Showing posts with label Zoho. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zoho. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Zoho

Image representing Zoho as depicted in CrunchBaseImage via CrunchBase


Zoho is an upstart, but it is an upstart with major advantages. How about a laser focus and a great slew of products? And I admire their decision to not sell out to Salesforce.com.

What is holding it back is its not wanting to take venture capital money, and have no obvious ambitions to go IPO at some point. Those are mistakes. You can stay small and private and cozy and beautiful, or you can go big. I think Zoho should aim to go big. Zoho has to have IPO ambitions.

Microsoft is a giant but its major revenue sources are so foreign to what Zoho does that you could argue Microsoft is almost in a different industry altogether. Google is more in the cloud, but search is that company's strength and weakness. It is a good thing Zoho products integrate seamlessly with Google office apps. That way you get the advantages of Google being big and Zoho being nimble and superior.

Zoho's competition is not with Microsoft or even Google, but itself. It has to have IPO ambitions. That lack of ambition was not something given to it by either Google or Microsoft but itself.

Wall Street Journal: Blogs: Digits: QandA: Upstart Takes on Google, Microsoft in the Cloud
Competing against industry giants can be a brutal ordeal. Just ask RC Cola, which took on Coke and Pepsi. ..... For Zoho, a small company that competes with Google and Microsoft in the market for Web-based software, the strategy for surviving alongside huge rivals has been to target gaps in their products. Zoho now offers nearly 30 free and fee-based tools in the cloud: from wikis, word processing and spreadsheets to customer-relationship management, invoicing, and project management. ..... Zoho’s 3 million registered users ..... A small percentage pay subscription fees, enabling Zoho to quietly build a profitable niche, without PR or advertising. ...... founded in 1996 ..... headquarters in Chennai, India, and Pleasanton, Calif., now has 1,100 employees, nearly 1,000 of whom work in India...... has long refused to take venture capital funding and has rejected numerous acquisition offers. ...... founder and CEO, Sridhar Vembu ..... Google’s product suite is limited to Mail & Office suite, while Zoho has a much broader product suite targeted at small and mid-sized businesses. We integrate well with everyone, including with Google Apps. ....... Microsoft has formidable technology resources, but faces the economic challenge of transitioning their business model to the cloud ....... earn the trust of consumers through actual daily execution, not just talk ..... why we focus on small and mid-sized companies first, because they tend to have fewer inhibitions about trying something new. ....... we have stated a preference to be independent and private, so that we can keep our vibrant engineering and customer-support focused culture. We tend not to spend a lot of money in sales and marketing. This allows us to invest in engineering, and come up with interesting new products. ....... Google’s philosophy is to offer a minimalist interface, while Zoho provides a much richer suite in terms of depth of functionality, breadth of applications and richness of the interface. We believe business users want and need a lot more than what Google offers. At the same time, recognizing the immense reach Google has, Zoho has chosen to partner with them, so that customers can mix and match Google Apps with various apps from Zoho. ..... Over the next three years, you will see cloud offerings really mature in terms of features and functions, and become feature rich, overtaking desktop offerings in many areas. As feature parity is reached, market adoption will explode. Just as mobile phones overtook wired phones in terms of features, functions and of course usage over the past 10 years, cloud software will overtake installed software over the next 10. The reason in both cases is the sheer speed of technology evolution. .....Financial investors necessarily need exit or liquidity, while our focus is to stay in business for the long haul. We prefer to sacrifice near-term growth in favor of keeping our company healthy and vibrant for the long term, which is not something an exit-focused investor would like to see.

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News: July 27

Zoho's Raju VegesnaImage by Thomas Hawk via Flickr
Digits

Q&A: WikiLeaks and the Future of Whistleblowing
Smartphone Help for Typhoon Alerts
Going for Cheap: India's $35 Computer
Hong Kong Goes 'Crazy' as iPad Launches
AT&T on Its Network, iPad Usage and the End of Unlimited Data
Baidu Advances on China Mobile Search
Digits Live Show: Welcome to the Age of WikiLeaks
Q&A: Upstart Takes on Google, Microsoft in the Cloud
App Watch: A Photo Tour of Your Favorite Foods
New TV Tech Could Be Boon for Venture-Backed Chip Companies
If You Tweet, Japan Will Come
Tech Tweets of the Week: Facebook, Flipboard and Phones
Ten Things We Learned From Tech Earnings Season

Bits

What We’re Reading: Technology Obsession
Meet Google’s Space Commander
Ask.com Reverts to Its Q.& A. Origins
Citi Discovers Security Flaw in iPhone Application
Bringing Data Mining Into the Mainstream
What’s for Sale on the Bug Market?
Part I: Answers to Questions About Internet Privacy
What We’re Reading: Femme Fatales
Dell’s Trouble Kicking the Intel Habit
What’s Behind the White iPhone 4 Delays?
Microsoft Grabs Hold of ARM
Diane Sawyer Interviews Mark Zuckerberg
What We’re Reading: Flipboard
Apple’s Web Browser Allows Sites to Collect Personal Information

TechCrunch

Apple’s Magic Trackpad Signals The End Of The Mouse Era
Not Only Is Google Places Going After Yelp, They're Doing So With Yelp's Content
Apple's Innovative New... Battery Charger?
37signals Buys Campfire iPhone App Ember
Dude-Centric Video Network Break Media Moves Into 3D Programming
Stieg Larsson Is The First Author To Reach One Million Books Sold On The Amazon Kindle Store
Yahoo: comScore Underreported Our U.S. Page Views By 1 Billion Last June
Apple On The Defensive: Jailbreaking Your iPhone May Be legal But It’ll Still Void Your Warranty
Apple Outs A 27-inch, 16:9 Cinema Display
VoilĂ ! Apple’s Magic Trackpad Appears. Multi-Touch On Any Mac For $69
LearnVest Launches Financial Bootcamp Programs To Keep Women Fiscally Fit
Yahoo Japan To Use Google Search (And Not Bing) In The Future
Seesmic Web Adds Desktop App-Like Abilities, Facebook And LinkedIn Support
Listiki Offers A Smart Way Of Gathering Opinion Through Crowdsourced Lists
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