Loading ...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/
Here are the interviews I conducted with Zoho founding team:
On Zoho’s product suite: http://www.pluggd.in/2007/07/zoho-interview-raju-startups-indianhtml
On Entrepreneurship: http://www.pluggd.in/2007/08/interview-with-sridhar-vembu-founder-of-zoho-indian-startups
Before asking the qns like “have you used Zoho”, I believe the appropriate question should be “Have you used an online doc system? Have you felt the need for the same?” - Most of the Indian netizens aren’t using the product and these products aren’t meant for any specific geography.
-Ashish
ZOHO is very much loved by Arrington and team and have got considerable coverage on TechCrunch(even slideshare too). They have good unique products + they were early in the market though I don’t know the teams involved with the product, I am just getting the feeling that they got there basics right. By the way, I am happy with Google docs so far …
OK why doesn’t zoho also start a free email service? They are the web guys, so i’m sure can do all that gmail does and more. Don’t tell me there are already too many players. Recount how soon gmail rose to the top with yahoo, hotmail etc around.
As someone pointed out, it would be GREAT marketing tool for zoho.
I stand corrected, Zoho is not free.
Other parts of my post remain intact.
I think your statement about this being the ONLY global product to come out of India, is flat out not correct. While it is true that products are not India’s forte (and also that too many “projects” receive a “product” label), there are in fact several world class products to come out of India, and the list is too long for this post (both in software, telecom, and many other areas).
On Zoho, as an enterprise buyer, perhaps we are not the market (I was looking for a SaaS solution for one of our companies) but while Zoho is cute, usefull and nice, I doubt that it can address the requirements of companies that have a lot riding on their IT infrastructure. I would rather pay for a service (like salesforce.com) that use free.
Cheers
By 2020, Tourism in India could contribute Rs 8,50,000 crores to the GDP. (Source- WTTC).
I would like to initiate a discussion through this post on whether the funding of 5-6 online travel portals in India is the be-all of this mamoth Travel and Tourism industry in India.Is there still a place left for other travel players and if yes what could be their business models.And we can say “There is enough space at the top,come up”
Vikas Shah
vikaschandrashah@yahoo.com
i use Zoho CRM and absolutely love it.
however, i’m yet to convert from ms excel and powerpoint. MS Word was never a robust software, so it was easy to convert. but excel and powerpoint will take time.
i think Zoho is the way for startups.
having an offline package residing on u r desktop would increase user-base. i know its against the philosophy of office 2.0 or whatever u call it. but as a user, working in offline mode is an absolute must. thinfree has a desktop version at a price i guess. zoho can do something similar.
when do we expect an accounting package? invoices and pos can go straight from Zoho CRM into Accounting package.
Roj & Ram : Thanks. Please read the couple of blog posts I’d pointed out in the comment thread above. Will give you an idea of why it isn’t always “winner takes it all” in business & there’s room for smaller players like Zoho.
RYK : Zoho Mail’s in private beta now and we are striving hard to getting it out to the public.
I use zoho and am very happy with it.
In fact i feel they are much better than the google’s comparable product on the given date.
Coming to they fighting it out with google, it’s a david vs goliath.
Product feature wise I guess they are doing the things right.
Marketing!! What are we doing now, WOM i feel has helped them a lot. It may be time to scale it up a bit.