Why we are not afraid of Microsoft | Hacker News Reader

Why we are not afraid of Microsoft

blog.freshdesk.com

87 pointsshankarganesh35 comments

Is there any otherwise-vanilla SaaS out there that generates more controversy than Freshdesk (at least among the HN readership)?

Already on this article (8 comments posted as I write this) we have a FUD comment saying their post is "smug" and their customers should be worried, and then another talking about how you need to "be careful" about criticising the company because their employees victimised the commenter by "down voting them in groups".

Add to this the backdrop of ridiculous comments by Zendesk founder calling them a ripoff, and just the general FUD espoused by almost everyone whenever an Indian tech company is in the picture, and it's a bit sad.

We don't use Freshdesk, although we're considering moving from Zendesk to them due to some missing features, and I'm not Indian, but I really do think it's interesting how this company is just constantly and vaguely looked down upon by people who should know better.

FD seem to be scrappy, they're growing quickly, their product looks good, they give discounts to startups, and they just happen to be based in India - what's not to like?

I didn't know much about how Freshdesk was founded, but this post is interesting: http://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple-c...

From that HN thread:

> Whenever I read something like this I can't help but think "Here's a potential customer to whomever can get this right and at the right price". It seems like there's still a huge opening in this market for someone to come in and take all of ZenDesk and eSupport's customers.

> Do you really think so? It always struck me that there was 1001 support desk providers out there... is there really that much space? (cos if so it's going on my list of maybe projects :))

> There's always space for someone who does it better and/or cheaper than the competition.

I read HN daily and this is my first encounter with Freshdesk.

>FD seem to be scrappy, they're growing quickly, their product looks good, they give discounts to startups, and they just happen to be based in India - what's not to like?

Regardless of the quality of their offering, I'm personally turned off by the David vs. Goliath click bait being my introduction to the company. Maybe that's unfair, but so it goes.

What was it they said about "when life gives you lemons..."?

While I agree on a personal level that the post crosses the line somewhat between scrappy startup chutzpah to user acquisition tactic, I still like the idea of Freshdesk using a negative news item to position itself more aggressively.

I also think that outside the hyper-attuned HN community, this post is going to be seen more positively.

I too am turned off by the article. Girish Mathrubootham should've posted this on his own personal blog instead of under the Freshdesk corporate blog. It can _only_ present a bad image for the company. He can be a smug CEO all he wants on his personal blog.

I found it to be a great response. A competitor gets acquired, a news article says your company will be put out of business by it, and voila! An opportunity to rise above it.

And yes, when was the last time Microsoft put somebody out of business?

I went from Zendesk to Freshdesk purely based on my experience on one feature request on Zendesk. The feature was promised repeatedly for, roughly as I recall, 4 years and never delivered.

Freshdesk functionality isn't better, but it is cheaper and they've never made empty promises that affected me. The thread seems to have been removed now I search for it, not surprised, it reflected very badly on them.

Edit: Found it [0]. TL;DR, Lots of people wanted it. It's coming, it's coming, it's coming... Delivered years later...but not actually what was asked for...

[0] https://support.zendesk.com/entries/12834-Monospaced-Unforma...

That is the most ridiculous thread I've ever seen from a company. Not only did the employee take a shot at people (self hosting solutions is wrong) he also epically, never delivered what the people were asking for even after FIVE YEARS!!

I'm really wondering why he even continued to reply to the thread.

Microsoft didn't have to acquire anything to compete with most SaaS businesses:

They have Excel.

Small businesses have tighter budgets, but often the owner is the person doing certain tasks that in a big corporation would be given to interns. Because they do the work themselves, they're more open to try new software to improve their workflow. They're willing to pay $50 every month to be able to do something in a more efficient or enjoyable way, even though they could pay $500 (a fictional figure) once and buy Office or some established software to manage some aspect of their business, but feel miserable doing it.

However, many small business owners, after researching the competition, decide to do as the big guys are doing, and go with bloated, clunky software in hopes of eventually becoming big too.

That's why, it seems to me, it's relatively easy to run a simple SaaS with 200-500k yearly revenue, but hard to scale it to millions.

* * *

The target audience for this post is probably Freshdesk customers, not me. If I were a Freshdesk customer, I'd me more confident if the reasons listed were a better customer support, better user experience, being likely to stay in business for longer... instead, they went with "the competition is crappy and slow to act".

"If I were a Freshdesk customer, I'd me more confident if the reasons listed were a better customer support, better user experience, being likely to stay in business for longer..."

Fair points, but our existing customers already know about our user experience and customer support. And if I am going to talk about that, it is not going to be very credible anyway as I am biased :) But a quick review of our Google apps marketplace review will tell you that's exactly what our customers love about us.

Dynamics CRM requires consultants to install, servers to run, etc. etc.

It's bizarre anyone would say something so colossally stupid and be so ignorant of reality to say an add-on to an expensive and complicated CRM system will put standalone offerings out of business unless they were a Dynamics consultant.

Oh, Gene Marks is a Dynamics consultant.

No news here, no news in the original article, it's all just advertising.

