Sridhar Vembu built Zoho by questioning the conventional wisdom
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It's funny that in the tech world, providing a reliable service at a reasonable price for two decades (and with actual human customer service) is contrarian. I realize that's not the point of the article, but it does apply.
Hard to do obviously but you don’t need to strike gold on some new ideas or category.
For a lot of industries, it seems like the existing players are able to service both markets. You've got the classic splits like "Toyota vs. Lexus" or where the same supermarket chain owns both the bougie foodie/organic brand and the ghetto brand.
In the tech space, we haven't seen that as much. There's no obvious technical reason the hyperscaler crowd couldn't offer a premium brand-- "GSuite Deluxe" or "AWS Deluxe" with quality live support. Presumably, their resources and pricing power could run a "freestanding' premium vendor like Zoho into the ground easily.
It seems like so far, this hasn't been in their corporate DNA. I wonder if it's due to a complete fixation on "we'll AI and algorithm as many people out of the process out to pursue higher margins and better scale", to the point they don't even recognize the premium market as worth pursuing. It could be that "we're not interested in a business that isn't a billion dollars/bajillion percent growth rate", even if it offers high margins/stickiness.
A more sinister thought might be that by deliberately discarding an "uninteresting" market, they can feign that their position is weaker when market-competition regulators come to town.
Yes, we have.
> There's no obvious technical reason the hyperscaler crowd couldn't offer a premium brand-- "GSuite Deluxe" or "AWS Deluxe" with quality live support
Google Workspace and AWS each have their own multi-level (3 for Google Workspace, 4 for AWS) progressive scale of how high-touch they are. (For Workspace, which also has product feature tiers, this is a separate axis of differentiation.)
This is quite common in software and online services.
> Presumably, their resources and pricing power could run a "freestanding' premium vendor like Zoho into the ground easily.
Just as Toyota having Lexus and Honda having Acura doesn’t squeeze out McLaren, there’s space in tech for standalone high-touch brands. But, yeah, the big names high-touch offerings are probably doing orders of magnitude more business.
> It seems like so far, this hasn't been in their corporate DNA
No, the difference is that, sincs its not a consumer but a B2B product, the high-touch version from a mass vendor is just differentiated by being high touch, not be having an entirely separate brand identity despite being the same vendor. In fact, the brand identity is kept because the ability to move up seemlessly as business needs evolve is a selling point.
That's amazing, especially given that this is an Indian company, and "Indian customer service" is known throughout the English-speaking developed world as being terrible.
My Google Apps account does all I need for now, but I've heard enough good things about Zoho from you and others recently that it will be on the list of alternatives to check out.
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This results in a premium being placed on complicated and convoluted phrases. Like in legal documents. This seems to be prevalent in the former British colonies in Africa too.
I can tell you conventional wisdom missing in Zoho like version-control and testing is very much needed.
It seems to be an industry-wise thing and I wonder if it's time for disruption.
It is ready for disruption but to do so, I think it would need a holistic base that is consistent with respect to and between programming language/implementation, infrastructure, api and gui tooling. Now these are mostly manually adapted between each other when stuff gets added and the end result is a lot of leaky abstractions, instability, issues scaling, bugs and inflated infra costs.
Instead of 1000s of features, have 40 good features. Limits how many customers you can get, but should lower development costs as well. There's probably a sweet spot that works.
Deceptively hard. The only way to make this happen is using telemetry, and users don't like that, understandably. My belief is that Excel and Word are so successful because EVERYONE uses a different subset of those thousands of features. A one-lawyer office will differ from a dozen-person firm, a big general contractor will use different features from a small one, etc.
You can't survey users about those features either. Users don't know what your surveys mean half the time. They will answer according to how they think you want them to answer instead of what they really do. Or they will be satisfied but name features they would never use because they heard about them at a conference once. They use different terminology from you, so signal gets lost either way. Ad nauseam.
Can confidently say theres no business in the US at that scale ($600M+ revenue) with those margins. Ridiculous.
There doesn't seem to be much literature in estimating gross profit margin.
He trains them for $3000 for 2 years and then probably pats them $10k per year for first 2 years or less.
>The very idea of a billionaire moving to a village that's hardly known and hard to pronounce, and images of him pedalling a bicycle around paddy fields, driving an electric auto, or relaxing in a thinnai (shaded verandah) wearing a half-sleeved shirt and a white dhoti evoked curiosity.
Must been written by American, as European I find the village name very easy to pronounce. Same with finding exotic riding a bicycle.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say a guy named N S Ramnath who lives in Bangalore (Twitter bio) is probably not American.
edit to add: As a European, you might be making faulty assumptions about the pronunciation, while he's aware of numerous pitfalls that vex people who don't know the language. As an American, I see this a lot from Europeans who try to pronounce place names from indigenous languages that we take for granted. I've heard some hilarious verbal renderings of Okefenokee, for example.
Not sure how the native way to say it was, but a lot of natural features in South Georgia were taken, nominatively & literally, from the Muskogee people (“Creek Indians”)
I pronounced it "takson", and my American friend had a laugh. He said it is obviously "tiuzon"
the ones usually messing pronunciation of foreign names are native English speakers who are not using phonetical languages, as European speaking phonetic language I've had never problem to read correctly names of Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Malaysian or Thai cities as intended since we don't give special pronunciation to each letter as illogical English language
as for Okefenokee I don't really care about transcriptions made by native English speakers which are usually hilariously bad
I'm Indian, though not a Tamil-speaker, and I couldn't tell you with 100% certainty the correct pronunciation of that village name. At least not when written in the English/Latin alphabet. I can think of 2 different pronunciations for at least 4 of the syllables in it.
I would translate மத்தளம்பாறை as MaththalampaaRai, rather than Mathalamparai. The a's have different lengths, so single a's are short (as in "ma"), and double a's are long. Double consonants like "த்த" are pronounced separately, so "Matha-" should be "Maththa". And finally, the "R" at the end is a rolling r, distinguished from the regular r "ர" - a good example of a Tamil letter with no equivalent letter in English!
And, I know this is unrelated, but in terms of syntax, I find Tamil to English translation really suffers from the way Tamil reverse subject object verb order (Tamil is to Reverse Polish Notation (RPA) as English is to regular, clunky, bracket notation), and the option multiple words into a single verb with recursively adding suffixes. Tamil basically offers a lot more degrees of freedom then English, which makes it far more expressive, but also adds a lot of cost to mastering correct grammar. The majority of 1st generation Tamils can only speak a simpler subset of the language. Personally, I find Tamil tends to be less clunky, and have quicker, more pleasing rhythm, then any English equivalent.
how many european billionaires ride a bicycle as a form of transport rather than exercise?