iPhone or Blackberry, bequeath it to my heirs, write a book about it, or give a copy to Google or Netflix or Yahoo, or you get the idea. It's the last thing they don't want me to do, give a copy to a competitor of theirs. And they hope I won't notice that I'm doing all this work and not insisting on at least being their equal when it comes to my data. Sometime in November Google is rumored to be revealing their answer to Facebook. Whatever it is it will surely have an API, and will allow Google apps to share the info, and it will, if it hopes to compete with Facebook, provide some access to this data to app developers. But the true measure of their gravitas will be whether they give full control of the user's data to the user. If they do that, no matter what's missing from their software, it won't suck. PS: When I write about it, I do it crudely, saying they suck or don't. When Doc Searls writes about it he calls it Vendor Relationship Management. Doc writes so elegantly because he is a research fellow at Harvard University.

IT investor confidence in technology is gaining strength. This week, vendors as diverse as Google, Business Objects, and VMware led the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index to break the 2,800 mark for the first time since January 2001, the second week in a row the market has hit a six-year milestone.Tuesday's Nasdaq close of 2803.91 was noteworthy, since it fell on the five-year anniversary of the current U.S. bull market. The bear market earlier this decade, marked by the dot-com bust, ended in October 2002. Since then, markets have had short periods of decline but generally have trended upward.Eighteen straight quarters of double-digit growth in corporate earnings have sustained the bull market, and IT profits have been at the core of this phenomenon. Strong earnings have helped lift tech-company share prices 142 percent since 2002, according to data from Standard & Poor's.Concerns about the U.S. economy -- stemming from a soft housing market and a rising tide of defaults on mortgages -- caused shares to tumble in July and August. The big question is whether the third quarter declines were the end of the bull market, and whether a general market decline would affect IT vendors. The answer to both questions over the past few weeks appears to be no.Recently, IT companies that appear to be taking advantage of user interest in hot areas such as mobile technology, virtualization, business intelligence, security and cutting-edge Web services have grabbed investor attention.Google shares broke $600 for the first time on Tuesday. The company appears set to branch out from search advertising. It is putting ads on YouTube videos and seems prepared to offer an array of software for mobile devices.On Tuesday, Google announced it is buying Finnish startup Jaiku, which has developed a social-networking mobile phone application. Similar to Twitter, the application lets users send short messages about what they're doing.VMware is still riding high on interest in virtualization. On Tuesday, the company broke the $100 mark for the first time since going public three months ago. Virtualization, which allows servers to work more efficiently, has been a buzzword for several years. But as businesses struggle to curb energy and hardware costs, interest in the technology remains high.Business intelligence is seen as a way to sort through all the data in those servers, as the Internet fuels an exponential rise in the amount of information companies are able to collect. Following Oracle's acquisition of BI and financial applications vendor Hyperion, completed in April, SAP on Sunday announced it would buy Business Objects for $6.8 million."In one transaction, SAP gets the best-of-breed set of BI tools with full BI stack capabilities," Forrester analyst Boris Evelson wrote in a research note.Business Objects jumped $7.56, to close Monday at $57.83, though SAP shares fell $2.87, to close at $56.36, probably because the acquisition will dilute earnings.After Tuesday's milestone, the Nasdaq rose again Wednesday, then retreated Thursday. Analysts widely attributed the retreat to efforts to reap profits on the recent share gains. The index is still well above its third-quarter low point of 2451.Analysts are widely anticipating strong third-quarter results from many IT bellwethers.Google, Yahoo, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices will report earnings next week. Some analysts expect Google profits to be up 50 percent from a year ago. And even though CitiGroup lowered its fourth -quarter forecast for the semiconductor sector, it released a research note this week saying it expects some upside surprises from Intel, and possibly some other chip makers, as they report results. 