Consultants - probably. Servers - nope, not for about 6 years, since CRM Online shipped in January 2008. http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=252780

Your bottom-line takeaway is spot-on.

In the face of certain despair, it's humorous that Freshdesk pulls off the "I'm so smug, come join us" pitch. If I was a Freshdesk customer, I'd be a little worried about the political pow-wow being played. It's quite clear that Freshdesk is looking to get acquired by Microsoft. One of the prerequisites is to smacktack the ol' Microsoft 'legacy' and then whistle dixie.

Also, watchout when you bad mouth them on HN, they use shady tactics to downvote comments written against them (I was a victim once; their employees downvoted me in groups). I don't trust this company nor their employees at all - In fact, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that this blog post was posted by one of their employees and the blog post is just a glorified landing page.

    "We're not scared of Microsoft, so signup right now"

What makes you so sure you were downvoted by freshdesk employees and not just HNers who thought your comment was ineffective at portraying a useful point?

note: I am not nor have ever been a freshdesk employee

Fixed that for you:

       "We're not 90s Microsoft, so signup right now"

I look at the article and instead say “well played, Freshdesk—well played!”

It doesn’t look to me that they’re looking to get acquired at all; they’re just making very good use of a rare PR situation which could much more easily, but much less effectively, be ignored. If I was a contented Freshdesk customer I would expect to be very pleased by such an article which gives such assurance that they’re not going anywhere. (As it is, I’m not a customer—but I do like the look of their product and would recommend trying it if such a need was coming up in anything I was involved in.)

> It's quite clear that Freshdesk is looking to get acquired by Microsoft.

The reason there's a blog post is because Microsoft just acquired Parature. Why would Microsoft want to acquire a different company in the same space?

First sign of being not afraid is creating "I am not afraid" blog posts.

The hubris in this post is on par with the classic tales of the Greek gods. Microsoft may not sink Freshdesk, but Freshdesk may sink Freshdesk.

Unless the blog post has been updated before I read it I find it difficult to understand the hostility being expressed towards FreshDesk.

Someone wrote them off as being good as dead because a competitor was acquired by MS, they wrote a rebuttal, what is wrong with that?

I have to say, this HN thread is super confusing to me. There are plenty of good points in this article, none of which come off as smug to me.

The fact of the matter is that the helpdesk software market is huge, and the notion that there isn't enough room for multiple companies to succeed in it is just wrong headed.

Very rarely, but especially with niche software, is there ever only one winner. Usually there's lots of room for many companies to succeed.

As a happy Freshdesk customer I pretty much agree with everything written in this post, and think they'll be just fine.

It's not smugness, it's sensationalism, and it's a valid PR tactic. I think the old saying "there's no such thing as bad publicity" applies in spades here. Look at the controversy in this thread: some people think it's bad, some think it's good, but the number of people with Freshdesk on the brain has jumped by an order of magnitude—if half of them are turned off it's still a net win.

Slightly off topic but what is better about Zendesk?

I've been using Freshdesk for a few years and originally chose it because the price was so much less. To me the major benefits of Zendesk appear to be a better mobile experience and a json api (vs Freshdesk's XML). Out of those 2 thing the XML api has been the more annoying to deal with.

It looks Zendesk may have dropped their prices a little and may be worth reconsidering.

The XML api itself should be enough to tell you which one to pick.

Then again, I'm thinking this from a developer point of view, guessing how the decision would have been brought up.

The things that comes to mind is either A) Massive legacy code B) Decision made by business-goon C) Shitty developers.

I would probably never have touched the API, but regardless of that, it would have scared me off.

Freshdesk has had both XML and JSON APIs from day 1. Maybe it was not so obvious as the documentation was done for XML and it was probably assumed that since it is exactly similar for json it was not required. Thanks for the feedback. We will fix the docs.

Good to know.

Hey, a bit late to the thread but I wanted to ask a question about your service (I couldn't find a "send private message" button in HN):

My company is evaluating several Helpdesk systems (both SaaS and Open Source). FreshDesk is one of those we have in mind. However I would like to know how possible is it to "tweak" Freshdesk to meet our needs.

For example, being able to add HTML elements (forms) or "dashboards" made by us would be a plus. Also, how "mature" are your APIs? (i.e. what % of the functionality can be accessed via API?).

Basically, we need to use a HelpDesk/Ticketing/CRM system, but must tailor it to our business need which is more on the financial side of things (we are looking to make the HelpDesk system our one-stop-panel for managing).

is there anyone @ your company I can contact to discuss this more in private?

Thanks a lot!

Hi,

Thanks for your interest in Freshdesk. If you can email me: saurabh@freshdesk.com, I will be glad to get on a call, understand your requirements and take the discussion further.

Best Regards, Saurabh Prabhuzantye

Such kind of blog posts are best written a year or two, where you have evidence that Microsoft will not be able to kill your business. In fact, I hope it happens and wish you all the best that your business grows and thrives.

Otherwise, no one really cares whether you are afraid of Microsoft or not.

I'm always wondering why journalists "kill" everything. There is room for more than one player - in nearly every market.

I see now why the moderation on hn prefers titles that match the original article.

So brave of them.

Nobody is anymore.

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