Yahoo: Internet withdrawal anguishing
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com September 22, 2004, 12:36 PM PT. This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been improving or obtaining CRM and ERP software for the past year and a half.
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By Tony Glover Technology Editor  YAHOO's profits warning last week sent shock waves through the entire internet  sector, leading some investors wondering if the glory days of search-orientated internet companies like Yahoo and Google are nearing their end.
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Microsoft&#39;s offer Friday to buy Yahoo&#160;for $44.6 billion in cash and shares put a turbulent end to a heavy earnings week in which forecasts from Internet leaders worried IT investors.
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By Michael Liedtke Associated Press  SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo! Inc. is tackling its most difficult challenge since the dot-com bust with sweeping organizational changes aimed at cleaning up a mess of the Internet icon's own making.
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NEW YORK: Nearly half of US Internet users say they could not go without the Web for more than two weeks, with many suffering &quot;withdrawal&quot; symptoms while offline, according to a recent survey.
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Blog: Presence of exploit code puts pressure on Yahoo to fix the security flaws.
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Internet attorney Eric J. Sinrod says a new report detailing online consumer behavior speaks volumes about frustration levels.
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Get on your feet... Yahoo! is taking some time out from worrying about what it's like to be a Microsoft tentacle to offload its damp squib music subscription service.â¦
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Yahoo yesterday asked a court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing the Internet giant of abetting torture and abuse of pro-democracy writers in China.
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Surfers are becoming addicted to the internet and suffer from withdrawal symptoms if deprived of web access, a study has found. Yahoo&#39;s Internet Deprivation Study tested how emotionally connected consumers
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Yahoo's switchover plan for the photo-sharing site draws fire. Plus: Yahoo unveils a universe of brands. In Monkey Bites.
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Yahoo Inc. YHOO.O is offering refunds   to customers of its new Internet streaming package of National   Football League games after a technological problem caused   access problems on Sunday.
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If you search for Yahoo Microsoft, this page is the second hit. I like that of course. It's generating a fair amount of flow, since the combination of Yahoo and Microsoft is a pretty hot topic. Keeping the topic going, I think it's pretty amazing that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, but then again, which of all their web efforts has captured our imagination? At least Yahoo has Flickr, and when they try something new, we all try it with them (often with not the greatest results). The rambling continues... If Yahoo is into poison pills, try this one out.  Reserve 5 percent of Yahoo's common stock for blogger options. Put us to work to find new businesses for Yahoo, ones that are relevant to our world. When we find them, reward the bloggers with a significant upside stake in Yahoo's future, not the airy-fairy kind, but real stock that we can trade. Handled properly, it could raise shareholder value by much more than 5 percent. Just the kind of deal they pay you to do, oh Yahoo gods and board members.  Of course it'll never happen. It's an idea like the one I keep proposing for newspapers -- that they hire their public editors from the public, independent bloggers with no journalism experience, with no undue reverence for the institutions so revered by journos. They're going away, just like Yahoo is (sad but true). Now what will rise in their place? Imho, something that's home grown, with the integrity of the people, in our interest. The more they invite the public in, the more clued in they will be when we figure out where we want to go with news on the web. It's why I'm excited about the Obama campaign and why I keep giving to it (I'm up to $400 now). I'm excited because so many other people are excited.  I like his idea about tuition for public service for college students. It's so simple. People want to be involved, they want to use their energy and creativity to solve problems. In the 20th century we were couch potatoes. In the 21st we do it for ourselves.  The first tech company that fully embraces this, not just in the form of User Generated Content (what an insult) but by giving us power (that comes from stock) will rule the world. If Y! had the guts, it won't be long before they're making tender offers to buy out Ballmer.  BTW, I think I understand why Ballmer wants Yahoo! When Yahoo engineers wake up they program stuff like Yahoo Live, which is pretty cool and runs on the web, and while it steals ideas from smaller companies, it adds some pretty cool stuff of its own. When Microsoft engineers wake up they program stuff like Vista, a multi-year, multi-billion dollar waste of money, time and customer goodwill. They can't do another Vista without wrecking the franchise. Now the question is -- where do they go for growth? That's what Yahoo is for.
