
Zoho: The Little Engine That Could (Take on Both Microsoft and Google) - terpua
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zoho_the_little_engine_that_could.php
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jasonlbaptiste
What i respect:

a) Zoho's recruitment of smart young hackers in India. They don't look at
their degrees, but their skill + tenacity b) Not taking VC money. Granted
AdventNet gave them a great start. c) They've built a here to stay business.
What I don't respect: a) They basically ripped sugarcrm off with VTiger and
called it "REAL open source". Last I checked sugar got past that debate with
GPL3, plus zoho relabels vtiger as zohocrm with a new skin b) Their products
are soulless and lack innovation. They are basically ms products + ajax with a
shitty ui.

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sridharvembu
Jason, thanks for the complement and the criticism. To clarify a couple of
points: Zoho CRM has _nothing_ do with SugarCRM code. It is entirely written
in Java - just as all the rest of the Zoho suite, in fact, it shares the same
underlying Java distributed framework with the rest of Zoho.

vtiger has a clean open source license, same as Firefox (MPL) - the entire
product is available on that license - and vtiger offered it on exactly equal
terms to everyone, including SugarCRM. What is "ripping off" about that?
SugarCRM basically has been trying to have it both ways, using the word open
source liberally, but not quite living up to it. About half the product they
offer is not open source at all. They basically have abused open source as a
marketing term. vtiger called them on it. vtiger is doing well - it is now a
separate stand-alone company, which was spun out a while ago.

As for our "soulless" UI, I suppose the marketplace will judge. We do have a
lot of very happy customers - otherwise we won't be in business. On
innovation, have you looked at Zoho Creator?

On the corporate side, there is only a single entity: AdventNet, which itself
is a bootstrapped, organically grown company. We just have been around long
enough (12 years) to afford to do things like Zoho.

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unalone
I can't argue about the ripping off business: I am not nearly experienced
enough with your history to argue that.

What I CAN argue is the user interface, because that's something I've got
experience with. Yours is awful. You essentially emulate an old version of
Office, which had a fairly terrible interface to begin with. It works because
you can modify the toolbar to work with it, to add on. Your products look like
Office with all the toolbars enabled. There is no acknowledgement that certain
buttons are used more than others, no acknowledgement that such a thing as
"user flow" exists. It's unoriginal and it is worse than the original design.
This is not usable.

Your aesthetic is questionable. Brown and white in Writer is not pretty by any
means. The fact that your UI changes with every product means that you lack
consistency. Furthermore, in Safari there is severe clipping whenever rounded
corners are involved. It looks about as pretty as a bad student project.

Google understands that the Internet has different requirements, a different
medium than desktop apps. Their products are lighter than Office, not just in
terms of features but in terms of aesthetic. They don't try and fail to
emulate Office. They offer one that's more optimized for the Internet. With
yours, I'm seeing vast increases in disk usage. That's poorly done.

Of course you have customers. You have a wide set of applications, and a lot
of people will use anything that has a wide featureset without design. That
doesn't mean you won't get criticism. Many people despair of the fact that
there's so much attention on featureset and so little attention on good
design. It's the 37signals crowd, I guess you could say. And that crowd looks
down on Zoho as a symbol of what's wrong with web design right now.

I mean, don't get me wrong. Good luck with your site: you certainly do have a
product that appeals to a particular market. I just wish you guys would put a
little more effort into making something that looks and feels beautiful.

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sridharvembu
Point taken. Design is hard, great design is harder. To contrast with
37Signals, we don't believe, and haven't believed in less is more. As Joel
Spolsky has said, nothing sells software better than new features. We are
working on new interfaces that will expose the feature set better.

Safari isn't supported yet. We will eventually support it, but haven't gotten
around to it yet.

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unalone
Well, good luck. I don't agree with your philosophy, but there are always
people that will.

------
burp
When daggers are pointed at innocent hearts, and muskets are ready to fire ...

