I'm sure you're aware, but you have to be careful with being very reliant on free-tier products. Once a magnitude of people are "locked in" then they'll start to do some of the pricing and licensing shenanigans where once common features or bundled products get hidden under a fee or broken up after an update.
(Interesting project BTW, I'd just recommend having a screenshot or 2 of one of the resumes if you're explicitly advertising them as beautiful. Calling them that is one thing, but showing people that is much better.)
This sentence gives me PTSD. We got the startup "90% discount" from Hubspot but what they don't tell you is that it's 5 users plan which you are locked in to. Then they lock you on to min 5 users for sales for the next two years where you are spending up to $500 per month which you cannot break out of.
To cancel it you have to notify them ON THE DAY of renewal because it's yearly contract.
We only had one sales person in our startup and all our customer data was locked in Hubspot + we were using their chat+ email.
I spent a weekend writing up scripts and moving to self hosted service (TileDesk!) and I had to cancel my credit card; there was no way out because you sign the "contract" when you take up their startup plan (https://mvpgrow.com/hubspot-for-startups/)
To be fair, while they did introduce new restrictions in the past, for example disabling imap support for free email accounts, the restrictions did not apply to older accounts that had already these features activated. Ie if you were using imap before the change, you would not have to pay to continue using it.
Ime zoho has been very reliable. Not relying on venture capital [0] and seemingly working on longer than shorter term profit makes it imo also less likely to resort to this type of strategies.
> I'm sure you're aware, but you have to be careful with being very reliant on free-tier products
Depends where the org is in its economies of scale, operating leverage, cost efficiencies (vs volume), and earnings. Zoho is based in India, in business for decades with pretty much the same model, reaping millions in profits, and can very well afford to not bill its clients as if it was paying developers in London or San Francisco.
I'm a fan of Zoho, but you do need to be clear eyed. You're not going to find a huge ecosystem like you will with Salesforce, 365 or other platforms. The UX can also be fairly clunky, and their approach to features is definitely "me too". On the other hand, you can't beat the price and convenience of being able to sign up for just about anything with a credit card.
Be that as it may - it wasn't started in Palo Alto or Pleasanton. Their about page[1] mentions the predecessor company was founded in New Jersey (1996), before moving to San Jose (1998), then Pleasanton (2000)
"In the 1990s, in a small apartment located in the suburbs of Chennai in southern India, a simple, yet revolutionary idea was born: "Build smart technology to help businesses work better." This idea evolved to become the world-class technology company we're known as today."
According to Wikipedia:
"From 1996 to 2011, the company was known as AdventNet, Inc. and initially provided network management software.[8][9]
AdventNet expanded operations into Japan in 2001 and shifted focus to small and medium businesses (SMBs).[9]
Zoho CRM was released in 2005, along with Zoho Writer, the company's first Office suite product.[9] Zoho Projects, Creator, Sheet, and Show were released in 2006.[9] Zoho expanded into the collaboration space with the release of Zoho Docs and Zoho Meeting in 2007. In 2008, the company added invoicing and mail applications, reaching one million users by August of that year."
So they were not providing SMB office software until 2005.
It's weird to me that there are these two narratives. Are we talking about the same Zoho, or is there more to it to either of these stories? Was it a case of shifting origin stories? One of the 2009 articles announcing the change in name from AdventNet to Zoho included mentioning the corporate HQ in Pleasanton.
I may have been overzealous is removing what I thought were tracking parameters. If you click on "about us" in the footer and scroll all the way to the bottom or click on 1996 - you'll find the text about AdventNet, which I suppose is the source for Wikipedia
I built some backend CRM stuff at a previous job on Zoho and was consistently amazed at how great it was. Everything "just worked" and was surprisingly well thought out. It lacks some of the polish that can make it feels fully "complete" but my experience with it was generally very positive.
Zoho prices strategically. For example, it ensures that the price for the help desk product, ZohoDesk is the lowest in the market; across all tier it is priced at USD 1/month cheaper than the next cheapest competitor, FreshDesk.
They just separated out Servers in Endpoint Central, where servers now require a different license. My use of the product will not change, the price of renewal goes up 12%. I'm paying more this year for the same thing. Strategic pricing indeed, lock'em in and crank'em up.
Also, Redhat and CentOS are 'servers' under this new licensing, but Ubuntu is not a server.
I've found Endpoint Central to be rather buggy, and not really improving over time, they just keep introducing new bugs.
Zoho's biggest asset is that it's generally Good Enough. I was an early adopter of their remote desktop software, and it went from being Good Enough to Good. They're responsive to feedback and generally good folks. We recommend them at work for their email on a regular basis (context: managed WordPress hosting)
I can't speak highly enough about the responsiveness. I've had a few issues with their products (for example, they locked me out of my email account while traveling abroad) and they resolved all of them very quickly. I also once suggested a very small UX improvement, expecting my request to fall into the ether, and was surprised when they implemented it about 2-3 weeks later.
Zoho Analytics came bundled with an electronic health record we use. Support has been very responsive, and I attended a 2-3 day intensive data reporting training with some of their Indian data team who were absolutely fantastic, experts in the system and fun to work with.
It's not covered in the article, but I wonder if inflation has much to do with this. Nigerian inflation in March was 33.2%, and is still trending upward[1]. Pricing in Naira moves some inflationary risk to Zoho, right? At the same time, if US-based competitors have priced their product in a constant amount of dollars, those products are now costing several times what they cost a few years ago.
(I have no idea about inflation in the other countries mentioned in the article, it just seemed odd to not mention it at all when they were discussing Nigerian companies)
I believe you have Zoho confused with another company. Zoho has never taken any outside investments and has always been bootstrapped. There are countless articles about Zoho being bootstrapped online as well as on Zoho’s web pages. Disclosure: I work for Zoho.
Of course I didn't know that, but if true, that's wonderful. I am saddened by the ongoing destruction of value when a decent product or company is acquired, and then shuttered because it's not quite the juggernaut the acquirer expected it to be, or because there's some unforseen misalignment, even though this company was a viable business. Selling it back is a great solution, instead of doing a write-off where the company is destroyed.
I dont think Zoho was ever acquired. They were and are still are a private company with no external investments. Interestingly the confusion seems to be with Zimbra and here is a blog post on Zimbra acquisition by Zoho themselves.
Zoho is very well positioned to be useful, especially to people on HN. Their pricing is great, customer service is good, and they cover a lot of ground with their products. If you need email for your custom domain, they are a great choice.
I've been using them for a small charity, and they've been really great. Super powerful/flexible including setting up complex sets of groups and multiple domains that forward to specific places.
There was a card snafu last year and our bill didn't get paid, and Zoho degraded nicely into the "free" tier without hassling us or threatening us. Once I discovered it, it was simple to upgrade again.
What may really blow their mind is that there are open source tools that cost even less. Zoho is a good choice though, their CRM was not the best but got the job done. Has a good API. Haven’t tried their other tools like docs or mail.
I gave Zoho a compliment, not sure why there is so much defensiveness.
You are right - open source requires more work. My response related to open source was responding to the article's tone that it was surprising that anything could be cheaper than Google or Microsoft :) Which is silly.
Good point. I have been up way too long. I re-read the question now as just wanting alternatives.
I read the question earlier about email deliverability and black list management as being rhetorical in that those services are usually performed by a centralized service provider.
Glad someone was able to respond with some examples.
Open source has many advantages, but either support is terrible or you are paying for support. If you can support yourself open source is great. However if you need help the options are often not very good, and when they are good they are not cheap - might or might not be competitive with non-free offering.
Since Zoho is trying to attract small business, support is something they can beat open source one. (I don't know if they do, just that they can)
I was wondering if Zoho paid to have this article written. And then all these positive comments make me paranoid they’re paying for that too. Maybe I’m too much of a skeptic but companies definitely pay agencies to astroturf like this.
Companies definitely do and they may have had a hand in the article but I can vouch that most comments here are probably genuine (or maybe I'm just another astroturfer!).
It helps that Zoho's main competitor is GSuite. That's what a lot of us are comparing them against and it's just not very difficult to beat Google's "non-existent unless you spend $millions on ads" support, they could literally have a cat answer support and it'd be an improvement. Anyone who has had to deal with trying and failing to get anything answered by Google and then tried the same with Zoho will have something good to say about them regardless of their product overall.
Zoho's products are also a bit more "traditional" in the way that people on HN tend to enjoy. Their UIs, configuration, features and all aren't very 2024 glittery but they're good for getting shit done and setting stuff up yourself.
And then they're also cheap which HN tends to be sensitive to, here you see many contemplate self-hosting things every time a SaaS increases their pricing. Or write about moving back from Big Cloud to bare metal or Hetzner and co. to save $.
It's possible they are doing such a thing, however I also am sure there are many legitimate users in the comments. I personally have been using them on the free tier for over 10 years. I signed up soon after Microsoft was stopping allowing you to use your own email domain through Outlook at a free tier. Zoho allowed you to use your own domain name for free and even has support for things like IMAP. The current free tier is a bit more restrictive now with features like IMAP being removed, however they have never removed any features from my account. I personally find it hard not to be loyal to a company who will grandfather me in on a less restrictive free plan. I haven't paid them anything, they technically owe me nothing.
However, while I have not made use of their paid services (as I use it just for personal use), I have referred clients before to Zoho when I have been working on their websites.
I've also made use of their invoice software free of charge to generate a couple invoices and have been quite pleased with that as well.
Sometimes when companies are fair to their customers either via pricing or business practices, it results in people being much more willing to go out of their way to say good things about the company. It would be insane for me to be negative against a company that has provided me a good product for free for years upon years. There aren't even ads.
Definitely disgruntled by the way Google Apps went from being free for the last decade of my life to costing ~$120/mo for myself and my family. I don't think I can leave Google at this point, but if I was strapped for cash I would choose a different platform. Otherwise, I would still go with Google just due to their dominance in this space and integration with other companies. Calendar invites, meet etc being the primary thing
My current company is using Proton for mail/calendar but we still need Google accounts in order to access things like Google Cloud. We have Google Calendar but not Email. So there is this frustrating bifurcation between mail and some calendar on Proton and then some Calendar items on Google. I wish that Calendar sharing/sync was a more solved problem these days because keeping them syncronized is a nightmare.
Anyway glad to hear from the thread here that Zoho is a worthy competitor and might consider it in the future. They have been around for a very long time.
I’m torn between not prying, and wondering how you get a family to $120/m, when you can get a basic personal Google account (which comes with access to all of the usual apps) for free?
I think I may have heard of Zoho once, as a South African dev. My employers have all used either Microsoft or Google office suites. South Africa might have better access/relative pricing to U.S. services than some other African countries though.
> Zoho started allowing African companies to pay for its software in local currencies. This decision has been a major reason for Zoho’s success in Africa as it allowed customers and potential clients to avoid regulatory hurdles around dollar spending
One wonders what they're going to do with the local currency, if they presumably also have to deal with the same restrictions.
