Zimbra Founder Satish Dharmaraj to Depart Yahoo
by Kara Swisher
Posted on January 21, 2009 at 9:18 AM PT
Satish Dharmaraj–the founder of open-source email start-up Zimbra, which has been at the heart of significant new changes to Yahoo’s key communications services–will be leaving the company.
The move, to be announced internally later today, is not a big surprise, even though Yahoo paid $350 million for Zimbra in the fall of 2007.
Dharmaraj (pictured here) had previously stepped back from day-to-day leadership at the Yahoo communications and communities division, which is run by former Zimbra President and CTO Scott Dietzen.
But the departure of an innovative entrepreneur like Dharmaraj–although typical when big companies buy start-ups–is never a good thing, given that it’s more important than ever to keep innovative leaders at Yahoo.
New CEO Carol Bartz will have to tap internal leadership if she hopes to turn Yahoo (YHOO) into the kind of fresh opportunity she said it could be when she was hired earlier this month.
Yahoo introduced new email services recently, based on some of Zimbra’s technologies and concepts.
That has been important, since Yahoo Mail has always been a company bright spot and has remained the bigger provider of Web email to general consumers.
But most agree that Yahoo has allowed the Google (GOOG) mail offering, Gmail, to suck up all the oxygen in the room with more flashy features like threading of conversations while not serving up a strong response quickly enough in an arena Yahoo pioneered.
Zimbra vaulted its effort at differentiation from the hyped Google offering forward more quickly.
More importantly, it has strengthened Yahoo’s ability to make online email act more like a computer program than a Web page, which has been the main focus of late of Yahoo, Google, Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL and Windows Live Hotmail from Microsoft (MSFT).
In addition, since Zimbra was designed with flexible and open Ajax programming tools, it made it easy for third-party developers to make many other applications that jack innovation from the outside, making the communications platform the center of the Web experience with video, search and other tools.
It’s not clear where Dharmaraj is going, but here is a video interview I did with him last year after Yahoo bought Zimbra:
Comments
Now if we could only get rid of Yang & Roy. Problem with YHOO is that the wrong “talent” is leaving. Yang stays and the real talent exits. With him still on the board we will never get the “change” we are hoping for.
Posted by michael kane at January 21st, 2009 at 9:56 amI was fortunate to be part of the Zimbra team in India and having worked closely with Satish, this is a huge blow for Yahoo. It is also rumored that Abinash Tripathy (Satish’s protege) who founded the Zimbra team in India and is credited with creating one of the best Web 2.0 teams in India is also leaving Yahoo to pursue entrepreneurial ambitions. He was instrumental to Zimbra’s success having built a team in India imho that could take on any valley team. His departure will also be a serious blow to Yahoo. He is probably one of the best startup guys to watch in India.
Posted by Chintan Zaveri at January 28th, 2009 at 10:44 pm“…more flashy features like threading of conversations…” give me a break. Zimbra has been offering this as an option from the beginning. At least with Zimbra it’s an option, whereas with Google it’s been mandated. Likewise, with Zimbra you have the *option* to continue to use Outlook, and sync natively with email, contacts, calendars, filters and more. Also the option to use push mail with Blackberry and iPhone. Zimbra remains way ahead of the pack. Catch-up, Google. Zimbra desktop anyone? Ok, it’s not ripe yet, but for a green app it’s clearly ahead of the pack. I am happy to pay $3.99/mo for Zimbra versus “free” for Google apps, given my usage is free from prying eyes. Much more, I can restore my account to 30 days ago.
Posted by Marshal Mather at February 12th, 2009 at 5:25 pm