A couple of days ago, I ran across this posting from David Young of Joyent (a Ruby based, hosted collaboration service run by the TextDrive guys). In it, Young links to a quick snippet of audio taken from the 2.20.06 Gillmor Gang, in which Edgeio and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington absolutely killed Zimbra, calling Edgeio’s experience with it a “total, unmitigated disaster,” and saying that they were considering moving back to Exchange.[1] Having been very impressed by the demos and our conversations with the Zimbra folks – to the point that RedMonk is strongly considering migrating off of Exchange to it, provided we can get a satisfactory hosted plan – I was very curious about what the context was of this remark. Unfortunately, when I went back to the original source – the show itself, there was no information or explanation beyond that soundbite.
So like Serge Meeuwsen, one of the commenters on the above Gillmor Gang link, I’m left wondering what precisely went wrong with Zimbra as Arrington sees it . The only mention of Zimbra on TechCrunch that I could find, here, was fairly positive, and I didn’t turn up anything in a quick search.
Would love to see the answer to that question if anybody knows it, whether it’s Arrington or any of the other Edgeio folks. If it’s that bad, why haven’t posts turned up describing the problems – or did I just miss them?
Disclaimer: None of the above are clients of RedMonk, but we’re considering Zimbra as a replacement for Exchange, and we do currently have a paid account with Joyent for evaluation purposes.
[1] In case anyone’s curious, Young does qualify his remarks, saying that “we here at Joyent think Zimbra is a great product for the Microsoft Exchange replacement market.”
