Virtual Piecework
Trolling the Web for Free Labor, Software Upstarts Are New Force.
In late 2003, at a coffee shop in Palo Alto, Calif., three friends weary of work at big Silicon Valley companies decided to create an email program. In a weekend they cobbled together a simple prototype. They combed the Web for free software, and in a few months they had assembled more than 40 blocks of free programming into a basic system. They named it Zimbra, after a Talking Heads song, posted it online and invited strangers to offer suggestions. (...)
By the spring of 2004, the trio had raised $4 million in seed money. They spent it sparingly, housing their modest contingent of 10 employees in a rented Silicon Valley office that leaked when it rained. Eventually they raised a total of $30.5 million in venture funding.
In August 2005, in what has become a rite of passage for open-source software, Zimbra posted a prototype of its software on the Web and invited suggestions. They bought sponsored links on Google that would point to Zimbra when people searched for key phrases, such as “open source email.” And they set up online forums on the Zimbra for contributors to meet and exchange ideas. (...)
The three bet that businesses would want to pay for an official version that had a full set of features, was free of major bugs and that Zimbra would support. In February 2006, Zimbra’s Web site offered a link to buy the “Zimbra Collaboration Suite 3.0.” The basic price of $28 a year per user includes support and updates, but the cost can be lower, depending on the order. For Exchange, by comparison, a company with 100 users would pay $39 a user each year for the first three years, after which the price falls to $17 a year per user. In April, Huntsville Hospital in Huntsville, Ala., put 8,000 employees on Zimbra. Interim HealthCare Inc., a home-health-care provider in Sunrise, Fla., paid Zimbra $15,000, or about $12.50 per user, to set up 1,200 nurses with the official version. (...)
by Roberta A. Guth, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 13 2006
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