The announcement of the Private Alpha of Zoho Notebook during the DEMO ‘07 had a high impact among bloggers and journalists alike. Here’s some choicest quotes from around the net :
Harry McCracken at PC World :
One of the most impressive th…

Zoho keeps on it list growing on. The latest addition to the list is Zoho Notebook. TechCrunch has a detailed coverage on the Notebook. Zoho team is lead by young and enthuasitic people. They are improving pretty weel in the type of products they are …

We are listening and you’ll see the progress in the coming weeks and months. Thanks for the feedback.

Example: that freeware Star-Trek font you are using. I think it comes with the GIMP. It really kills your demo.

To that guy who posted about sockets and stuff - get a clue, loser. So you’ve read W. Richard Stevens. That doesn’t make you an engineer. There is far more engineering in some of the things that Zoho has done than in fiddling with socket code. The work involved in this Zoho stuff is pretty impressive, I have to admit, and I’m a real engineer. You are just some dweeb. So get a clue, please. Even if Zoho crashes and burns and nobody uses it - the work they’ve done deserves respect.

Fact is, Zoho is the best online office application, period. It’s never going to fully replace a full installation of office. But it is incredibly useful if you can’t edit your documents on your own machine or if you need to do something quickly.

Jonathan,
Thank you for coming to our aid - I really appreciate it. Yes, it is sometimes hard to realize that this whole thing is so new - I came across an article dated November 2005, speculating about online productivity applications, and it didn’t mention any of us (though ThinkFree was already there, Zoho barely existed & Google hadn’t made any acquisition yet) and that is when it occurred to me that almost all the evolution in this space happened just in the past year, yet it feels such a long time. As usually happens, expectations get ahead of reality and we do need a reality check once in a while. We need the skeptics to keep us honest, so I try not to take it too personally …

The whole Web 2.0 world is predicated on yes to some extent copying what functionality users have on the desktop. We have to do that otherwise people won’t use the darn thing. But, putting it online opens some pretty great opportunities for collaboration and integration with other web services, not to mention ubiquitous access.

Ok, so Microsoft is winning right now, but how did they take over from IBM? By building similar functionality to what people already had, but changing the platform. That is what us Web 2.0 companies are doing now. I am not saying that any of us are going to overtake MS Office any time soon.

But, as Sridhar says give it some time. It is still very early in the game, although with all the hype surrounding Web 2.0 it seems like it has been around forever. Web 2.0 has a lot of potential but the hype pushes expectations way out there. Given the time, however, I think we can meet those expectations.

I for one am very interested in seeing what Zoho Notebooks can do.

Understand one thing … the world is not usa and usa is not the world.

With broadband connectivity becoming more pervasive over the coming years and its level of penetration increasing more and more in all countries online software suites will have a very important role to play.

Zoho has a good start and it has done a fantastic job in bringing the apps online. Yes google has tried and so has microsoft but from a features pov Zoho beats the crap outta them.

As for using the correct programming language it depends on what you are programming. If the world goes your way then probably it will be still trying to program using web apps with Cobol and the farthest we might have reached with a browser would be same as lynx.

But anyway I am guessing your skillsets ends with C or probably Cobol and being a dinosaur you are probably also unemployed or at the least feeling very very insecure because of the hundreds and thousands of asian engineers who can do much better than you. So my dear friend the only advise I can give you is to see things in the correct context and try to learn something that you obviously dont understand.

You’re right I don’t ‘dev’, but I do use….alot!

I don’t see how going backwards is innovative.

oh yeah and firefox sucks; but you haven’t heard cause you don’t dev.

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.......441922.37

How shortsighted some people can be. Altjhough ‘A’ maye have won (or more accurately be in the lead), some people obviiously can’t acknowledge how more innovative smaller players stimulate the ‘leaders’ to innovate (kind of) themselves and improve (kind of) their product. Anyone around here use that loser of a browser called Firefox.

This isn’t an attack - I think you have a solid platform to create something awesome, you just really need to pull your finger out and become more enthusiastic and passionate about your UI.

