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.
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.
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.
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.
Okay, misinformation on that then. Glad to see that they're different.
That's great that VTiger was offered with a good license, but I don't think the intentions of forking sugar were the best. Their licensing may have caused some issues, but now GPL3 has cleared most of those. If Zoho's products are superior why continue to offer VTiger, which is primarily Sugar's code? Why not just open source ZohoCRM and unify things together? Granted, that is much easier said than done.
Sure, most people haven't woken up to the power of UI. Think of the poor souls still on SAP or Great Plains or whatever CRM you can think of. There's no doubt Zoho is proven. Microsoft is also proven, but the way they execute on products isn't exactly the best.
Zoho Creator is very nice. The app store launched this week via web 2.0 expo is pretty cool.
Adventnet(zoho,vtiger,etc.) is a hell of a business. I just challenge you guys to do something truly different to shake things up. You're right, 12 years has afforded you to do things like Zoho, so take that juice to kick it a few notches up. Best of luck.
vtiger CRM is now a separate open source product with an active community that will determine it's future. vtiger CRM has evolved significantly over many years with a complete overhaul of the UI and the server framework, and is largely Sugar-Free.
Please note that SugarCRM is open source only with it's limited community edition. Much of SugarCRM software is proprietary.
pretty sure zoho was before coghead. These apps are a lot different than MS Access at the end of the day. At the heart, sure there are lots of similarities.
this is a culture thing. i'm sure there's innovation, but having worked with indians, i know they prefer to present their product in an classical and conservative way, and that they frown upon aggressive marketing (à la MTV)
the same for Tata and Mittal steel, one of the biggest companies in the world, and who have typically a weaker brandname than Chrysler for instance.
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.