Zoho is arguably the ONLY global product to come out of India from ANY company, and its a sweet product. It gives mighty Google Apps a run for their money; and Zoho’s Creator is a path breaking innovative product.
So why is VentureWoods not talking more about Zoho? Is it because of lack of awareness of Zoho? Or is it because of lack of glamor due to being non VC funded?
Questions:
1. Have you used Zoho?
2. Will you consider using any of their products for daily work? Why? Why Not?
3. Do you think Zoho can take on Google Apps or is the Google brand too big and Google quality too good?
4. What is the marketing advise you would give Zoho to gain a fair share of the applications space?
Note: I have nothing to do with Zoho, don’t know anyone there, but do use their products and I think they are brilliant.
21 August: Techcrunch reports Zoho making their services available offline; and check out what poster no. 8 in that thread has to say: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/21/zoho-goes-offline-in-a-good-way/
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Zoho Viewer.Zoho Office suite ..Zoho Creator. Most of the times I have started using these tools just out of curiosuity and later came to like them so much that now i use them on a regular basis. Take their latest app Viewer for example .Its promoted as a tool to send attachments of any format without having to send huge attachements their by clogging inboxe of the recipient.
But the real killer is that you can upload attachmnet in upto 15 formats which can then be viewed in cool formqats like PDF xls etc.
You can use it a like simple PDF converter 🙂 Upload and file in any format and download it as PDF.
I think they are doing a really good job on the “Office as a Web Service” space,but howevr lack the exposure that Google has due to their sheer size and brand invisibilty in some countries.
I guess most of their users are early adapters or friends of friends of Techcrunch .
Areas where they can certainly improve are stop trying to behave like MS or yahoo. e.g they restrict file sizes to 5MB when these days file size shouldnt be concern.
Let the free users have ad supported or watermarked copies,while those who pay can pretty much use as much as they can.
I am sure a lot of organisations really need these kind of solutions,where they need not worry if their client has Adobe reader intsalled ti view the PDf they are mailing him.
Upendra
Seems like a decent product, but your words “the ONLY global product to come out of India from ANY company” seem to be misleading.
From the website “Zoho is an Office Productivity Suite from AdventNet Inc. Founded in 1996, AdventNet is headquartered in Pleasanton, CA with offices in North America, Europe and Asia. AdventNet focuses on building affordable software for businesses”
Clearly its an American company possibly with a development center in India. Your words would suit better if the company was headquarterd in India.
Where the product got conceived and engineers of which nationality worked on it, is meaningless these days and should not drive nationalistic pride.
Pitch to academia (students), small firms, R&D institutions.Since the aim is to increase usage and sustain it. Partner with websites and provide a platform on
top of various Zoho products
For all I know they might even be doing all these.
– my 2c
Zoho seems to have intentionally kept low profile in India, while they have been heavily advertising on the US websites like Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb and so on.
Meanwhile The Hindu BusinessLine has written a profile of the company here:
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/ew/2007/05/07/stories/2007050700050400.htm
OffTopic
“Zoho is arguably the ONLY global product to come out of India from ANY company”
In my opinion SlideShare http://slideshare.net is another great product to come out of India.