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The $350 million cash price tag Yahoo will pay for email software firm Zimbra makes the mind reel. Especially since Yahoo just got finished with a major update for its Mail product. Barely a month ago, Yahoo Mail left beta. The product once known as Oddpost before its acquisition by Yahoo in 2004 has features to match desktop email clients, if not their speed. Yahoo Mail is very good.

The official word yielded this contradictory gem from Brad Garlinghouse on Yahoo's official blog:

Zimbra is a global leader in email and collaboration software and its services are aimed at universities, businesses, and ISPs worldwide, which is a major driver of what made the company so attractive to us. We’re constantly being approached by these entities for our expertise in email and communications.

If those entities are approaching Yahoo, why are they using Zimbra? If those entities are happy with Zimbra, why are they approaching Yahoo? Are there really conversations along the lines of, "We're thrilled with Zimbra, but we're ready to change," taking place?

Valleywag editor Owen Wilson suggested the deal was less about email and calendaring, and more about the people Zimbra has in its ranks:

Zimbra's management team is extremely high-powered for a startup its size, and heavily weighted in the very tech expertise that Yahoo lacks in its battle against Google.

My bet: Zimbra president and CTO Scott Dietzen fills Yahoo's currently empty CTO slot, while Zimbra CEO Satish Dharmaraj might squeeze out the widely disliked Marco Boerries, who currently oversees Yahoo's mobile efforts.

$350 million to bring two executives onto the Yahoo payroll, and access to a trio of markets that have been using Zimbra, probably in open source form to keep costs down, is a mind-boggling proposition.

But we can't think of another one that makes sense, unless Yahoo plans to gut their Mail product and stuff in Zimbra's code to improve its performance, and its appeal to third-party 'Zimlet' developers.