Zoho (or whatever payment processor they use) has to handle N countries, which is easier than having multiple companies from different countries handling payment in foreign currencies.
Living in Europe, it is easy for us to pay USD-centric services in dollars instead of EUR. But I remember it being almost impossible at the companies I worked at, when I was in Latin America.
We used Zoho at a previous job! While not exactly flash, I appreciated a few things like being able to automate a check-in when I arrived at the office, because their iOS app offered automation hooks.
My biggest issue with Zoho is the integration between Zoho CRM and Inventory/Books. Making sure they are in sync...is basically impossible. Off the top of my head, inventory, taxation and images do not sync at all without breaking significant portions of the standard Zoho workflow. One can see their org chart through the way the two have been put together. The integration makes the entire thing completely unusable, since now it becomes impossible to track products across the sales lifecycle.
The integration journey of Zoho CRM and Zoho Books has been significant. With the Zoho Finance module seamlessly embedded within CRM, accessing Zoho Books is just a click away.
Furthermore, we are actively pursuing enhancements to further streamline the integration between Zoho Inventory and Zoho CRM. Please reach out to us at support[at]zohocrm[dot]com with a detailed list of your concerns. Rest assured, we are dedicated to resolving them promptly.
Our company (B2B, a SaaS without a static billing model) has used Zoho for a few years, mostly as an outgrowth of the use of CRM. None of the apps are the best in breed, but the price is great, and it's more than adequate for small companies like ours. Many alternate solutions are far too complex, as they're trying to capture more enterprise customers.
That said, we do use still Google for Gmail and Drive.
I use Zoho too for one of my side companies. It works really well for really cheap. I haven't tried their bookkeeping project but maybe I will next year. Currently use Wave for that.
Tbh the fact that it's a one stop shop really helps. Everything covered by their suite. I also thought it would be junk but it's not. It's pretty good!
It would be great to see Zoho adopt privacy friendly features like end to end encryption or hosting in countries with privacy friendly laws. I would love to ditch Google too.
I understand free is nice and all, and many people are price conscious - but O365 I believe has worldwide geographic pricing, and it is the standard.
While Zoho is nifty, you are holding yourself back quite a bit because you are not running what is the standard.
From what I can recall, and it's been a while - even Google runs O365 because Excel is the standard, and a few other things, but of course not Exchange - though they did have an Exchange Online server a decade ago! (Not saying much it's included in most O365 skus's but I chuckled when I saw it on the DNS a decade ago - not sure about nowadays.)
Meta/Facebook also uses Sharepoint and Excel heavily too.
Around a decade ago I also used Zoho and thought it was clunky but I know enough 2-5people orgs that use it and are happy with it, but I really don't want to spend too much time w/ support and paying for $20 for license/for user, is easy enough. $1200 a month to not have to worry about much is nice enough and for security, geogrpahic blocking and other features it works very well. You can control alot of incoming mail w/ Exchange Online Protection/Defender - so you can cut down on your phishing and such.
I know I must sound like a Microsoft plant, but, for the price, the features included are very generous and you never have to worry about migrating off it for another vendor ecosystem because it is the standard.
Plus training, everyone learns on O365/Office suite. That itself is nice too.
One sweetspot Zoho I think has been in more from fortunate circumstances was grinding away as a GSuite competitor for years on years without the wasteful budgets or engineering egos of Silicon Valley.
This way they naturally had to focus on core features more, which they did well enough, and understanding vertical integration as one of the main pillars of their organizational culture.
I had Zoho set up on the lowest tier for a side-hustle project years ago. It did it's job smoothly and without much intrusion. Then the project ended and I forgot about the Zoho account, changed phone numbers, lost the 2fa keys - all of it. Totally my fault. Their support quickly and competently handheld me through the shutdown process. I can't imagine the nightmare Google would've forced me through to shut down a pointless 3$/month charge had I made the same mistake with them.
Zoho support is neat when you compare against any other big tech.
They are kind of slow at developing features, for instance you can't set up new tags/folders for email in the phone app, only on desktop, and this has been like that since beginning of times.
Thats great. The "I want to do everything on my phone" folk need to be told NO at some point. A somewhat cluttered but usable desktop interface cramped fully onto a tiny phone screen will have to much nested menu options to be able to discover things. I went into this dead end more often than I should have, wasted a lot of time until I finally started wondering what the hell I was thinking. The funniest was a long side menu next to a pdf. One could add all kinds of information and pick formatting and styling. On a phone you couldn't even see the pdf. Endless sub menus. Truly hilarious. I also one time build an advanced search interface with so many options it was.. uhh... completely unusable.
There are more smartphones in use than people on the planet so it stands to reason that for many, the smartphone IS their interface to the world the way the desktop was (and maybe still is) for many of us. Seems more like an opportunity to implement a different design paradigm than something to be dismissed outright.
If you care more about land-grabbing users to aggregate demand (https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/) then you can develop what users wants, get them onboard, and then start squeezing profits out of that. That is what Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Facebook et al did. Here we are with ads on freemium products, and now the data we generate are more valuable to feed to train AIs.
If you're trying to sustainably develop features to support users, even if the pace of the feature development is very slow, I think that is what we are seeing with Zoho.
I made a similar mistake with AWS where I have $0.50 monthly charge. I called and they want me to go through a lengthy processes including getting documents notarized to handle it. So instead, I just canceled the card and am patiently waiting for them to shut down the account from failed charges. It’s been about a year now though and it’s still going.
Oh man, be very careful with that. I don't know about AWS specifically, but many of those big tech companies have powerful ways to get you, and they often use them. You may be silently blacklisting yourself from being an AWS customer in the future. As they are fond of saying, cancelling the card is not cancelling the service. You still owe the money!
These fears are why I never use AWS, GCP, Azure, etc and prefer something simple like DigitalOcean where I just add money to my funds via PayPal. If I exceed the limit, they shut down my account. Highly preferable than accidentally getting banned from say Google and losing my gmail where I access incredibly important things like healthcare, finances, utilities, etc.
Same, most of the time, although I don't use Digital Ocean much after a client of mine issued a charge back having forgotten what "Digital Ocean" was (even though I explained it several times). before talking to me, they locked my admin panel so I was completely unable to fix a production issue. Then when I discovered what had happened they took several business days to "unlock" my admin panel. I suffered a pretty big reputation hit with my clients and was put in a position I NEVER want to be in again: "sorry normally it would take me 5 minutes to get the site back up, but it's gonna be <unknown> number of days until DO decides to unlock my account, long after I gave an updated credit card and paid the balance. I use Linode now, and hopefully Akamai won't mess that up.
I don’t know for AWS but I did that once as a teenager with another cloud provider and they sent a debt collector to my family home to collect a few euros. The debt collector had a nice fee.
Related: AWS has an unwritten policy of giving customers one get out of jail free card when they inevitably fuck up. I’ve called upon this once, completely my fault, at work. AWS refunded me over $2,000 USD (at a company small enough for that to be a big number).
I used ManageEngine MDM before, which belongs to Zoho. The support is excellent, even though I was only using the free tier, they did everything to assist me. Open the support chat, one minute later you are chatting with a human (!), not some robot that you have to trick to eventually speak to someone.
I also used Zoho for mail, it was pretty nice and they had quite robust support once I got an issue. I left them only because I already pay for iCloud+ and comes with custom domain support, so I realized I didn't need to pay for another service.
The Web UI of the mail and the mobile app was also quite good.
Agreed.
I setup zoho voice, ported from Google business voice, and had an issue where SMS wasn't going through even though it said it was. Zoho's issue or some porting issue. But I quickly chatted with a human, they resolved it and let me know when it was fixed.
I have no idea how to even start a conversation with a Google rep from any of their interface. Zoho had it easy to find.
I've also had great customer service experience with Zoho. In both cases it was my fault but they helped me anyway.
I was very pleased with their product. They are one of the few companies who are actively adding settings and options to their products, and they are very thorough with their designs! You can do almost anything you want to do between the settings and the API they offer.
> Zoho started allowing African companies to pay for its software in local currencies. This decision has been a major reason for Zoho’s success in Africa as it allowed customers and potential clients to avoid regulatory hurdles around dollar spending
> Zoho has also been aggressive with its pricing in Africa. Zoho One, a bundle of more than 45 products
This is a major reason why Western products aren't landing as well abroad anymore.
This isn't the 1990s-early 2000s where your only options for software and hardware were Western (in reality only American and maybe a couple niche European vendors).
American companies need to actually localize and build the "cultural competency" muscle, which I feel a lot of Western companies lost by being overly dependent on China as a singular market.
This isn't 1989 anymore - Levi's jeans and Coca Cola don't cut it. Just about every major country is capitalist now.
American brands, technology, and R&D still have a lot of staying power and brand cachet (there's a reason Asian tourists love taking a selfie while touching John Harvard's foot), but there needs to be recognition that the delta between the US and other countries in R&D has drastically shrunk now that countries all over the world are much richer and have adopted American style innovation systems.
Localization and greater openness to foreign innovation will help boost our own products, economy, and soft power.
If we become too insular, then we doom our larger economy to the same mistakes France, Germany, UK, and Japan made.
Sticking to principles like Data Security, Privacy, and concierge Customer Support are legitimate differentiators that can by justified by customers to pay a premium.
I am not so sure how much of your post really applies to this scenario.
Zoho has been around practically for as long as Salesforce has and they have always been the scrappy bootstrapped company that in my opinion focused on the small to medium sized business. MSFT is at such a large size that tailoring the selling experience to a smaller market does not move the needle enough to make a difference for the business. With ~200x the revenue of Zoho, it just might not make sense to focus on these smaller markets and being aggressive on pricing.
American companies do not need to localize or build cultural competency when it does not move the needle for them and I don't think we lost that by being dependent on China. I am not even certain how China comes into play on that front beyond outsourcing of manufacturing and cheap imports. Even for booming new economies like Nigeria, the overall benefit for larger companies is so small that its most likely not worth the effort for them to go down that path.
Zoho would have been American if Sridhar's visa process wasn't messed up. He used to live in Pleasanton like the rest of the Zoho founders, but they were looking at a multiyear GC backlog, so Sridhar decided to return to India.
I'd argue it's one of several pieces that show an issue of insular pigheadedness American institutions have.
This was fine when the rest of the world was much poorer than the US, but that delta has shrunk massively.
> American companies do not need to localize or build cultural competency when it does not move the needle for them
I agree to a certain extent, but there have been plenty of major fumbles in markets with large TAMs (Uber in ASEAN, Ford in India) that if there was a bit more localized market research done, they would have done decently well.
Korean, Chinese, Indian, etc companies are increasingly becoming competitive, and American companies cannot rest on their laurels.
