Sridhar Vembu

There are reports that Yahoo has put Zimbra on the block. Honestly, this came as no surprise at all to us at Zoho. I remember scratching my head when the acquisition was made; I didn't see how an enterprise/business focused open source offering like Zimbra fit with Yahoo, as a technology, as a business or strategically. Zimbra is an open source installable product offering primarily intended to be installed within medium to large organizations. Yahoo has never made an installed product in its history and is mainly focused on consumers, with an occasional foray to sell those consumer-focused applications to small businesses. Zimbra's service provider offerings made no strategic sense to Yahoo either, because Yahoo, being a service provider itself, has no interest in selling ... (more)

Cloud Economics: Microsoft, Google & Amazon

Sridhar Vembu's blog Yesterday Microsoft launched its Azure cloud platform, so it is time for another spreadsheet. To properly compare Microsoft, Google and Amazon, I am using the gross profit (instead of revenue) and net profit numbers. Gross profit is, in some sense, the real revenue of a company after paying its outside suppliers; gross profit is what is available to pay its employees,... (more)

IBM, Microsoft & Google Eras of Computing

By now it is conventional wisdom to say that there was an IBM Era of computing, then a Microsoft Era, and now we are in the Google Era. In this post, I will explain why Microsoft was not the “next IBM” and why Google is not the “next Microsoft” - there are significant qualitative differences among them, quite apart from their status as the dominant, era-defining p... (more)