rajuvegesna

> One day I'll actually set aside a few hours to go through a list of all tech companies that IPO'd in the last 5 years, and see which ones have actually made a profit. Gut feeling is that the "flashy" ones are still burning through cash reserves (Asana/Slack/Uber), but the more boring ones (Rackspace/Pivotal/etc) are probably sitting pretty.

You might find site helpful. https://postipononprofits.com/

This is outdated a bit in terms of numbers (doesn’t include recent years and excludes many companies), but the broad point remains. You are right, there are ton of companies built around the idea of dumping it on someone else before turning a profit. This has become the ‘formula’ for building companies, unfortunately.

We have to ask the question...why do these vendors keep increasing prices? Shouldn’t the economies of scale reduce prices instead? AWS has the right attitude to keep reducing prices. We need this attitude in software.

Its either greed or market pressure to keep showing increasing profits/growth.

PS: I am with Zoho. We recently reduced prices. https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html

Fundamental issue is the expectation that all public companies must keep growing and show profits quarter after quarter, year after year. This is obviously unsustainable.

It is like a treadmill that keeps increasing speed. If you slow down, you are thrown out.

If consecutive quarterly results are not good, CEO is typically thrown out. This pressure forces management to make unnatural decisions that might help short-term, but will hurt long-term. What we are seeing with Google with all of these recent events/decisions is a result of this, IMO.

Zoho Mail is a strong option. Comes with mobile apps, supports all standard protocols (IMAP/POP/ActiveSync), includes Calendar and many other modules. Zero tracking. Zero ads.

Beyond Mail, Zoho offers several apps that can replace most of what Google offers. From Docs to office suite, note-taking to chat and many more.

(Disclosure: I am with Zoho)

This is the problem when a note-taking app tries to make it ‘big’. A good note-taking app can be a niche business. But when you raise hundreds of millions of dollars, there is pressure and you are forced to make unnatural decisions to show growth.

Also, note-taking apps are part of a suite. See Apple, Microsoft, Google, Zoho (disclosure: I am with Zoho and we compete in note-taking space with Zoho Notebook). It is a challenge for any independent app provider to compete with a single app against suites in the long run. It’s surprising Evernote didn’t expand to other productivity apps beyond note-taking.

How about Notebook?

https://zoho.com/notebook/

There are good web clippers from most vendors (Notebook, OneNote, Keep etc). Did you try them?

https://www.zoho.com/notebook/web-clipper.html https://www.onenote.com/clipper

Notebook http://zoho.com/notebook

Nothing was mentioned about multiple spleens at birth (Polysplenia). Yes, some people are born with multiple spleens. In such case, it has nothing to do with injury and there doesn't seem to be enough knowledge on why this occurs.

Multiple spleens often result in mis-diagnosis (during radiology) leading to wrong treatment. When you know you have accessory spleens, it is always good to give them a heads up.

This reminded me of this post.

"...companies don’t get killed by competition, they usually find creative ways to commit suicide."

https://www.zoho.com/general/blog/companies-don-t-get-killed...

Evernote let their CEO and some key people go, then we have seen significant price increases and now this privacy episode. 'creative ways to commit suicide' indeed.

Disclosure: We compete with Evernote.

These are some of the alternatives.

OneNote (http://www.onenote.com/), Notebook from Zoho (http://zoho.com/notebook), Apple Notes (https://www.icloud.com/#notes), Keep from Google (https://www.google.com/keep/), Simplenote (https://simplenote.com/)

If you are looking for seamless integration, you need to buy into an ecosystem. An ecosystem that offers all/most of these pieces of software and integrates them well. Obviously, not a lot of ecosystems exist that offer all these pieces.

Based on your apps list (Box, Drive, Email, Slack, Salesforce), there are two ecosystems that offer alternatives to all these apps - Microsoft & Zoho (I am with Zoho). Google is also in the mix if you add apps from Google Apps Marketplace.