Sure American institutions have insular pigheadedness. Indian/Vietnamese/Chinese/Korean institutions are filled with corruptions and nepotism.
We don’t know for sure Zoho would have been an American company, I would almost argue that their success is because they are in India and can most likely build their product at drastically lower costs than in the US. This is probably one of the reasons they can target SMB, including emerging markets in local currencies.
No doubt localization would have helped but it’s again one of those things where there are too many angles to really accept what is the correct or incorrect path. Uber, perhaps it was that insular pigheadedness you like to mention or perhaps they were really dedicated on having a single app, with a familiar process globally. Grab is indeed hyper local but also drastically different depending on the region your in and is a much different experience than what Uber provides.
I could not speak on the Ford in India but on the flip side Tata could never make it in more developed markets probably with the lack of safety.
The thing is that with India - for example - it is a relatively cheap market and those can afford expensive stuff, but western stuff anyway.
Also regarding visa - well there are more indians in the visa queue than probably multiple countries combined. If they make it as fast as other countries - indians will just move in millions and millions simply due to sheer amount of people they have.
> those can afford expensive stuff, but western stuff anyway
Western, sure. American, not really.
There's a reason American brands like Harley-Davidson and Ford quit India, but Western (NATO+) brands like Toyota and Hyundai thrive in India, and Indian conglomerates like Tata acquired prestige western brands like Jaguar Land Rover.
Same thing with China and the acquisition of MG, Volvo, Lotus, etc.
> Also regarding visa - well there are more indians in the visa queue than probably multiple countries combined. If they make it as fast as other countries - indians will just move in millions and millions simply due to sheer amount of people they have.
True, but there needs to be a middle path between being selective but also attracting the cream of the crop. Take a look at the placement statistics of IIT graduates nowadays (2017 onwards) - barely 5-10% choose to immigrate abroad now, ad it's a similar trend in mid-tier Indian programs as well.
America's innovation ecosystem only worked because we were able to attract the best and the brightest from Russia, India, China, etc. Without that level of openness, we fall to the same pit of stagnation that Mainland Europe, the UK, and Japan fell into.
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Both these points are examples of the insular mindset that is going to doom the US. There is this assumption that we have always been the best and always will be the best.
It was immigrants or the children of immigrants like Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Fermi, von Neumann, etc that ushered the Atomic and Information Age, and it was immigrants like Hinton, le Cunn, Bengio, etc that ushered in the current ML revolution.
Already, a lot of my Chinese and Indian friends who did their PhDs in EE or CS at programs like Stanford or MIT have started returning to China and India because they find the visa process demeaning and very backlogged.
> It was immigrants or the children of immigrants like Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Fermi, von Neumann, etc that ushered the Atomic and Information Age, and it was immigrants like Hinton, le Cunn, Bengio, etc that ushered in the current ML revolution.
You’re not wrong, but America won’t accept it. The middle class has been gutted, and everyone is scrambling over the ruins of it to try to land in the upper class instead of the lower.
People perceive those immigrants as “taking a spot” in the upper class, as if there were a deity determining how many rich people we can have at some inflexible level.
I think people pervasively underestimate the value of education, in literal dollar terms. The US spends a crazy amount just getting someone through high school, much less college and a PhD. I would be pretty okay with a visa process for anyone that has a PhD from a reputable institution (where reputable only means “not a degree farm”).
Having someone with a PhD immigrate here is like their government donating a half million dollars to the US in the form of paying for the immigrants education instead of us. Their home country bears the costs, we reap the benefits. I don’t even really care if they speak English; they’ll learn, or use a translate app, or marry someone that can translate or whatever. They got a PhD, I’m sure they’ll figure it out.
The only real risk is crashing wages, but in a globalized labor market I don’t know if immigration is even relevant. Even if wages did crash, that might be a good thing if the crash wasn’t permanent. Cheap research sounds like the kind of thing that might drive us into new technologies.
The thing is that I am not sure what american - that is not software services and some PC hardware - is even sold outside of USA. Coca Cola and McDonalds? But aside that I haven't see much american stuff even in Europe. It is usually german home appliances, local food, nestle (swiss) etc.
> True, but there needs to be a middle path between being selective but also attracting the cream of the crop. Take a look at the placement statistics of IIT graduates nowadays (2017 onwards) - barely 5-10% choose to immigrate abroad now, ad it's a similar trend in mid-tier Indian programs as well.
The problem is that even 5% is a lot. Like Indian's population is probably 2-3 times bigger than the whole europe. My own country has less than 9m people and my friend got his USA passport after 5 years only...
> America's innovation ecosystem only worked because we were able to attract the best and the brightest from Russia, India, China, etc. Without that level of openness, we fall to the same pit of stagnation that Mainland Europe, the UK, and Japan fell into.
One of the reason for western stagnation is just the amount of regulations. That's why heavily regulated industries are usually quite successful in Europe (like pharmaceutical companies), but garage startups? Not really. Sweden is basically the only exception. And UK (every 10 years lol).
> Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Fermi, von Neumann
People like this are exceptions really. Though there are always trends over the years when some countries produce more talents than the other. It is like there is a beacon shining at one point and a lot of talents are born close to each other.
> Also regarding visa - well there are more indians in the visa queue than probably multiple countries combined. If they make it as fast as other countries - indians will just move in millions and millions simply due to sheer amount of people they have.
This is already happening in Canada and it is destroying many governmental services like healthcare, education, and of course housing. There definitely need to be reasonable caps in place otherwise services cannot scale up quickly enough to accommodate. I'm sure USA is like Canada in this respect; many services are already woefully underfunded or backlogged without even increasing immigration rates.
I'm also surprised someone who is more well-off would want to leave their country to come to North America. I would think their money would go much further in their own country. But maybe there is more to it than I realize.
> I'm also surprised someone who is more well-off would want to leave their country to come to North America. I would think their money would go much further in their own country. But maybe there is more to it than I realize.
It really depends on how well off you are and the reasons for that. Let's take my home country as an example.
We have IT people earning like 3-5x times more than the regular people (like you get salary 2000$ while the rent will be 200$ at worst, with average salary being below 500$. New apartments cost 100k in the capital but outside the capital even 40k is considered an expensive apartment). And we have police and military earning similar (and more money. Not to mention corruption). Both IT and police can afford buying expensive goods and stuff, can afford apartments, good food and so on.
Both can live like kings, but at the same time people are limited to what they can get and find in their country. It is like to be a king of the village - you are the king, sure, but in the city you have more opportunities, more advancements, more access to resources.
When I was leaving the country we did not even have Spotify, for example. And I was earning like 5x times of the average. But there was no point in that. And that's just a software service - there are issues with medication, education etc. So even if you earn more, it might not be worth it.
However in case of IT, it is not a problem for me to get a relatively decent salary in a foreign country while as a military person or a police officer it will become close to impossible to reach the same level without a lot of things attached to that. So for people like this, being a king of a village is worth more than being an average in some foreign country. But, each and every time, they are trying to send their children to a foreign country to live or to study.
And that's without people who have no opportunities or cannot learn foreign language and thus cannot leave.
In India you have extremely rich and extremely poor, coming from various developed and underdeveloped countries and all know English most of the time and often has IT education - with their much bigger population just sheer amount of people leaving will be a lot. A lot.
Thanks for that perspective. I wish there was more of a focus on people trying to improve their own countries versus running to another country, but I can understand why people would choose that option.
The problem I've been seeing in Canada is that we have A TON of new people coming from India. Aside from all our services being unable to handle things. The other problem is that people from these cultures tend to stick together, rather than assimilate. When the rates of immigration are kept lower and the people being brought in are more diverse, the problem isn't really present. But when about 90-95% of new people are coming from one country, the problem really surfaces.
People will say they are trying to get away from the bad practices in their country and that they want to improve, however in practice it doesn't seem 100% true. Many continue to operate the same way as where they came from. Especially since they can stay within their Indian communities and rarely need to interact with the existing population. Canada has now began shifting towards a more low trust society. Even things like food banks aren't save from many new immigrants as they are viewing them as places for them to keep more of their salary rather than as places for people really struggling.
And I think this is part of the reason many people start to become against immigration. When they see their own countries culture/norms/values start to get degraded. Many people even start to feel real hatred and racist feelings towards groups because of it.
To me, leaving a country for betterment makes sense in a way. But leaving to another country to copy your own countries practices just seems odd to me.
> Thanks for that perspective. I wish there was more of a focus on people trying to improve their own countries versus running to another country, but I can understand why people would choose that option.
Most of the time the improvements are coming from the top. So what usually happens - and we observe it over the course of history - countries reach peak, then decline and decline until they collapse or fall, and then again rise by using some external means (finding cheap resources etc). Every time you need the government that actually does things (forces/gives morale boost to the people) - or a revolution. Any other time it will be endless bureaucracy in democratic societies (nothing is getting done or takes too much time) or nepotism and corruption (with authoritarian flavor) in less democratic societies.
> People will say they are trying to get away from the bad practices in their country and that they want to improve, however in practice it doesn't seem 100% true
It is not true for sure. Especially with many people coming at once or forming their own small communities. When you are alone - you are forced to adapt. But when you are not alone you can keep your own culture and traditions without changes, while having benefits of a developed society.
I see it all the time - if you are used to throw away trash outside of trash box in your home country, then by coming here you will continue doing that sooner or later with more people from your countries coming here. Same with public transportation - in my country in order to travel from one region to another region, we used to have a train once per day. Per day. Here you get trains once every 10-15 minutes. So even if the public transportation will decline (fall apart, more delays and cancellations) I will feel ok (and a lot of people will feel ok) because I am used to such conditions and with bigger populations coming from the same culture and gaining rights to vote and so on - nobody will care about such things because we are just used to have it worse.
Or another example - in my country we are used to have fully crowded buses, coming every 30 minutes. Here if they cancelled a couple of buses and it would start arriving crowded, I would feel "at home" and it would not be a shock me and I would less likely to care about that because I simply used to it in my home country. It would be a minor issue for me. And you can imagine that with more people coming with the same mentality, it will just degrade the quality of living.
That's why adaptation and supporting the habits, rules and laws of your new country is important - because you came here due to them. You wanted to live in that "clean and nice country". Don't bring your bad habits with you.
Many people thought Alicloud would eat AWS/Azure/GCP's lunch in the developing world, since they expanded really fast and priced aggressively. But there's a limit to what even extremely price-conscious customers will accept, and their service quality and support was just not up to scratch.
Chinese manufacturers are steadily creeping upmarket though: Haier, BYD, Xiaomi, DJI, Anker etc are all producing increasingly solid hardware with software that's distinctly not great, but tolerable (and certainly good enough to compete with Japan/Korea, who don't exactly shine on this front either).
