Its interesting to see Google try and accomplish the same goals (marketshare in the online office space) through much smaller acquisitions (writely, zenter).
Implicit suggestion here: That Yahoo's wasting their money.
Zimbra's a very mature product that's already making money. The company's also reasonably old. Compare that to Writely and Zenter, which were both purchased before large-scale release and while the companies were brand new. I think this is probably a pretty good buy for Yahoo.
At the first Startup School in Boston someone mentioned that Yahoo Store had about 235,000 stores and $5 billion/year in store revenue, if I'm remembering correctly.
The smallest available monthly fee(1) is currently $40 and the smallest transaction fee is 0.75% thus their annual revenue must be greater than (235000 x 40)+($5 billion x 0.75%)=$46.9 million. I'm guessing it's rather a bit more than that.
Now I'm curious about this. They list 71,245 under "shop by store."(1) However, I think this number may be low.
Are inactive stores listed in that directory? I'm sure Yahoo is billing for more than a few stores which never got beyond intentions.(2) We set up a test store a few hours ago "filmat16.com."(3) It's not been published yet so there's nothing there. It's also not listed in the directory by name (although this may be a function of time.)
If the $5b sales figure is correct (and I wish I could remember the original source of those numbers) and we use the 71,245 store count that's $70,180 per store/year. Reasonable?
Also my original estimate didn't take into account the (currently) $50 setup fee or fees for credit card processing (outsourced, but surely they make a bit from that), DNS fees, advertising revenue, etc.
In any case I think Yahoo has made rather a lot of money from their purchase of Viaweb - which is good for people creating startups which might be bought by Yahoo etc.
2) If that number is in any way related to the percentage of people who don't send back rebate forms it could be huge.
3) Not a completely for testing purposes; we're going to sell some 16mm films that have been sitting around in a closet for years. http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html
Zimbra's a very mature product that's already making money. The company's also reasonably old. Compare that to Writely and Zenter, which were both purchased before large-scale release and while the companies were brand new. I think this is probably a pretty good buy for Yahoo.