Right now it’s clear from the multitude of applications you have that your focus is on quantity. I don’t know, perhaps I’m being presumptuous and I’m sure you’ve probably thought about this a lot more than I have, but as a bystander, I personally think whatever marginal utility the alpha-adopters gain from you creating yet another addition to the Zoho suite is a small price to pay for you cooling down and giving the whole setup a big kick up the backside in the UI and UE area which will benefit all your users directly.

I like how you throw out the race card when you can’t come up with any logical way to defend against sucking bad.

oh yeah, I’m not envious, and never will be. I think its totally stupid to rewrite/remake the wheel. Microsoft won, Open Office tried, Google is trying, your trying. The world don’t care. Its done, that war is over. M$ won it in 98, probably before that. It just programmers tooling with themselves showing their AJAX skills. Its called a circlejerk.

So what are you guys gonna create a scripting language like visual basic so I can program my online spreadsheet?

Go Zoho Go!! Beat the crap out of them

Your comment…
>>A good analogy to Zoho Notebook is Microsoft OneNote, a desktop >>application. But with sharing and versioning

…is not true.

OneNote has sharing and versioning capabilities.

Also it is tightly married into the entire office suite. So I can push pages via email, pull calendar events into OneNote for quick meeting notes, has handwriting recognition…

johnlknight,
Your point on improving existing services is well taken. I apologize for the occasional frustrations you have had. We won’t have a service up and let it gather dust (we will withdraw it if we weren’t committed to it). We put out an update about once every month on each Zoho service.
We are working on improving each of the Zoho services, and Writer is particularly important, being the first of the office productivity suite we put out. Given how much is expected from a word processor (or spreadsheet or presentation or …) it just takes time.

yongfook,
I grant that UI consistency is important, and Zoho still has to get this right. But part of what we are learning is what kind of UI works best in such online applications, through experimentation. Same way, Zoho services could evolve by being made features of other services, or features could be separated out as stand-alone services, based on the experience we are gathering. People have commented, for example, on the broad similarity of goals between Wiki and Notebook on the one hand, and Wiki and Writer on the other.

By the way, we don’t “outsource” development - the parent company AdventNet was one of the earliest software product companies based out of India - our R&D started in 1996.

I get what Zoho are trying to achieve, and it’s very noble, but it’s extremely apparent that the development (or at least, design) process within Zoho is fragmented at best and chaotic at worst.

I think once Zoho hires a UI guru and takes some responsibility for the quality of work that their teams are churning out, they will be a force to be reckoned with.

How simple that is to do within their current hierarchy of this network of outsourced developers remains to be seen.

To cite one example: there is still no search function for ZOHO writer. This is incredible!

That said, it is still the best online app, but google docs is now fast catching up, especially as they’ve just added seamless GMAIL opening of word docs through GDocs. Although I can’t imagine google docs ever building a Word interface, since they (google) want to keep you off the desktop and in the web. But again, although the word plug-in is very good, it too has some very annoying bugs that I’ve written about in the ZOHO forum.

I’m mainly referring to ZOHO writer.

>>There is no fundamental reason these applications are slow
except for time and distance. my labtop has the processing power of a server, and no distance, or very little, is needed for Word to read the data from disk…you even admitted it in your response to me:

>> All these problems are all solvable -
>> with fine tuning of code,

I’m an engineer by trade and create awesome state of the art distributed system to handle mass loads…don’t bullshit me with the ‘fine tuning’ argument. I betcha your system isn’t even written in ‘C’ and you’re not at the socket level parsing that HTTP message….and you wanna talk about speed and fine tuning. Lets just say, If you can’t hit the problem straight on with the idea of speed as your first concern, you don’t have a chance.

>>more servers,
yeah, I see you have lots of experience scaling. You could’ve at least mentioned breaking up the database of using some super fast network storage system in the backend…but if your first answer is throwing ‘big iron’ at it, then your toast for any audience of significance.

>>better understanding of usage patterns and so on.
This is like fine tuning…guess work. You can’t be guessing when your customers are complaining. Everything should be as fast as possible. It should matter what order I press then buttons in for it to be fast.

>>Give it some time
why? I have office today, 2003 and 2007…what you got?

so…did you guys write your own servers in ‘C’ ? do you have anyone on your team who even knows ‘C’ cause if you can’t engineer at that level and think AJAX will save you; well, good luck.

but but…its two point ohhh