Zimbra just released v5.0.  For those of you that don’t know Zimbra, it’s a Microsoft Exchange / Outlook competitor that Yahoo bought last year for $350m.  While v5.0 looks nifty, I was thinking about the release notice to Zimbra customers for Zimbra v6.0, which I assume will be released after Microsoft completes their conquest acquisition of Yahoo (for those of you that live under a rock in a cave, Microsoft made an offer to acquire Yahoo last Friday for $45b.)

Following is an approximation of what I expect a Zimbra customer to receive regarding an upgrade.

Some date, 2010

Dear Microsoft Zimbra Customer:

The latest release of Zimbra (Zimbra 6.0) has been released to manufacturing today and will be available within 60 days.  As part of this release, we are renaming Zimbra 6.0 to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.  The upgrade will be automatically delivered as part of your Zimbra license (sublicensed under the Microsoft Live Enterprise Support Service.)

If you are running the Zimbra desktop client, it will automatically be deleted and upgraded to Microsoft Outlook. If you are running the Zimbra Windows Mobile client, it will automatically be deleted and upgraded to Windows Mobile Mail.  If you are running any of the other Zimbra clients, including ones for Palm, Symbian, iPhone, or Blackberry, they will simply stop working and you will need to upgrade to a Windows Mobile Device.

Please back up your data as we can not assure you that it will be transferred.

One of the great things about startups is that you get to "start from scratch" and create whatever culture you want.  You don’t get handed a 275 page how to act like a BigCo employee manual on your first day of work immediately prior to your two week orientation at a conference center in Iowa City.

My friends at Lijit have a great sense of humor which is driven top down by the CEO Todd Vernon.  I was inspired to post this after waking up to my twitters and seeing that Ari Newman had twittered that Lijit wins for best maint. page.

One of Lijit’s publisher evangelists, Tara Anderson, has a great series up on her blog where she profiles each Lijit employee.  Here is a photo of me hugging one of my favorite cactuses (or is it cacti?)

And then there is the official Lijit Rock Band – Hamswords.

Remember – it’s your company.  Laugh a little.

There is a magic spot on Highway 36 between Boulder and Louisville where 99.4% of all cell phone calls drop.  While on a call tonight, the person I was talking to went through this magic spot.  Our call dropped.

I called him back 30 seconds later.  We continued our call after having a chuckle about the inevitability of a dropped cell phone call at that particular spot on 36.

My friend suggested that it is further evidence of the unique cosmic forces around here.  We are found of saying that Boulder is 25 square miles surrounded by reality.  We concluded that there is a wormhole on 36 that one goes through during the transition from Louisville to Boulder.  This is the only explanation that we could come up for the reason that the mega-amazing-cell-phone companies can’t figure out how to do a handoff from one cell to the next at this particular spot in the universe.

I have been a hardcore Outlook user for a long time.  I grimaced with empathy as I read through Stan James 67 Reasons That Outlook Sucks.  If you are having a frustrating Outlook day, Stan’s rant will make you feel better.

Brilliant strategic move by Microsoft today – offering a price for Yahoo that is both well above the market clearing price and done out in the open.  Microsoft’s Letter to Yahoo is great.  It coincides with Terry Semel leaving the Yahoo board, which is a small irony.

In other news, Microsoft is now the rumored buyer of the 432-acre Sun (Storagetek) campus just outside of Boulder.  And apparently the bloom is finally coming off of the Google rose.

I love this industry.  It is so endlessly entertaining.  I don’t have to watch the E! Channel or read People Magazine anymore to get my daily dose of drama.

I got the following note from a friend at a big software company that was founded in the mid-1990’s.

Having worked at the big companies it has always amazed me the energy that goes into creating the stack of patents.  We have lawyers who we sit down with to go over new products and releases and they generate 10s or 100s of patent filings out of which a few actual patents will end up being granted in a few years.   I have around 40 patents for what I would consider innovative work but 99% of them are just for the things anyone would have to do in order to solve the actual problem.

I find this a disgusting waste of time and energy that runs counter to the notion that patents are supposed to be used to "help promote innovation."

Another practice that I find abhorrent is the BigCo "pay for patent application" approach where BigCo pays engineers a bonus (typical $1,000 to $5,000) for each patent filing.  Not for the patents, but for the patent filing.  This obviously encourages engineers to waste a bunch of their time not innovating but instead cranking out a bunch of stupid patent filings that clog the system.

I think this should be illegal.  It’s a complete abuse of the original intent of the patent system.  At the minimum, the patent filing should have to disclose whether any fee beyond normal compensation was paid to the "inventor."  Maybe we can get the 409A and 157 accounting weenies on this – that’d slow things down.

I get questions like the following on a regular basis: "I like reading your blog, and I’m amazed that you can get involved with so many things simultaneously and manage to get great results while living a balanced life. Could you talk a little about your time management techniques, and how do you prioritize your daily activities?  I’m sure many readers would appreciate a post on these."

I sat down to write a long answer to this and realized that there is a whole category of self help books on this that takes up a ridiculous amount of floor space at Borders.  I decided that rather than answer this in a blog post, I’d write another crappy time management book.

Not really.  I don’t have time for that.  Nor do I have any interest. 

Whenever I’ve written on work-life balance, I get lots of compliments and thank you emails.  I also know that some of the best blogging I’ve done are series like the term sheet series I wrote several years ago.

So – to try to answer this question, I’m going to start a work-life balance series.  I’ll periodically blog about how I get things done, keep my sanity, and enjoy almost every minute of life.  Some of it will be tools I use, some will be my philosophy, and some will just be me blathering on about something.  Hopefully some of it will be helpful.

For the wiseasses out there, I know that your answer #1 will be "stop reading blogs – they are a waste of your time."  But – I don’t buy this – I learn an enormous amount from the blogs I read (in my own special way which I’ll describe at some point soon.)  Read on – maybe you’ll learn something too.