Depends what Yahoo! bought Zimbra for, really.<p>You may have noticed that Yahoo! has quite a big internal mail platform... perhaps they actually wanted the technology expertise and the people more than the enterprise business. Perhaps they already extracted that value.<p>Disclaimer: I work for Y! but not for mail and I have no insight into mail at all. Also these opinions are my own and not Y!'s.
From a certain perspective, the startup complex is and extremely bizarre value creation and destruction machine. You have acquisitions like this funding (in the sense that founders and investors do this in order to achieve an acquisition like this) scores of startups who are creating real value come into being. The "successful" ones that get acquired are actually destroyed. Maybe there is some opaque value (expertise acquisition) passed to the buyer, but overall the value seems to be destroyed.<p>The side effect though is value created via all the other startups that get founded.