So there are two options. 1) Pick an integrated ecosystem and integrate missing apps. 2) Pick independent apps and integrate all of them

You clearly are doing #2 and experiencing the challenges. It is only going to get exponentially worse as you add more apps into the mix.

Google made a mistake initially by 1) Giving too much away for free and 2) Charging too low. It is probably trying to correct these mistakes.

1) On giving too much away…

Remember, Google Apps started with 200 free users, later reduced it to 100, then to 50, then to 10 and now to zero.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/23/google-puts-the-squeeze-on-...

At 200 free users, there was no room for a new entrant in the market. I am glad that didn't last long.

2) On Charging too low...

Back when they launched it, $50/user/year was extremely aggressive pricing. Vendors were charging $50/month. May be Google is realizing they were charging too low. I now see an additional plan with $10/user/month option (which didn't exist earlier).

Disclaimer: I work for Zoho, competition to Google Apps.

I am curious...to what extent does Chrome's Preferences section inspire you with this 'sheets' design? Horizontal navigation (clicking on the side) works pretty well in Chrome (including the back button). I assume that is the case with your design too?

This deal sounds very similar to MS-Yahoo deal. Abandon your existing technology, rely on competitors tech and expect growth.

We have seen how MS-Yahoo deal played out this week. It won't be long before Nokia realized what they got into. By then, it'll be too late.

If you try taking a screenshot of the AppStore (Cmd+shift+4+space bar), it doesn't include those window control styles. If Snow Leopard can't understand it, may be this is their new style for Lion?

There are my preferences. Infact, I use all of these.

Search: Bing (This is my default search engine); Maps: Bing (Their Bird's Eye is way cooler than Google Maps); Gmail, Calendar: Zoho Mail & Calendar; Docs & Apps: Zoho Docs & Business; Voice: YouMail.com; Translate: MicrosoftTranslator.com; Sites: Weebly; Finance: Y! Finance; YouTube: Blip.tv, Viddler, Vimeo; Photos: Flickr; Browser: Firefox/Safari

Zoho Projects in integrated there. Similarly, there are other project mgmt apps.

If you are looking for some commercial solutions, there are ton of them like AppManager (appmanager.com). But then, some of these solutions monitor what you expose from your application.

I don't know if there are any hosted solutions though.

I agree here. I wrote a similar post this morning with the same point.

http://rajuv.com/2010/01/28/ipad-is-the-computer-for-rest-of...

"This is a device I can hand it my grand father and he won’t have much trouble using it. Compare this to handing him a laptop and training him about how an OS works, what a drive is, what a file system is, why he needs an anti-virus software etc. Ease of use is the key here. Infact, we have seen this with iPhone already. Every day I see many 2-3 year old having absolutely no problem using the device. That makes a HUGE difference.

In a country like India, there are over 500 million mobile phones. But there are less than 15 Million computers (connected to the internet). Why is this the case? One of the reason is, PCs are complicated to use/learn for non-techies. I think this device can address a broader market as it hides the details from the user."

Yes, it has both options.

Zoho Discussions has 'Follow this Topic' option to receive emails on the discussions you are follow.

To post to Zoho Discussions directly from your email, it has Email2Forum option. More details on this are available here.

http://help.discussions.zoho.com/forum-settings.html#Email2F...

https://forums.zoho.com/topic/explain-email2forum-feature%3F

Ofcourse, these features can be made available for free for open source projects.

We are looking into adding an option to directly use the apps without having to sign-in. These will be available @ fakeoffice.org.

Thank you for your feedback. We put together our current page in a rush. We are working on improving it. There are some very good suggestions here. We will roll out an updated page today. For this site, we will focus on just the three apps and make the signup process easy.

Very good points James. Yes, we do plan to improve it. This is just an initial page we put together at the last minute. We are improving it as we speak. Comparison charts, easy-signup, funny cartoons etc are coming including videos...like this one...REAL happy customers using FAKE Office http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO4I3p7DYuk