Don’t count Yahoo! out just yet

The late afternoon bombshell that Yahoo! has announced its intent to acquire Zimbra is creating quite a few ripples in the Web 2.0 this afternoon. It’s a very smart move and one that restores more than a little luster to Yahoo which had been looking a bit day-late-and-dollar-short of late. Zimbra has had a momentous and rapid ride since 2005 capped by the announcement of a sweet deal with Comcast earlier this year. This acquisition is a nice payoff (at $350 million) for a lot of hard work by a focused (some might say relentless) team.

Yahoo’s blog, Zimbra’s blog, the news flash on TechCrunch, and the official press release should give you most of the available details you need to form your own opinion. More here if you just can’t get too much of this sort of news. As is always the case with these acquisitions, much of the value in this deal will only be seen over time as the assimilation and integration plays out.

What I’m interested to see if how Yahoo! positions this relative to their own recently updated webmail offering. Zimbra is, in many ways, a better product for Yahoo! to offer its web customers as well as pursuing the enterprise and ISP avenues Zimbra has been developing. I can’t think of a better way for them to prove scalability than to provide it to their millions of users (many of whom actually pay for additional storage).

I don’t think it’s just Google who might feel the need to take a glance or two over their shoulder on this one.