Those companies you listed, especially DJI and Anker, are the exception rather than the rule. In my experience living there for 6 years, Chinese companies at all levels tend to cut corners too easily and focus on short-term profits. Very few are capable or willing to put in what it takes to establish a brand that can compete with Western brands. DJI was helped by being in a relatively new market without long-establish brands, Anker to a similar extent (and also produces less expensive products). It's much easier to buy a foreign brand (like Geely with Volvo) than to try to establish your own brand internationally. Even huge companies like BYD, Huawai, and Xiomi (smaller but very popular in China) have not made headway except in less developed countries.
> But there's a limit to what even extremely price-conscious customers will accept, and their service quality and support was just not up to scratch
I totally agree! I've worked on Chinese CSPs and they are annoying. IMO they could have been much better, but they are extremely insular and fall into the same trap of lack of localization that I mentioned in my comment.
> American companies need to actually localize and build the "cultural competency"
Not gonna happen.
It's much easier to manage a company that has all-American culture, and American market is the biggest anyway, so it makes sense to focus on it as the priority #1 because that's how you achieve fastest growth.
When a local company starts growing too much and threatens your business, you just buy it and allow it to run as a subsidiary. All the money, none of the effort.
Depending on the market and industry, it's already started. Take a look at Google and Meta's ad buy in India, Brazil, and Indonesia for example.
> When a local company starts growing too much and threatens your business, you just buy it and allow it to run as a subsidiary. All the money, none of the effort
Some do attempt this (eg. Walmart's acquisition of Flipkart) but it doesn't always succeed.
For example, Zoho was an acquisition target of Google and Yahoo back in the day.
And most countries have regulators that try to bar this kind of a move for competitive reasons.
For example, it was Chinese regulators that crashed Intel's attempt at acquiring Tower, and Broadcom's attempt at acquiring Qualcomm, and there's the whole sordid saga around Carl Ghosn's tenure at Nissan.
56% of Apple's revenue is from outside the US. 38% of Boeing's revenue is from outside the US. 58% of Caterpillar's revenue is from outside the US. (Those are the first three companies I checked.)
If American companies took the attitude "America #1, we don't need foreign customers," I don't think you would like the impact the resulting revenue loss would have on the American economy.
Apple doesn’t make much hardware in the USA anymore, so you have to count the software and hardware IP from the actually hardware/finished product, so accounting what percent of value for an iPhone is generated in China/other countries vs the USA. For Boeing it’s slightly easier, but they also have an international supply chain.
By becoming completely insular, you lose the ability to innovate, as you cater to a subset of consumers and as such aren't being pushed to test the limits of the existing status quo.
For example, look at what happened to Sony - they were a darling of the Consumer Technology space and the Apple of the 1990s-early 2000s, but because they concentrating on the Japanese market at the expense of the global market, they fell drastically behind in innovation.
A similar story happened with Nokia, RIM, GM, etc as well.
Competition from players like BYD, DJI, and Huawei has helped incentivize innovation in the Li-on Battery space (eg. Panasonic, Tesla), the low budget drone space (eg. Andruil, Skydio), and 5-6G sector (eg. Cradlepoint, Qualcomm)
An insular America is an uncompetitive America. An uncompetitive America is a weaker America. A weaker America opens political vacuums from the Red Sea to Central Africa to Myanmar.
Primary implies the lack of localization, and localization is a critical piece of innovation, as it forces you to consider additional user experience enhancements.
From a typography standpoint, think about how you would represent Hudum versus Latin fonts on a mobile app or PWA now that Mongolia is deprecating Cyrillic script.
On the Cloud side, a lot of major K8s orchestration and edge computing innovations were sparked by Chinese telcos and tech vendors trying to work around GFW related latency issues.
> On the Cloud side, a lot of major K8s orchestration and edge computing innovations were sparked by Chinese telcos and tech vendors trying to work around GFW related latency issues.
If my feature's primary market is the US, I'm not going to prioritize Japanese localization or GDPR compliance. Those two epics will remain in the backlog until a sufficiently large enough opportunity arises to justify a pivot to meet those feature requests.
I am not going to justify limited engineering resources to localization if the localization isn't aimed at my primary market.
This is why GOOG or MSFT haven't prioritized building billing infrastructure for Naira, but something a company like Zoho absolutely can.
My hunch is Zoho is using Razorpay (YC W15) for payments, and Razorpay has been pivoting to support the Africa and ASEAN markets (like most Indian companies have been for decades).
Did you read the article? The whole point is that African companies are replacing GOOG and MSFT with Zoho because Zoho is more responsive to their needs.
Increasingly, American companies cannot expect to succeed internationally on the strength of brand alone, if they are not willing to customize their product and service offerings to meet local requirements.
This is why China is investing so heavily in EVs and green energy. They don’t want to have to go to war over oil in the future, and they would rather be immune to oil price fluctuations. Same with imported coal and natural gas. It is just as much about national security as it is about environment.
The USA could do the same, but it produces a lot of oil and gas so there is more resistance against it. But they make those a part of the world market, so whenever Russia or the Middle East go nuts, the price of oil rises and affects consumers at home as well as allies, and we feel compelled to be implied militarily.
The problem is that with giant trade deficits since the the Reagan Era, either Americans scale down their consumption habits by a lot, or America needs to export more.
America can't rely on the global appetite for the US dollar and US Treasury Bonds forever to keep consuming what other countries consume.
The Petro Dollar is not going anywhere anytime soon, but it definitely has a future expiration date. The global demand for the dollar and US bonds won't disappear tomorrow, but it will cool down somewhere in the future, and thus America can't let go of international markets, unless it wants to downsize a lot.
And the problem with Downsizing is that due to the absurd levels of wealth concentration, the middle-class and the poor are really poorly equipped for such a thing.
We are not on the 50's and 60's anymore when the US share of the global GDP was almost half of it, if we measure it using PPP, it is only about 15%, less than China. America can't just rest on its laurels, it needs to be globally competitive.
Hello alephnerd, Loved reading your insights. I am one of the editors of this story, and I was surprised when the reporters told me that most other tools (Google and Microsoft) did not allow African entrepreneurs to pay in local currencies. That does seem like something that can be easily fixed, if there's will. Here's hoping that all global companies make the playing field even for all global entrepreneurs.
My hunch is Zoho is using Razorpay (YC W15) internally for payments.
A company like GOOG can't justify using a product like Razorpay that is directly competing with internal platforms.
> That does seem like something that can be easily fixed
It's a very hard problem due to KYC, AML, and a multitude of other compliance and legal headaches. That's why Stripe and Razorpay can justify multi-billion dollar valuations.
> A company like GOOG can't justify using a product like Razorpay that is directly competing with internal platforms.
This does seem silly, though, even though it's probably already obvious to say. If they want to build something, and why not, build an integrating service over the top of that one and the internal ones, and figure out how to select the one to use based on the currency/location/etc.
It's partially for financial reasons (why should I pay you to undermine my lead) as well as competitive (the competitor can extrapolate our own internal trends, and then potentially use it against us in competitive deals).
This is why Walmart is famous for forcing every single one of it's vendors not use Amazon services in a Walmart related SKU (eg. If I'm selling a SaaS to Walmart, I either need to migrate the Walmart portion to GCP or Azure, or not get the Walmart contract).
Apple also buys Google Cloud products for iCloud even though there are alternatives that don't have rival mobile platforms.
If Google used market research from Cloud customer usage patterns to bolster its Android products, then I would expect various regulatory agencies to start knocking on our door with (more) antitrust action and calling for a breakup of the company.
Similarly, I'd be surprised if Samsung uses its foundry customer data for market research for its smartphone segment.
> Apple also buys Google Cloud products for iCloud even though there are alternatives that don't have rival mobile platforms.
GCP is separate from Google. While they're both Alphabet subsidiaries, the pot of money used by GCP is separate from the pot of money used by the Pixel team (within Google).
Kurien doesn't report to Pichai and vice versa.
> then I would expect various regulatory agencies to start knocking on our door with (more) antitrust action and calling for a breakup of the company
This falls under "competitive intelligence" which ISN'T treated as corporate espionage legally, because you are extrapolating data from sources.
As I've mentioned on here before, Competitive Intel is SOP for all companies, and every largeish (post-Series D) company has a CompIntel department under their PM or PMM org.
> GCP is separate from Google. While they're both Alphabet subsidiaries, the pot of money used by GCP is separate from the pot of money used by the Pixel team (within Google).
> Kurien doesn't report to Pichai and vice versa.
This is patently false. Thomas Kurian reports directly to Sundar Pichai, who is both the CEO of Google as well as Alphabet.
While Kurian likes to refer to himself as the CEO of Google Cloud, that's as much a vanity title as Susan Wojcicki's former title of "CEO of YouTube" -- neither has been an independent company during their tenure, under the Alphabet umbrella or otherwise. (YouTube was once an independent company... pre-acquisition almost 20 years ago.) All Google Cloud employees are Google employees, just as all YouTube employees are Google employees.
> This falls under "competitive intelligence" which ISN'T treated as corporate espionage legally, because you are extrapolating data from sources.
I never said it was corporate espionage. However, it is potentially anti-competitive behavior to use data (market research, whatever you want to call it) from one product to boost another. (Context matters.)
Are you familiar with the EU's Digital Markets Act, which recently went into effect? Google is designated as one of the "gatekeepers" by the European Commission, and the act itself reads:
> The gatekeeper shall not use, in competition with business users, any data that is not publicly available that is generated or provided by those business users in the context of their use of the relevant core platform services or of the services provided together with, or in support of, the relevant core platform services, including data generated or provided by the customers of those business users.
While GCP and other cloud platforms have not yet been explicitly designated as core platform services by the European Commission, it's only a matter of time before that happens.
Not very hard but they should prefer big fat clients over tiny ones. Google products are at the top of my list of things to avoid. I don't have time for their endless work for free assignments. I'll reluctantly use their services if they are just to good but I keep in mind I'm not client material.
I hear of zoho for the first time, it apparently has 100m users. I hear they have actual support. There are employees on this page answering questions, or should I say busting myths? I haven't seen any of their products and it already sounds superior.
European regulators talk big, but European companies (German+French) have really horrid internal security practices.
I don't want to name names as it can affect me professionally, but I would never trust a European (German+French) digital platform developed by one of their traditional conglomerates - even a stereotypically non-technical American F500 like Home Depot has way better technical and security practices than some of the European (German+French) conglomerates I've dealt with.
These are organizations where managing ACLs are a brand new practice.
If we're sharing anecadata, I've interacted professionally with organisations of all sizes and types (from startups to big banks to public sector) from all around the world, and I strongly disagree.
Legacy companies exist everywhere. Big banks with weird "security" practices exist everywhere. There's nothing special about French or German companies' digital security. If anything, they're often better than American ones because there's regulations forcing them to deal with some things like securing private data, meanwhile companies like Equifax can leak everything about everyone and not care in the slightest.
