Zimbra was acquired yesterday for $350 million by Yahoo! That’s great news for the pockets of its staff and investors, but what about the rest of us? There is a constant stream of talk about email bankruptcy, email overload, and email being broken … and if that’s all true, does yet another email system solve the problem? Does switching from Outlook, Notes, Gmail, Hotmail or any other system resolve our serious issues with email?

No, it doesn’t. Marc Orchant’s essay in More Space entitled “Work is Broken” addresses a way of being effective with email, pretty much regardless of email system. Mark Hurst in “Bit Literacy” (see Amazon, it’s a book) talks about how to be effective using email, again pretty much regardless of what system you use — although note that he’s generally disgusted with the poor state of email clients and their lack of bit literacy. And David Allen, GTD guru and coach, would pretty much say the same thing — it’s in how you use what you’ve got, not really what you’ve got (to the chagrin of many, David is a big Lotus Notes fan).

And what about the case studies from collaboration vendors — Traction Software, Socialtext and Atlassian — to name but three, pointing to the huge reduction in enail traffic that’s possible with alternative communication and collaboration tools? Are they fake numbers? Do senior execs not believe them or not “get it”? Surely if a businessperson overloaded by email wanted to make a game-changing move they’d switch to something with profound options for improvement; otherwise the answer to “email is broken” is merely “get a different email”.

So while I’m delighted for Satish et al at Zimbra, I’m disappointed for the market and for businesses that the $350 million didn’t go to something that had more of a potential breakthrough impact. Now if Yahoo had paid $350 million for Traction, or Atlassian, or Socialtext … Then I’d take my hat off to them as business visionaries.

Apart from some money changing hands, I fail to see much of an impact from this move. Was it driven by vision or desperation? What’s your view?

(Blogging from BlackBerry; hence no links)