While Live Documents Yaps, Zoho Delivers

November 26th, 2007 at 2:31 am

So where does this put ZOHO in the scheme of things will it be a rival to google docs is that even possible. I dont know but would like to know what you guys think.

johnny

November 26th, 2007 at 3:37 am

Wouldn’t buying Zoho when their suite has dependencies on Google’s gears be counter culture for yahoo?

November 26th, 2007 at 3:43 am

I have to say, i’ve seen so many types of apps like this, but does anybody really have a need? I think more start-up companies need to ask themselves the “so what?” question a bit more.

November 26th, 2007 at 5:07 am

I stick with gDocs over Zoho because I mainly use OpenOffice and there is a plugin to upload documents directly from OO.org into gDocs. The Zoho plugin is for MS Office only. While that would work for me on one computer, on 3 others (including my Ubuntu laptop) it does not.

Might seem a silly reason, but my online needs are strictly for collaboration and content approval. The formatting options of gDocs might be sparse but sparse is all I really need.

November 26th, 2007 at 5:10 am

@Rahim

Yahoo would not think twice about the Gears issue IMHO.

Selling to Yahoo would kill Zoho has the Yahooligans seem to lay an egg with nearly everything that they do.

I would be more concerned with the overload of graphical ads that Yahoo would no doubt heap on Zoho. The average internet user doesn’t mind the slow load times of Yahoo Mail but those with any sense at all know that much of that slowdown is waiting for ads to load. No thanks.

November 26th, 2007 at 5:13 am

Zoho is good stuff and relatively innovative (at least dare to try out new toys), though their overly-too-many choices are intimidating and in fact quite confusing, and my limited experience with their products/service was: not solid enough..

Would Yahoo ever want to buy them? HIGHLY doubtful, but never say never… really depends on the market and what their competitors do, imho… well, yhoo’s a company that at least had the track record to pay billions for toys like geocities… until they suddenly became recently known to be some kind of peanut butter sort of thing.. /ac.

November 26th, 2007 at 5:40 am

With Microsoft facing the huge dilemma of placing some or all of their O/S Office Suites online, perhaps they might consider buying Zoho - and move it onto their own Silverlight Platform.

With Microsoft acquiring Zoho, they could then look at ways of slowly integrating parts of their successful O/S Office Suites as add-ons to Zoho’s full office range, to create a Zoho/Microsoft online Office Suite hybrid.

So far there is not enough evidence to suggest that the future of O/S Office Suites must be available free online and funded by Advertising Revenues.
Why does Microsoft have to look at ways of sacrificing their O/S Office Suites Cash Cow, because the new Web 2.0 guru’s point to the clouds in the sky as the future of Office Suites.

Of course there will be a need in the future for cloud based Office Suites, but that still doesn’t mean that there is no future for current PC based Office versions.
With a possible acquisition of Zoho, Microsoft would have the best of both world’s, by offering all of their big business users the benefits of using O/S Office Suites both on the PC or through a Web Browser.

Why should Microsoft fix something that is not broke.
If Microsoft’s investment in Facebook is a strategic experiment, then they could not go wrong in doing the same thing with a great proven Company like Zoho.

November 26th, 2007 at 6:25 am

“Adobe has throw its hat in…”

Past participle…

November 26th, 2007 at 6:29 am

IHMO if Live-Documents is really using Flash (or equiv.) well, then it will make a great product.. see what box.net and meebo can do these days and gaining real tractions.. Ajax alone isn’t enough, gDocs and Zoho, while good, are not enough, and the this new ajax Yahoo Mail still sucks, big time.. can’t do anything without waiting a long minute for it to load up.. same for Zimbra.. Silverlight is likely to sort all these problems out.. /ac.

November 26th, 2007 at 6:39 am

Lame Lame Lame. Word and office, the latest releases are great!

November 26th, 2007 at 7:15 am

I know design is subjective and I truly believe that zoho is a leader in using technology to build some of the first true “web applications”…but…..

Is it just me or are there others that find it hard to take Zoho serious with such a poor logo and site design?

remember…I know design is subjective…so maybe its just me….

November 26th, 2007 at 7:29 am

I grew up visionary.

I can see yahoo acquires Zoho. Shares jump up $40 a share or even higher because they could compete google docs, webex, and facebook new wysiwyg.

I saw Microsoft, facebook and yahoo will bully attack Google. Google got a lot of enemies and even startup enemies.

Google tried to buy new operating system. Many startup os guys say “NO” they don’t want to give out secret to google.

November 26th, 2007 at 7:38 am

Online office is a dumb idea to begin with. Microsoft Office is not going to go away.

November 26th, 2007 at 7:57 am

What a shock! A glowing review for a Techcrunch advertiser. It might be nice if you actually disclosed that during posts for your customers. It just seems wrong not to.

November 26th, 2007 at 8:13 am

I totally agree with Eric, you should tell people that in your post. I think there is a lack of impartiality going on in Techcruch.

Cheers

November 26th, 2007 at 8:32 am

@rodrigo and eric,

If I am right, Arrington used to let people know that in his posts on Zoho. At least I recall one now. You both would have known that if you are a regular techcrunch reader.

November 26th, 2007 at 8:38 am

@23, interesting notion.. it might jump up past $40 a share, but definitely not because of acquiring zoho, if they ever do (ie., they might)..

@30, what’s the value to the big boys.. they buy one company and suddently found that they have 12 or 20 products to play with but only 1 or 2 really useful..

in general, very interesting to see so many posts “curious” about why not yhoo et al acquiring zoho.. i’d wonder, have you ever gone through acquisition deals before… and what it takes… (and the first question from the acquirer is likely to be, who’s your vc backing you up? no vc? no deal..) — in a way, just kidding.. but then, quite often true..

in other words, having products per se not enough.. get a vc or two and let them pitch your company to the deep pockets.. it’s their game, /ac.

November 26th, 2007 at 9:21 am

One question, is it purely for home/student users ? corporate users may need some kind of automation build to interface with other apps. For many, Excel or Word is just one piece of block - not full picture. Is this presented as full picture ?

With all the features they claim to have, do they have any APIs so we can interface this information in and out of it ?

November 26th, 2007 at 12:41 pm

How to get acquire by Yahoo.
Use letter “A, H, O, X, Y, r, c, l, k, i, f, b, s, t” mix around.

How to get acquire by google.
Use letter, “J, D, O, Y, B, p, d, u, a, t, z, f, p, g ” mix around.

How to get Microsoft invest and get MS armies.
Use letter, “F, V, O, b c, a, e, l, i,k, …, …, … “mix around.

November 26th, 2007 at 4:14 pm

#38 Yeah, Google Docs has less feature but is MUCH more reliable.

Both office suite still miss an integrated macro language, something like the useful iMacros Firefox extension offers. I use iMacros to automate Google Docs, but there are still a few functions it does not support, such as filling out spreadsheet cells.

November 26th, 2007 at 5:29 pm

@36 - Yahoo should buy zoho — did Zoho start with “ho”??

@40 - i encountered those database-connectivity error kind of text error pages before and often, albeit a few months ago, fyi.

November 27th, 2007 at 2:45 am

@Sridhar Vembu
I should mention that I last used Zoho in June, so maybe things have improved meanwhile

November 27th, 2007 at 12:01 pm

@35 VPZONE : Zoho has APIs for Writer, Sheet, Show, Planner & Creator currently. More products will have APIs down the line.

Zoho Business which is in Private Beta is targeted towards businesses, not to mention Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects which many businesses are already using. And Zoho’s single sign-on system allows individual users to have a single login name/password and access a host of Zoho services.