I wasn't talking about European financial companies - they're actually pretty decent at security because European financial regulators actually have teeth, and the internal platforms for a Deustche Bank or BNP Paribas are fairly forward facing (or at least as forward facing as very large and old conglomerates can be).
The companies I'd be worried about are outside the financial sector. I know it's all anecdotal so we're just randos on the internet yelling at each other, but actual enforcement of European data and security regulations (outside of the financial sector) are minimal, and more critically, very basic platform security practices haven't percolated.
That said, I can safely say that Equifax has completely revamped their infra to prevent a leak like the one they previously faced. They had a complete rearchitecture and heads rolled.
And I'm not talking about financial sector exclusively either. All sorts of companies, even centuries old ones, are taking security seriously and even if there often is lots of legacy stuff, there's no material differences with Indonesian or American or Brazilian companies
The price of being first - you are much slower to make any new changes.
I'm Polish, our internet infrastructure is miles better than German. Paying via phone is norm.
Were I cross the German border, I'd think it's a museum.
But we didn't do anything particularly right. We just could implement our infrastructure on the newest ideas, while for Germany they're stuck with what they had as pioneers.
The exact same mistakes as Japan - deciding to concentrate on their large local market which is protected via tariffs, but then completely outsourcing IP in non-target markets via JVs (eg. Renault's JVs in India, Volkswagen's JVs in China, Dassault and Thales JVs in India, Airbus JVs in China), but also failing to attract enough talent from abroad to innovate in these countries.
The Eurozone crisis also completely destroyed Western Europe's competitiveness (like the Asian Financial Crisis and Black Thursday did for Japan).
American companies make JVs abroad as well, but will also help transfer promising employees to the US, give them a competitive salary, and sponsor their visa process.
If you're smart enough to become a MechE for Dassault in India, you're also smart enough to become a MechE for Ford R&D in the US or India. Going from earning €25k in India to €45-50k in France or Germany isn't worth it, compared to moving to America and earning €90-110k.
Germany's automotive industry is a great example of this. In the 1990s-2000s, they began a MASSIVE expansion into China. Chinese consumers ditched their bicycles and motorbikes for the VW Jetta. But while VW continued to concentrate on ICE vehicles, Chinese challenger brands in the 2000s began researching EV technology as they were already the goto suppliers for batteries. Fast forward to today, and now German companies are dependent on Chinese EV R&D in order to build European EV platforms.
This is not exactly the fault of VW/Renault etc. China has quite explicitly encouraged technology transfer as an important strategic imperative for their local firms, so if these companies wanted to play in the (obviously growing) Chinese market, technology transfer was the price to be paid.
(Another example of this is the high-speed trains in China - the first generation was built by JVs with Siemens/Hitachi/etc with an explicit policy of technology transfer, but the newest trains in China are now local, built on top of the technology that has been acquired.)
There's a reason I mentioned Renault and Dassault - to show that it's not just a China thing.
Every country pushes for JVs, but it's up to the individual companies themselves to defend their IP, or at least integrate the host country's talent base with the home country's innovation system so that it's mutually beneficial (eg. What Japanese companies did in Korea in the 1970s-80s).
American companies do that (eg. L1/2 transfers and O-1 visas) but European and Japanese companies don't as often.
US companies haven't had any more success in protecting their IP in China and avoiding "tech transfer" than European companies; it's endemic to operating in China ("somehow" your tech leaks from your JV to your Chinese competitors, who in some cases may even be owned by the same group of people through a web of shell companies). (The solar panel industry is a good example of this.)
Not concentrating on localization and expanding their TAM.
Japanese firms had much less money to play around with after the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s, and localization costs a LOT of money.
Japan is already a large (125M+ pop, $4T GDP) market with an insular population that only really speaks Japanese.
This meant Japanese companies line Sony, Toshiba, etc can survive by just selling to Japanese customers without having to worry about spending money on innovating or building competitive products, as non-Japanese companies didn't care as much about Japanese localization and Japanese consumers couldn't really afford dollar denominated products on a Japanese salary.
Within 15 years, Japan got overshadowed by Korea, which to Japanese before rhe 2010s was what Americans think of Mexico. Korea has a much smaller population and historically had a much poorer population than Japan (they only caught up in median household incomes recently-ish - last 5 years), and as such Korean companies were more international facing and open to adopting best practices from abroad and competing in the developing world (it was Korean companies like Samsung that paved the path for Apple to begin manufacturing in China, India, and Vietnam)
Companies like Sony, Toyota, and Kirin got overshadowed by Samsung (Korea), Hyundai (Korea), and Lotte (Korea), and Korean conglomerates like Lotte began buying up Japanese prestige brands, and even Japanese-Koreans became like Mayoshi Son major titans of industry
Not necessarily, on the tech side, but localized support can get pretty hairy.
Also, it depends on what your product is. Many different nations have many different laws, and localization is more than just changing the words in your screens.
Only made them a top 5 economy with a tiny population, few natural resources and little to no land.
Sounds like being a U.S. vassal state is an excellent place to be.
Which is actually truer than one may think. Most U.S. “vassal states” do excellently, including much of Europe, Israel, Saudi Arabia, etc.
The primary reason behind that is they are not vassal states. The U.S. doesn’t have vassal states (outside of maybe Puerto Rico) and yes it has expectations of its allies but those are surprisingly low compared to even the shitties states to be vassals of. Compare what the U.S. expects of Saudi Arabia or Japan (what impositions does it place?) to what Russia expects of its vassal states (many of which it has literally taken over by force), or China (look at what China is doing to BRI countries like Pakistan and Sri Lanka…hollowing their economy out and getting paid for the privilege…) or even India (which has gone on an all out economic war against Mauritius because a couple of clowns in their government said something they didn’t like).
Heck, even to the extent China or India are succeeding economically it’s because of the U.S. economic ties. China is almost entirely built by American investment over the past few decades. And even the subject of this specific story, Zoho, part of the Indian IT ecosystem, is entirely a result of US economic partnership starting in the 90s.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that American “vassal statehood” is literally the only path to economic success and prosperity since WW2.
That's not the mainstream economic consensus, nor what the Japanese economists themselves think.
One thing often forgotten is that the trade surplus of Germany and Japan was so high that it was literally squeezing out the growth of other export developing countries. That kind of artificially overleveraged bubble is unsustainable for any nation, and the Japanese failed to make the neccesary reforms till it burst. Germany managed to come out fine, while setting the stage for the rest of Asian tigers to rise.
First of all, Maldives not Mauritius. Their current president won on a campaign of India out and then a minister said Indians smell and something about cowdung. I guess we Indians need to develop thick skins and still go to Maldives for leisure travel because self respect is only reserved for westerners.
Frankly it is simply the US dollar being overvalued. It is making US exports way too expensive for most of the world. Google can't really compete and make any money.
> WHY IN HELL IS EUROPE, WITH ITS INCREDIBLE AMOUNT OF AVAILABLE RESOURCES NOT DOING TH SAME?!?
Probably because Euro is much more stable (relative to dollar) than Naira (the official currency of Nigeria). So european companies don’t feel the need to compromise for an inferior service (this claim comes from the article linked in the OP, not from me) or bother creating their own one.
If EU countries had an ongoing inflation rate of 30%+, which would result in GCP/AWS costs for european companies go up insanely every year (without GCP/AWS increasing pricing on their end and usage staying constant), I bet EU would consider switching to a cloud provider that accepts EUR instead of USD as well[0].
That’s not a good problem to have at all.
0. I have no idea if GCP/AWS accept payments in EUR. So that statement was written with a scenario in mind where GCP/AWS only accept USD (to draw an analogy with the situation in Nigeria).
> If EU countries had an ongoing inflation rate of 30%+, which would result in GCP/AWS costs for european companies go up insanely every year
Inflation would mean that the nominal revenues of EU companies would also increase to the same extent. Thus, the affordability of the foreign service would, ceteris paribus, remain the same.
> Inflation would mean that the nominal revenues of EU companies would also increase to the same extent.
Only if their customers are not from EU (aka their customers pay in USD instead of EUR) or if the company increases pricing to match the inflation on a regular basis (while managing to not lose any customers).
With the first scenario being a very specific edge case, and the second scenario being borderline impossible, I don’t see the inflation being a nothingburger here. Otherwise, the Nigerian companies wouldn’t care about the inflation either.
> Only if their customers are not from EU (aka their customers pay in USD instead of EUR) or if the company increases pricing to match the inflation on a regular basis (while managing to not lose any customers).
Under standard conditions (nothing else then inflation matters), is the same for the domestic market. If we have x % yearly inflation, it means that the exchange rate at the end of the year is x % "higher", meaning the costs for the company are x % higher, but likewise the prices for companies's goods and services are x % higher and thus their revenues. So its profit margin (in percentage of its costs) remains the same.
> Otherwise, the Nigerian companies wouldn’t care about the inflation either.
The real problem is not inflation per se, but accelerated, unpredictable inflation. This ruins the exchange rates of a currency, as it is a risk that is not easy to manage. Due to these unfavourable exchange rates, companies from such countries are exposed to greater cost pressure when they purchase services in countries with a hard currency.
Calm down. This is just a single (private - so no public data or real numbers - just what they claim) Indian company (unsupported by the Indian Govt in any way shape or form) doing a decent job. It has nothing to do with political will.
You say it takes political will, but this isn’t a political decision by African companies. The first three bullet points tell you what’s going on pretty well: African companies are choosing to use a more affordable competitor that they can use local currencies to pay for even though the product isn’t quite as good (per the article, I have no horse in this race myself) and doesn’t have the same level of developer community support. It’s an affordability tradeoff, which is valid, but fundamentally it didn’t take any crap like the political will to do it, just buying decisions at the corporate level.
And if you dig down, all you’re really getting is that Google and Microsoft are the established players but Zoho is making a nice business for itself at their expense with African startups.
What is it that Africa does? Choose the cheaper alternative they can pay with their own currency?
How can the EU (Remember, Europe also has large parts of Russia and other countries) do to mimic that? Become much poorer and change the public currency to something Google does not want.
Lower vages in developing countries have always been one of the major drives for outsourcing. Without market ristrictions, as long as there is no other advantage that an industrialised country can provide, the business will in the long run move to the developing country.
It does seem telling that I don't use a single Europe-based tech service that I know of, even a free one. In fact the only tech companies I can think of, some game developers, are in the UK, no longer in the EU.
do what exactly? it doesn't seem like these African startups are choosing it because of some regulation based on "political will". they're choosing Zoho because it's cheaper and they can use their currency. if they were richer and Google supported their currency (like most EU startups) they would probably choose Google.
The problem is EU does not want home-grown ecosystem. EU wants BigTech they can do business (as well as „business“) with.
Big old businesses are very reliant on export to certain markets. E.g. German car industry in China. Thus there's a big push to not have protectionist policies due to fear of retaliation. But such approach does not help to build local ecosystems in newer niches.
