Word from the TechCrunch conference in California is that Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) bought open source e-mail and calendar company Zimbra for $350 million. Zimbra has more than nine million paid mailboxes across 50+ countries making it "one of the fastest growing solutions in the business, education and service provider markets for messaging and collaboration."

The deal will allow Yahoo! to enter the business of onlne/offline desktop operations which has recently been attractive to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Office and Windows OS have dominated this market for years, but they are not open source, so the code cannot be used by outside developers to make related applications. The Microsoft products also tend to be expensive.

As the news becomes official, it leaves open the question of why Yahoo! is expanding into more businesses that do not have a proved business model when its core display ad model is in such great trouble.

Maybe new toys are more important than new revenue.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.