(InfoWorld) - Zimbra customers appalled at the company's planned acquisition by Yahoo are speaking out, saying they are vexed by the deal and upset over its possible negative consequences. Skeptical about Yahoo's capacity to serve enterprise customers and suspicious about Yahoo's plans for the Zimbra collaboration and messaging suite, these IT professionals express pessimism about the deal announced Monday and expected to close next month. A collective feeling of alarm and dismay emanates from a discussion forum thread Zimbra created to obtain feedback from its customers. Already 9 pages long, the thread contains mostly negative impressions. Zimbra organized a conference call this week open to all customers so that the company's top executives could answer questions and address concerns. Neither that call, held Tuesday, nor reassuring messages from Zimbra employees in the forum have calmed customers IDG News Service interviewed on Thursday. "There is a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt regarding Zimbra at the moment, and it's not unwarranted," said Matthew Day, IT Manager at Langs Building Supplies in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Just over a year ago, Day began researching collaboration suites for Langs and chose Zimbra Collaboration Suite over Microsoft's Exchange and Xandos's Scalix. Currently, 400 Langs employees use Zimbra's suite. However, his misgivings about the Yahoo deal prompted him to scratch plans to renew Langs' Zimbra contract for three years, opting instead for a one-year agreement. Day has too many questions that Zimbra and Yahoo haven't answered to his satisfaction. Chief among them: Does Yahoo, whose online services are heavily focused on consumers, understand the needs of business customers? "As an IT Manager, I would not have expected to ever see a Yahoo product in one of my production environments," he said. "I am concerned about how the culture of Yahoo will deal with the requirements of commercial users and the support they expect." Day also worries that Yahoo's influence may negatively affect future development of the Zimbra suite, a concern shared by Dan Phillips, IT Manager at Other World Computing, in Woodstock, Illinois. "Before the acquisition, Zimbra had only one purpose: To make a better product. Zimbra now has a different purpose, and that is to ensure Yahoo's agendas are fulfilled," Phillips said. Among his first tasks after getting hired six months ago was picking a new messaging platform for Other World. The Zimbra rollout was completed barely three weeks ago. He picked the Open Source Edition of the suite, which also comes in a commercial option called Network Edition. The news of the Yahoo deal left him aghast. "I am certain I was not the only IT decision maker who felt disgust and despair after reading about Yahoo's [planned] acquisition of Zimbra," Phillips said. Also deeply pessimistic is Dominic Ijichi, a Belfast-based Unix supercomputer administrator for a large bank, who in his spare time manages the Zimbra suite for a small finance company whose chairman is a friend of his. He predicts Yahoo will disassemble the suite and plug its pieces into Yahoo Mail. "I believe [Zimbra's suite] will be killed off as a separate product," he said. Jim Hutchinson, IT Manager at Richmond Systems in Olympia, Washington, is scratching his head over Yahoo's motivation. "What are they going to get for their $350 million?" he said. "I can't see how Zimbra fits into the way Yahoo makes money." In addition to downloadable, server-based versions of the suite meant to be installed in customers' premises, it is also available as SaaS (software as a service) from third-party hosting providers. Keepnet, a U.K. provider of hosted IT services, recently developed a new Zimbra-based hosted service, but the company isn't feeling too hot about it now, said director Kevin Dontenville. "We are disappointed that this acquisition throws many of the knowns out of the window. We need to decide whether to continue and risk losses that are significant to us or to change direction ... and find a new route forward for our new business," he said. Andy Armagost, systems administrator at Brigham Oil & Gas, in Austin, Texas, is also conflicted about the deal, which he believes would have given his company pause for reflection when deciding for Zimbra, but the suite is partially rolled out already at Brigham. While he shares many of his peers' concerns, he also sees a silver lining: That Zimbra will become more financially secure and able to access Yahoo resources. "I hope this deal works out well for all of us," he said. Those interviewed generally believe that the best-case scenario would be for Yahoo to interfere as little as possible with the Zimbra team and technology while providing a strong backup. Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra's co-founder and CEO, understands that acquisitions often worry customers but said the concerns are unwarranted in this case. "I already know my budget for the next five years, in which there is a continued commitment to growing this business," Dharmaraj said in an interview with IDG News Service. For starters, Yahoo will not dismantle Zimbra to boost Yahoo Mail. "If Yahoo wanted the people and the technology to bolster the Yahoo consumer mail group, $350 million is a lot to pay," Dharmaraj said. "We're going to be kept whole as a business unit, and we'll execute on our current strategy," he added. Likewise, it's illogical to think Yahoo will rip out its Yahoo Mail infrastructure, which supports about 250 million consumers, and swap in the Zimbra technology, designed mostly for businesses. "Those are paranoid fears," Dharmaraj said. Zimbra's team will help refine and improve portions of Yahoo Mail on a case-by-case basis. Currently, the only component slated for a Zimbra revamping is Yahoo Calendar, he said. Meanwhile, the downloadable, server-based versions of Zimbra's suite aren't going away, so those customers can rest easy, including those who have signed five-year agreements, he said. Specifically, Zimbra will maintain the same commitment for the open-source version of this downloadable suite, keeping its development on par with the commercial "Network" version. Zimbra, founded in 2003, has an installed base of about 9 million mailboxes in more than 100,000 organizations, although it deals directly with about 1,300 customers and channel partners, he said. Customers include Comcast and New York University. Its core strength is e-mail, and it has commonly been considered an alternative to Exchange, but the suite also includes a word processor and a spreadsheet application. These let users create, share, and collaboratively edit documents. With e-mail, calendar, contacts list, and office applications, it also competes against PC-based suites, such as Microsoft Office, and Web-hosted suites, such as Google's Google Apps. Dharmaraj said Zimbra will sell the suite directly as a hosted service, something for which it had previously relied on hosting partners. As with direct sales of the downloadable versions, Zimbra will sell the hosted suite at a premium over the prices it gives to hosting partners. Also unfounded are fears that Yahoo will force Zimbra to limit its compatibility with Yahoo competitors, he said. Yahoo realizes that a big draw of the Zimbra suite is precisely its open platform, which lets external developers create application mashups called "zimlets." The deal gives Zimbra a financial and resources boost as well as heightened brand credibility with potential enterprise customers that as a 100-employee startup it didn't have, he said. If anything, Zimbra will be able to step up its development efforts. Version 5.0 of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite is due in December, and version 5.5 and beyond will follow, he said. Finally, he said he and the other members of the Zimbra executive team are committed for the long haul. "Zimbra is our baby," he said. "The reason we made this deal is to grow Zimbra." Yahoo's Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice president of communications and communities, reiterated Dharmaraj's commitments and challenges the perception that Yahoo only knows how to support consumers. For example, Yahoo provides Web hosting and domain registration-related services to hundreds of thousands of companies, while its advertising business includes a vast network of marketers and publishers, he said. Moreover, it has long-standing partnerships with carriers like AT&T and British Telecom, he added. "Those are very large commitments we have made in our systems that aren't consumer-facing," Garlinghouse said in an interview. Regarding Yahoo's ability to support enterprise customers, he points towards the know-how involved in providing reliable performance at a massive scale for services like Yahoo Mail. "This is a natural extension of what we're incredibly good at with a company, in Zimbra, that also is best-of-breed. We bring the best of both worlds together," Garlinghouse said. Assurances and promises are all good, but concerned customers said the antidote to their misgivings will be concrete actions. "I have no interest in asking simple questions and listening to Yahoo's spin. Only time can answer any question I have," Other World's Phillips said.

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