> Could you imagine EU doing to TikTok what US did?
Since they seem to have no qualms picking fights with big US tech when they run afoul of their regulations...yes. Yes I can absolutely imagine that.
Plus, establishing a homegrown market is not "protectionist politics". It's allowing for, and enabling, competition, which, according to every proponent of capitalism, is a good thing (which is funny, because capitalisms systems actively enable and encourage to stifle competition as muc as possible, because it threatens the bottom line of established players. But I digress).
What is China going to be (officially) angry about? That the EU takes their own money to fund startups and alternatives, in, and for, their own home market?
> Since they seem to have no qualms picking fights with big US tech when they run afoul of their regulations...yes. Yes I can absolutely imagine that.
Meh. It's just squeezing some cash.
> Plus, establishing a homegrown market is not "protectionist politics".
It's 100% protectionist politics once you start doing more interesting things :)
> It's allowing for, and enabling, competition, which, according to every proponent of capitalism
Ah yes. That's exactly what modern europe is known for :)
> What is China going to be (officially) angry about? That the EU takes their own money to fund startups and alternatives, in, and for, their own home market?
China doesn't need to be officially angry. They can simply retaliate by forcing EU-related companies out. Sort of like they already do, just more strictly. Which is funny that China has all sorts of protectionist policies, but what if West retaliates... All hell breaks loose.
> It's 100% protectionist politics once you start doing more interesting things :)
So its aggressive economic politics now if country A buy less from country B, by making the stuff it needs itself? That doesn't compute.
> They can simply retaliate by forcing EU-related companies out.
Sure, they can do that. Only, given that the EU is their most important trading partner, and forcing companies out would probably spiral China into a recession, destroying decades worth of economic growth in the process, I somewhat doubt that China is willing to shoot itself in the foot just to throw a tantrum.
> So its aggressive economic politics now if country A buy less from country B, by making the stuff it needs itself? That doesn't compute.
Yes it is. The problem with modern manufacturing (and services to lesser extent) is not to build something, but find a market for it.
> Sure, they can do that. Only, given that the EU is their most important trading partner, and forcing companies out would probably spiral China into a recession, destroying decades worth of economic growth in the process, I somewhat doubt that China is willing to shoot itself in the foot just to throw a tantrum.
China is already doing all sort of protectionist practices. And West does not retaliate. Furthermore, it plays along to make a quick buck in massive Chinese market.
Do you want what would send China into a recession for sure? Chinese economy is export-driven. If West limited import from China (effectively capping Chinese export), that'd do a lot of damage to China. And China knows that very well.
Ok, but can Zoho offer things like HIPPA compliance or “EU only” hosting and services for data protection?
Kudos to businesses who can make use of this Zoho in a safe way but one would hate to expose one’s users to a company based in some strange dictatorship of a country.
Good catch, I did a search but none of these were in the top results for me (I guess that's the state of search these days).
My main point however was that India doesn't have an agreement with the EU regarding the transfer and protection of personal data (e.g. the EU-US Privacy Shield and related). So while the links above state how much Zoho cares about privacy, the platform is not suitable for use-cases including personal information.
Thank you, I looked at Zoho a number of years ago and when I reached out to their team they did not recommend using them for HIPAA related transactions. I'm happy to see that change!
I am an African based in Uganda and I am currently working on my project https://labour.quest
I wanted to start by using Google Workplace. But then switched to Zoho for the generous free tier.
I am so glad I did. Zoho has so many tools that a project needs to run "built in".
For example I was thinking of signing up for the services below but Zoho already had these built in.
SendGrid - Zepto Mail MailChimp - Zoho Campaigns Email - Zoho Emails
Not to mention many other tools like CRMs
It's a real "batteries included" service for email & communication.
I'm sure you're aware, but you have to be careful with being very reliant on free-tier products. Once a magnitude of people are "locked in" then they'll start to do some of the pricing and licensing shenanigans where once common features or bundled products get hidden under a fee or broken up after an update.
(Interesting project BTW, I'd just recommend having a screenshot or 2 of one of the resumes if you're explicitly advertising them as beautiful. Calling them that is one thing, but showing people that is much better.)
This sentence gives me PTSD. We got the startup "90% discount" from Hubspot but what they don't tell you is that it's 5 users plan which you are locked in to. Then they lock you on to min 5 users for sales for the next two years where you are spending up to $500 per month which you cannot break out of.
To cancel it you have to notify them ON THE DAY of renewal because it's yearly contract.
We only had one sales person in our startup and all our customer data was locked in Hubspot + we were using their chat+ email.
I spent a weekend writing up scripts and moving to self hosted service (TileDesk!) and I had to cancel my credit card; there was no way out because you sign the "contract" when you take up their startup plan (https://mvpgrow.com/hubspot-for-startups/)
Zoho has a fantastic progrma for startups. You can explore that as well. Its straight forward with wallet credits.
Thanks for the warning! That’s super sketch.
To be fair, while they did introduce new restrictions in the past, for example disabling imap support for free email accounts, the restrictions did not apply to older accounts that had already these features activated. Ie if you were using imap before the change, you would not have to pay to continue using it.
Ime zoho has been very reliable. Not relying on venture capital [0] and seemingly working on longer than shorter term profit makes it imo also less likely to resort to this type of strategies.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/10/how-zoho-became-1b-company...
> I'm sure you're aware, but you have to be careful with being very reliant on free-tier products
Depends where the org is in its economies of scale, operating leverage, cost efficiencies (vs volume), and earnings. Zoho is based in India, in business for decades with pretty much the same model, reaping millions in profits, and can very well afford to not bill its clients as if it was paying developers in London or San Francisco.
Thanks for the feedback.
Zoho is hugely underrated.
They have a massive suite of capabilities, so much so a SMB (most of the worlds businesses) could run their entire company off of Zoho.
Because it isn't a Bay Area company, or making exciting products - makes them overlooked far too much.
For those who use Zoho, they love it because it-just-works.
I'm a fan of Zoho, but you do need to be clear eyed. You're not going to find a huge ecosystem like you will with Salesforce, 365 or other platforms. The UX can also be fairly clunky, and their approach to features is definitely "me too". On the other hand, you can't beat the price and convenience of being able to sign up for just about anything with a credit card.
> it isn't a Bay Area company
They started off in Pleasanton and still have a massive presence there. Zoho ads are very common on Bart as well.
> They started off in Pleasanton
That's not correct.
"In the 1990s, in a small apartment located in the suburbs of Chennai in southern India"
https://www.zoho.com/ourstory.html#:~:text=In%20the%201990s,...
He lived in Palo Alto and Pleasanton for several years and still has a ranch/mansion in Tassajara.
Be that as it may - it wasn't started in Palo Alto or Pleasanton. Their about page[1] mentions the predecessor company was founded in New Jersey (1996), before moving to San Jose (1998), then Pleasanton (2000)
1. https://www.zoho.com/aboutus.html
I don't see that information on that link.
On this link "Our Story" (https://www.zoho.com/ourstory.html?ireft=nhome&src=aboutus-d...) I see:
"In the 1990s, in a small apartment located in the suburbs of Chennai in southern India, a simple, yet revolutionary idea was born: "Build smart technology to help businesses work better." This idea evolved to become the world-class technology company we're known as today."
According to Wikipedia:
"From 1996 to 2011, the company was known as AdventNet, Inc. and initially provided network management software.[8][9]
AdventNet expanded operations into Japan in 2001 and shifted focus to small and medium businesses (SMBs).[9]
Zoho CRM was released in 2005, along with Zoho Writer, the company's first Office suite product.[9] Zoho Projects, Creator, Sheet, and Show were released in 2006.[9] Zoho expanded into the collaboration space with the release of Zoho Docs and Zoho Meeting in 2007. In 2008, the company added invoicing and mail applications, reaching one million users by August of that year."
So they were not providing SMB office software until 2005.
It's weird to me that there are these two narratives. Are we talking about the same Zoho, or is there more to it to either of these stories? Was it a case of shifting origin stories? One of the 2009 articles announcing the change in name from AdventNet to Zoho included mentioning the corporate HQ in Pleasanton.
> It's weird to me that there are these two narratives.
Company narratives are often crafted by marketing teams.
> I don't see that information on that link.
I may have been overzealous is removing what I thought were tracking parameters. If you click on "about us" in the footer and scroll all the way to the bottom or click on 1996 - you'll find the text about AdventNet, which I suppose is the source for Wikipedia
https://www.zoho.com/aboutus.html?ireft=nhome&src=ourstory-f...
But it still isn’t a Bay Area company.
I built some backend CRM stuff at a previous job on Zoho and was consistently amazed at how great it was. Everything "just worked" and was surprisingly well thought out. It lacks some of the polish that can make it feels fully "complete" but my experience with it was generally very positive.
Zoho prices strategically. For example, it ensures that the price for the help desk product, ZohoDesk is the lowest in the market; across all tier it is priced at USD 1/month cheaper than the next cheapest competitor, FreshDesk.
Also, IIRC, the CEO of Freshworks (company behind FreshDesk) was heading product management at Zoho earlier.
You're right: https://www.linkedin.com/in/girish1/
They just separated out Servers in Endpoint Central, where servers now require a different license. My use of the product will not change, the price of renewal goes up 12%. I'm paying more this year for the same thing. Strategic pricing indeed, lock'em in and crank'em up.
Also, Redhat and CentOS are 'servers' under this new licensing, but Ubuntu is not a server.
I've found Endpoint Central to be rather buggy, and not really improving over time, they just keep introducing new bugs.
Endpoint Central, now with arbitrary pricing.
Zoho's biggest asset is that it's generally Good Enough. I was an early adopter of their remote desktop software, and it went from being Good Enough to Good. They're responsive to feedback and generally good folks. We recommend them at work for their email on a regular basis (context: managed WordPress hosting)
I can't speak highly enough about the responsiveness. I've had a few issues with their products (for example, they locked me out of my email account while traveling abroad) and they resolved all of them very quickly. I also once suggested a very small UX improvement, expecting my request to fall into the ether, and was surprised when they implemented it about 2-3 weeks later.
Zoho Analytics came bundled with an electronic health record we use. Support has been very responsive, and I attended a 2-3 day intensive data reporting training with some of their Indian data team who were absolutely fantastic, experts in the system and fun to work with.
I set my wife's side-hustle business up on Zoho four or five years ago. It was very smooth, and excellent value. Would recommend.
It's not covered in the article, but I wonder if inflation has much to do with this. Nigerian inflation in March was 33.2%, and is still trending upward[1]. Pricing in Naira moves some inflationary risk to Zoho, right? At the same time, if US-based competitors have priced their product in a constant amount of dollars, those products are now costing several times what they cost a few years ago.