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Yahoo Inc.'s financial funk deepened at the end of 2007, prompting the slumping Internet icon to draw up plans to lay off 1,000 workers.
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NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO  - Yahoo Inc.  and AT&T Inc.  are negotiating potentially sweeping changes that could scale back their partnership, the Wall Street Journal reported, dragging Yahoo shares down 5.2 percent.
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Yahoo is widely expected  to undertake significant layoffs this week and dump several  underperforming businesses as the struggling portal continues  to reorganize its business operations.
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(InfoWorld) - Zimbra customers appalled atÂ the company's planned acquisition by YahooÂ are speaking out, saying they are vexed by the deal and upset over its possible negative consequences. Skeptical about Yahoo's capacity to serve enterprise customers and suspicious about Yahoo's plans for the Zimbra collaboration and messaging suite, these IT professionals express pessimism about the deal announced Monday and expected to close next month. A collective feeling of alarm and dismay emanates from a discussion forum thread Zimbra created to obtain feedback from its customers. Already 9 pages long, the thread contains mostly negative impressions. Zimbra organized a conference call this week open to all customers so that the company's top executives could answer questions and address concerns. Neither that call, held Tuesday, nor reassuring messages from Zimbra employees in the forum have calmed customers IDG News Service interviewed on Thursday. "There is a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt regarding Zimbra at the moment, and it's not unwarranted," said Matthew Day, IT Manager at Langs Building Supplies in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Just over a year ago, Day began researching collaboration suites for Langs and chose Zimbra Collaboration Suite over Microsoft's Exchange and Xandos's Scalix. Currently, 400 Langs employees use Zimbra's suite. However, his misgivings about the Yahoo deal prompted him to scratch plans to renew Langs' Zimbra contract forÂ three years, opting instead for a one-year agreement. Day has too many questions that Zimbra and Yahoo haven't answered to his satisfaction. Chief among them: Does Yahoo, whose online services are heavily focused on consumers, understand the needs of business customers? "As an IT Manager, I would not have expected to ever see a Yahoo product in one of my production environments," he said. "I am concerned about how the culture of Yahoo will deal with the requirements of commercial users and the support they expect." Day also worries that Yahoo's influence may negatively affect future development of the Zimbra suite, a concern shared by Dan Phillips, IT Manager at Other World Computing, in Woodstock, Illinois. "Before the acquisition, Zimbra had only one purpose: To make a better product. Zimbra now has a different purpose, and that is to ensure Yahoo's agendas are fulfilled," Phillips said. Among his first tasks after getting hiredÂ six months ago was picking a new messaging platform for Other World. The Zimbra rollout was completed barely three weeks ago. He picked the Open Source Edition of the suite, which also comes in a commercial option called Network Edition. The news of the Yahoo deal left him aghast. "I am certain I was not the only IT decision maker who felt disgust and despair after reading about Yahoo's [planned] acquisition of Zimbra," Phillips said. Also deeply pessimistic is Dominic Ijichi, a Belfast-based Unix supercomputer administrator for a large bank, who in his spare time manages the Zimbra suite for a small finance company whose chairman is a friend of his. He predicts Yahoo will disassemble the suite and plug its pieces into Yahoo Mail. "I believe [Zimbra's suite] will be killed off as a separate product," he said. Jim Hutchinson, IT Manager at Richmond Systems in Olympia, Washington, is scratching his head over Yahoo's motivation. "What are they going to get for their $350 million?" he said. "I can't see how Zimbra fits into the way Yahoo makes money." In addition to downloadable, server-based versions of the suite meant to be installed in customers' premises, it is also available as SaaS (software as a service) from third-party hosting providers. Keepnet, a U.K. provider of hosted IT services, recently developed a new Zimbra-based hosted service, but the company isn't feeling too hot about it now, said director Kevin Dontenville. "We are disappointed that this acquisition throws many of the knowns out of the window. We need to decide whether to continue and risk losses that are significant to us or to change direction ... and find a new route forward for our new business," he said. Andy Armagost, systems administrator at Brigham Oil & Gas, in Austin, Texas, is also conflicted about the deal, which he believes would have given his company pause for reflection when deciding for Zimbra, but the suite is partially rolled out already at Brigham. While he shares many of his peers' concerns, he also sees a silver lining: That Zimbra will become more financially secure and able to access Yahoo resources. "I hope this deal works out well for all of us," he said. Those interviewed generally believe that the best-case scenario would be for Yahoo to interfere as little as possible with the Zimbra team and technology while providing a strong backup. Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra's co-founder and CEO, understands that acquisitions often worry customers but said the concerns are unwarranted in this case. "I already know my budget for the nextÂ five years, in which there is a continued commitment to growing this business," Dharmaraj said in an interview with IDG News Service. For starters, Yahoo will not dismantle Zimbra to boost Yahoo Mail. "If Yahoo wanted the people and the technology to bolster the Yahoo consumer mail group, $350 million is a lot to pay," Dharmaraj said. "We're going to be kept whole as a business unit, and we'll execute on our current strategy," he added. Likewise, it's illogical to think Yahoo will rip out its Yahoo Mail infrastructure, which supports about 250 million consumers, and swap in the Zimbra technology, designed mostly for businesses. "Those are paranoid fears," Dharmaraj said. Zimbra's team will help refine and improve portions of Yahoo Mail on a case-by-case basis. Currently, the only component slated for a Zimbra revamping is Yahoo Calendar, he said. Meanwhile, the downloadable, server-based versions of Zimbra's suite aren't going away, so those customers can rest easy, including those who have signed five-year agreements, he said. Specifically, Zimbra will maintain the same commitment for the open-source version of this downloadable suite, keeping its development on par with the commercial "Network" version. Zimbra, founded in 2003, has an installed base of about 9 million mailboxes in more than 100,000 organizations, although it deals directly with about 1,300 customers and channel partners, he said. Customers include Comcast and New York University. Its core strength is e-mail, and it has commonly been considered an alternative to Exchange, but the suite also includes a word processor and a spreadsheet application. These let users create, share, and collaboratively edit documents. With e-mail, calendar, contacts list, and office applications, it also competes against PC-based suites, such as Microsoft Office, and Web-hosted suites, such as Google's Google Apps. Dharmaraj said Zimbra will sell the suite directly as a hosted service, something for which it had previously relied on hosting partners. As with direct sales of the downloadable versions, Zimbra will sell the hosted suite at a premium over the prices it gives to hosting partners. Also unfounded are fears that Yahoo will force Zimbra to limit its compatibility with Yahoo competitors, he said. Yahoo realizes that a big draw of the Zimbra suite is precisely its open platform, which lets external developers create application mashups called "zimlets." The deal gives Zimbra a financial and resources boost as well as heightened brand credibility with potential enterprise customers that as a 100-employee startup it didn't have, he said. If anything, Zimbra will be able to step up its development efforts. Version 5.0 of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite is due in December, and version 5.5 and beyond will follow, he said. Finally, he said he and the other members of the Zimbra executive team are committed for the long haul. "Zimbra is our baby," he said. "The reason we made this deal is to grow Zimbra." Yahoo's Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice president of communications and communities, reiterated Dharmaraj's commitments and challenges the perception that Yahoo only knows how to support consumers. For example, Yahoo provides Web hosting and domain registration-related services to hundreds of thousands of companies, while its advertising business includes a vast network of marketers and publishers, he said. Moreover, it has long-standing partnerships with carriers like AT&T and British Telecom, he added. "Those are very large commitments we have made in our systems that aren't consumer-facing," Garlinghouse said in an interview. Regarding Yahoo's ability to support enterprise customers, he points towards the know-how involved in providing reliable performance at a massive scale for services like Yahoo Mail. "This is a natural extension of what we're incredibly good at with a company, in Zimbra, that also is best-of-breed. We bring the best of both worlds together," Garlinghouse said. Assurances and promises are all good, but concerned customers said the antidote to their misgivings will be concrete actions. "I have no interest in asking simple questions and listening to Yahoo's spin. Only time can answer any question I have," Other World's Phillips said.