(I have no idea about inflation in the other countries mentioned in the article, it just seemed odd to not mention it at all when they were discussing Nigerian companies)
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/nigeria-inflation-rises...
Yup. Nigerian currency has taken massive hits these last few years relative to USD.
I've used Zoho's free email account for my personal domain name for years and it's worked great.
Zoho is a major player in the industry being direct competitor to small business. They are also bootstrapped.
> bootstraped
i think they got a big injection when yahoo bought them, tried to dogfood in lieu of exchange, failed and sold for pennies back to the founders
I believe you have Zoho confused with another company. Zoho has never taken any outside investments and has always been bootstrapped. There are countless articles about Zoho being bootstrapped online as well as on Zoho’s web pages. Disclosure: I work for Zoho.
https://www.zoho.com/aboutus.html#:~:text=a%20private%20comp...
https://www.zoho.com/25/values-convictions/#:~:text=we've%20...
https://www.zoho.com/ourstory.html#:~:text=our%20decision%20...
https://x.com/svembu/status/1279622800303509504
I think you're confusing Zoho for Zimbra. Zoho was never bought and they intend to stay private. In fact, the co-founder is very vocal about it.
I haven't heard the name Zimbra in a long time... I had mixed experiences administering a deployment of that :)
Anyway, thanks to this and the other comments reminding me to read up at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbra
Of course I didn't know that, but if true, that's wonderful. I am saddened by the ongoing destruction of value when a decent product or company is acquired, and then shuttered because it's not quite the juggernaut the acquirer expected it to be, or because there's some unforseen misalignment, even though this company was a viable business. Selling it back is a great solution, instead of doing a write-off where the company is destroyed.
When did this happen? I just couldn't find any links. Is it Zoho or Zimbra?
I think they're confused. It was Zimbra.
I dont think Zoho was ever acquired. They were and are still are a private company with no external investments. Interestingly the confusion seems to be with Zimbra and here is a blog post on Zimbra acquisition by Zoho themselves.
https://www.zoho.com/blog/general/the-real-cost-of-acquisiti...
I don't think that's Zoho. Yahoo acquired Zimbra.
Yahoo tried to acquire Zoho. But, Zoho denied the offer from yahoo
Zoho is very well positioned to be useful, especially to people on HN. Their pricing is great, customer service is good, and they cover a lot of ground with their products. If you need email for your custom domain, they are a great choice.
I've been using them for a small charity, and they've been really great. Super powerful/flexible including setting up complex sets of groups and multiple domains that forward to specific places.
There was a card snafu last year and our bill didn't get paid, and Zoho degraded nicely into the "free" tier without hassling us or threatening us. Once I discovered it, it was simple to upgrade again.
What may really blow their mind is that there are open source tools that cost even less. Zoho is a good choice though, their CRM was not the best but got the job done. Has a good API. Haven’t tried their other tools like docs or mail.
What are some of the open source/low cost email options that don’t have to deal with the headache of email deliverability, black list management etc.
I selfhosted mailcow (almost default setting) in a proxmox vm with ip from an internet provider for business. Never had problem with deliverability.
A few employees have problem syncing calendar to their phone or outlook but it's less than 1% users.
and security (handled by someone much better at it than me) in particular
I gave Zoho a compliment, not sure why there is so much defensiveness.
You are right - open source requires more work. My response related to open source was responding to the article's tone that it was surprising that anything could be cheaper than Google or Microsoft :) Which is silly.
How on earth is that comment defensive?
Good point. I have been up way too long. I re-read the question now as just wanting alternatives.
I read the question earlier about email deliverability and black list management as being rhetorical in that those services are usually performed by a centralized service provider.
Glad someone was able to respond with some examples.
Open source has many advantages, but either support is terrible or you are paying for support. If you can support yourself open source is great. However if you need help the options are often not very good, and when they are good they are not cheap - might or might not be competitive with non-free offering.
Since Zoho is trying to attract small business, support is something they can beat open source one. (I don't know if they do, just that they can)
Clickbait headline for a zoho ad. It's not clear at all how much penetration they have in Africa. It's likely unmeasurable vs Google.
I was wondering if Zoho paid to have this article written. And then all these positive comments make me paranoid they’re paying for that too. Maybe I’m too much of a skeptic but companies definitely pay agencies to astroturf like this.
Companies definitely do and they may have had a hand in the article but I can vouch that most comments here are probably genuine (or maybe I'm just another astroturfer!).
It helps that Zoho's main competitor is GSuite. That's what a lot of us are comparing them against and it's just not very difficult to beat Google's "non-existent unless you spend $millions on ads" support, they could literally have a cat answer support and it'd be an improvement. Anyone who has had to deal with trying and failing to get anything answered by Google and then tried the same with Zoho will have something good to say about them regardless of their product overall.
Zoho's products are also a bit more "traditional" in the way that people on HN tend to enjoy. Their UIs, configuration, features and all aren't very 2024 glittery but they're good for getting shit done and setting stuff up yourself.
And then they're also cheap which HN tends to be sensitive to, here you see many contemplate self-hosting things every time a SaaS increases their pricing. Or write about moving back from Big Cloud to bare metal or Hetzner and co. to save $.
It's possible they are doing such a thing, however I also am sure there are many legitimate users in the comments. I personally have been using them on the free tier for over 10 years. I signed up soon after Microsoft was stopping allowing you to use your own email domain through Outlook at a free tier. Zoho allowed you to use your own domain name for free and even has support for things like IMAP. The current free tier is a bit more restrictive now with features like IMAP being removed, however they have never removed any features from my account. I personally find it hard not to be loyal to a company who will grandfather me in on a less restrictive free plan. I haven't paid them anything, they technically owe me nothing.
However, while I have not made use of their paid services (as I use it just for personal use), I have referred clients before to Zoho when I have been working on their websites.
I've also made use of their invoice software free of charge to generate a couple invoices and have been quite pleased with that as well.
Sometimes when companies are fair to their customers either via pricing or business practices, it results in people being much more willing to go out of their way to say good things about the company. It would be insane for me to be negative against a company that has provided me a good product for free for years upon years. There aren't even ads.
Definitely disgruntled by the way Google Apps went from being free for the last decade of my life to costing ~$120/mo for myself and my family. I don't think I can leave Google at this point, but if I was strapped for cash I would choose a different platform. Otherwise, I would still go with Google just due to their dominance in this space and integration with other companies. Calendar invites, meet etc being the primary thing
My current company is using Proton for mail/calendar but we still need Google accounts in order to access things like Google Cloud. We have Google Calendar but not Email. So there is this frustrating bifurcation between mail and some calendar on Proton and then some Calendar items on Google. I wish that Calendar sharing/sync was a more solved problem these days because keeping them syncronized is a nightmare.
Anyway glad to hear from the thread here that Zoho is a worthy competitor and might consider it in the future. They have been around for a very long time.
$120/mo? What in the world are you doing? Or did you mean a year and not a month there?
Couple of domains, many users - mom, dad, two sisters, grandma, a cousin, myself, misc business accounts. It adds up quick.
I’m torn between not prying, and wondering how you get a family to $120/m, when you can get a basic personal Google account (which comes with access to all of the usual apps) for free?
Business Basic probably and probably has a personal domain attached.
I think I may have heard of Zoho once, as a South African dev. My employers have all used either Microsoft or Google office suites. South Africa might have better access/relative pricing to U.S. services than some other African countries though.
Zoho is also extremely well priced in countries like Japan.
> Zoho started allowing African companies to pay for its software in local currencies. This decision has been a major reason for Zoho’s success in Africa as it allowed customers and potential clients to avoid regulatory hurdles around dollar spending
One wonders what they're going to do with the local currency, if they presumably also have to deal with the same restrictions.
Economy of scale allows them to handle that regulatory burden much more efficiently than a single purchaser could.
Zoho (or whatever payment processor they use) has to handle N countries, which is easier than having multiple companies from different countries handling payment in foreign currencies.
Living in Europe, it is easy for us to pay USD-centric services in dollars instead of EUR. But I remember it being almost impossible at the companies I worked at, when I was in Latin America.
Presumably they could convert that local currency to Indian rupees directly without ever needing to go through USD, avoiding regulatory hurdles.
just like everyone else - sell it on the binance p2p market for USDT with very substantial mark-ups
We used Zoho at a previous job! While not exactly flash, I appreciated a few things like being able to automate a check-in when I arrived at the office, because their iOS app offered automation hooks.
My biggest issue with Zoho is the integration between Zoho CRM and Inventory/Books. Making sure they are in sync...is basically impossible. Off the top of my head, inventory, taxation and images do not sync at all without breaking significant portions of the standard Zoho workflow. One can see their org chart through the way the two have been put together. The integration makes the entire thing completely unusable, since now it becomes impossible to track products across the sales lifecycle.
The integration journey of Zoho CRM and Zoho Books has been significant. With the Zoho Finance module seamlessly embedded within CRM, accessing Zoho Books is just a click away. Furthermore, we are actively pursuing enhancements to further streamline the integration between Zoho Inventory and Zoho CRM. Please reach out to us at support[at]zohocrm[dot]com with a detailed list of your concerns. Rest assured, we are dedicated to resolving them promptly.
Our company (B2B, a SaaS without a static billing model) has used Zoho for a few years, mostly as an outgrowth of the use of CRM. None of the apps are the best in breed, but the price is great, and it's more than adequate for small companies like ours. Many alternate solutions are far too complex, as they're trying to capture more enterprise customers.
That said, we do use still Google for Gmail and Drive.
I use Zoho too for one of my side companies. It works really well for really cheap. I haven't tried their bookkeeping project but maybe I will next year. Currently use Wave for that.
Tbh the fact that it's a one stop shop really helps. Everything covered by their suite. I also thought it would be junk but it's not. It's pretty good!
This thread has certainly made me reconsider Zoho as a recommendation for cost-conscious SMBs.
It would be great to see Zoho adopt privacy friendly features like end to end encryption or hosting in countries with privacy friendly laws. I would love to ditch Google too.
You can choose data residency. My account is hosted in Europe
I understand free is nice and all, and many people are price conscious - but O365 I believe has worldwide geographic pricing, and it is the standard.
While Zoho is nifty, you are holding yourself back quite a bit because you are not running what is the standard.
From what I can recall, and it's been a while - even Google runs O365 because Excel is the standard, and a few other things, but of course not Exchange - though they did have an Exchange Online server a decade ago! (Not saying much it's included in most O365 skus's but I chuckled when I saw it on the DNS a decade ago - not sure about nowadays.)
Meta/Facebook also uses Sharepoint and Excel heavily too.
Around a decade ago I also used Zoho and thought it was clunky but I know enough 2-5people orgs that use it and are happy with it, but I really don't want to spend too much time w/ support and paying for $20 for license/for user, is easy enough. $1200 a month to not have to worry about much is nice enough and for security, geogrpahic blocking and other features it works very well. You can control alot of incoming mail w/ Exchange Online Protection/Defender - so you can cut down on your phishing and such.
I know I must sound like a Microsoft plant, but, for the price, the features included are very generous and you never have to worry about migrating off it for another vendor ecosystem because it is the standard.
Plus training, everyone learns on O365/Office suite. That itself is nice too.
One sweetspot Zoho I think has been in more from fortunate circumstances was grinding away as a GSuite competitor for years on years without the wasteful budgets or engineering egos of Silicon Valley.
This way they naturally had to focus on core features more, which they did well enough, and understanding vertical integration as one of the main pillars of their organizational culture.
> engineering egos of Silicon Valley
They started off in Pleasanton and still have a massive presence there. Zoho ads are very common on Bart as well.
Most companies in the Bay Area are similar in style to Zoho. The ego driven OpenAIs tend to be outliers.
Zoho users should be prepared for the surprise price increase.
Price per user:
Zoho Workplace $0.68
Google Workspace $6
Microsoft 365 $6
per year?
I see 1 USD/user/month, billed annually
Welcome to zohocom.
I had Zoho set up on the lowest tier for a side-hustle project years ago. It did it's job smoothly and without much intrusion. Then the project ended and I forgot about the Zoho account, changed phone numbers, lost the 2fa keys - all of it. Totally my fault. Their support quickly and competently handheld me through the shutdown process. I can't imagine the nightmare Google would've forced me through to shut down a pointless 3$/month charge had I made the same mistake with them.
Zoho support is neat when you compare against any other big tech.
They are kind of slow at developing features, for instance you can't set up new tags/folders for email in the phone app, only on desktop, and this has been like that since beginning of times.
Thats great. The "I want to do everything on my phone" folk need to be told NO at some point. A somewhat cluttered but usable desktop interface cramped fully onto a tiny phone screen will have to much nested menu options to be able to discover things. I went into this dead end more often than I should have, wasted a lot of time until I finally started wondering what the hell I was thinking. The funniest was a long side menu next to a pdf. One could add all kinds of information and pick formatting and styling. On a phone you couldn't even see the pdf. Endless sub menus. Truly hilarious. I also one time build an advanced search interface with so many options it was.. uhh... completely unusable.
But these are exactly in Africa, phone only.
Email without tags or folders works fine on a phone. I barely use it on desktop. You can always make multiple mail addresses.
There are more smartphones in use than people on the planet so it stands to reason that for many, the smartphone IS their interface to the world the way the desktop was (and maybe still is) for many of us. Seems more like an opportunity to implement a different design paradigm than something to be dismissed outright.
"Don't you guys have laptops". Maybe it's about your customers and the devices they use!
If you care more about land-grabbing users to aggregate demand (https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/) then you can develop what users wants, get them onboard, and then start squeezing profits out of that. That is what Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Facebook et al did. Here we are with ads on freemium products, and now the data we generate are more valuable to feed to train AIs.
If you're trying to sustainably develop features to support users, even if the pace of the feature development is very slow, I think that is what we are seeing with Zoho.
Just don't bother making things if you cant get it to work properly.
I made a similar mistake with AWS where I have $0.50 monthly charge. I called and they want me to go through a lengthy processes including getting documents notarized to handle it. So instead, I just canceled the card and am patiently waiting for them to shut down the account from failed charges. It’s been about a year now though and it’s still going.
Oh man, be very careful with that. I don't know about AWS specifically, but many of those big tech companies have powerful ways to get you, and they often use them. You may be silently blacklisting yourself from being an AWS customer in the future. As they are fond of saying, cancelling the card is not cancelling the service. You still owe the money!
These fears are why I never use AWS, GCP, Azure, etc and prefer something simple like DigitalOcean where I just add money to my funds via PayPal. If I exceed the limit, they shut down my account. Highly preferable than accidentally getting banned from say Google and losing my gmail where I access incredibly important things like healthcare, finances, utilities, etc.
Same, most of the time, although I don't use Digital Ocean much after a client of mine issued a charge back having forgotten what "Digital Ocean" was (even though I explained it several times). before talking to me, they locked my admin panel so I was completely unable to fix a production issue. Then when I discovered what had happened they took several business days to "unlock" my admin panel. I suffered a pretty big reputation hit with my clients and was put in a position I NEVER want to be in again: "sorry normally it would take me 5 minutes to get the site back up, but it's gonna be <unknown> number of days until DO decides to unlock my account, long after I gave an updated credit card and paid the balance. I use Linode now, and hopefully Akamai won't mess that up.
Ah that's a shame, I've never had much issues luckily and heard good things about Linode. I believe they are cheaper than DO now too.
I don’t know for AWS but I did that once as a teenager with another cloud provider and they sent a debt collector to my family home to collect a few euros. The debt collector had a nice fee.
Let me guess, it had two 1s in its name...
Yes.
Related: AWS has an unwritten policy of giving customers one get out of jail free card when they inevitably fuck up. I’ve called upon this once, completely my fault, at work. AWS refunded me over $2,000 USD (at a company small enough for that to be a big number).
I used ManageEngine MDM before, which belongs to Zoho. The support is excellent, even though I was only using the free tier, they did everything to assist me. Open the support chat, one minute later you are chatting with a human (!), not some robot that you have to trick to eventually speak to someone.
I also used Zoho for mail, it was pretty nice and they had quite robust support once I got an issue. I left them only because I already pay for iCloud+ and comes with custom domain support, so I realized I didn't need to pay for another service.
The Web UI of the mail and the mobile app was also quite good.
Agreed. I setup zoho voice, ported from Google business voice, and had an issue where SMS wasn't going through even though it said it was. Zoho's issue or some porting issue. But I quickly chatted with a human, they resolved it and let me know when it was fixed. I have no idea how to even start a conversation with a Google rep from any of their interface. Zoho had it easy to find.
I've also had great customer service experience with Zoho. In both cases it was my fault but they helped me anyway.
I was very pleased with their product. They are one of the few companies who are actively adding settings and options to their products, and they are very thorough with their designs! You can do almost anything you want to do between the settings and the API they offer.
> Zoho started allowing African companies to pay for its software in local currencies. This decision has been a major reason for Zoho’s success in Africa as it allowed customers and potential clients to avoid regulatory hurdles around dollar spending
> Zoho has also been aggressive with its pricing in Africa. Zoho One, a bundle of more than 45 products
This is a major reason why Western products aren't landing as well abroad anymore.
This isn't the 1990s-early 2000s where your only options for software and hardware were Western (in reality only American and maybe a couple niche European vendors).
American companies need to actually localize and build the "cultural competency" muscle, which I feel a lot of Western companies lost by being overly dependent on China as a singular market.
This isn't 1989 anymore - Levi's jeans and Coca Cola don't cut it. Just about every major country is capitalist now.
American brands, technology, and R&D still have a lot of staying power and brand cachet (there's a reason Asian tourists love taking a selfie while touching John Harvard's foot), but there needs to be recognition that the delta between the US and other countries in R&D has drastically shrunk now that countries all over the world are much richer and have adopted American style innovation systems.
Localization and greater openness to foreign innovation will help boost our own products, economy, and soft power.
If we become too insular, then we doom our larger economy to the same mistakes France, Germany, UK, and Japan made.
Sticking to principles like Data Security, Privacy, and concierge Customer Support are legitimate differentiators that can by justified by customers to pay a premium.
I am not so sure how much of your post really applies to this scenario.
Zoho has been around practically for as long as Salesforce has and they have always been the scrappy bootstrapped company that in my opinion focused on the small to medium sized business. MSFT is at such a large size that tailoring the selling experience to a smaller market does not move the needle enough to make a difference for the business. With ~200x the revenue of Zoho, it just might not make sense to focus on these smaller markets and being aggressive on pricing.
American companies do not need to localize or build cultural competency when it does not move the needle for them and I don't think we lost that by being dependent on China. I am not even certain how China comes into play on that front beyond outsourcing of manufacturing and cheap imports. Even for booming new economies like Nigeria, the overall benefit for larger companies is so small that its most likely not worth the effort for them to go down that path.
Zoho would have been American if Sridhar's visa process wasn't messed up. He used to live in Pleasanton like the rest of the Zoho founders, but they were looking at a multiyear GC backlog, so Sridhar decided to return to India.
I'd argue it's one of several pieces that show an issue of insular pigheadedness American institutions have.
This was fine when the rest of the world was much poorer than the US, but that delta has shrunk massively.
> American companies do not need to localize or build cultural competency when it does not move the needle for them
I agree to a certain extent, but there have been plenty of major fumbles in markets with large TAMs (Uber in ASEAN, Ford in India) that if there was a bit more localized market research done, they would have done decently well.
Korean, Chinese, Indian, etc companies are increasingly becoming competitive, and American companies cannot rest on their laurels.
This is really is opening too many arguments.
Sure American institutions have insular pigheadedness. Indian/Vietnamese/Chinese/Korean institutions are filled with corruptions and nepotism.
We don’t know for sure Zoho would have been an American company, I would almost argue that their success is because they are in India and can most likely build their product at drastically lower costs than in the US. This is probably one of the reasons they can target SMB, including emerging markets in local currencies.
No doubt localization would have helped but it’s again one of those things where there are too many angles to really accept what is the correct or incorrect path. Uber, perhaps it was that insular pigheadedness you like to mention or perhaps they were really dedicated on having a single app, with a familiar process globally. Grab is indeed hyper local but also drastically different depending on the region your in and is a much different experience than what Uber provides.
I could not speak on the Ford in India but on the flip side Tata could never make it in more developed markets probably with the lack of safety.
The thing is that with India - for example - it is a relatively cheap market and those can afford expensive stuff, but western stuff anyway.
Also regarding visa - well there are more indians in the visa queue than probably multiple countries combined. If they make it as fast as other countries - indians will just move in millions and millions simply due to sheer amount of people they have.
> those can afford expensive stuff, but western stuff anyway
Western, sure. American, not really.
There's a reason American brands like Harley-Davidson and Ford quit India, but Western (NATO+) brands like Toyota and Hyundai thrive in India, and Indian conglomerates like Tata acquired prestige western brands like Jaguar Land Rover.
Same thing with China and the acquisition of MG, Volvo, Lotus, etc.
> Also regarding visa - well there are more indians in the visa queue than probably multiple countries combined. If they make it as fast as other countries - indians will just move in millions and millions simply due to sheer amount of people they have.
True, but there needs to be a middle path between being selective but also attracting the cream of the crop. Take a look at the placement statistics of IIT graduates nowadays (2017 onwards) - barely 5-10% choose to immigrate abroad now, ad it's a similar trend in mid-tier Indian programs as well.
America's innovation ecosystem only worked because we were able to attract the best and the brightest from Russia, India, China, etc. Without that level of openness, we fall to the same pit of stagnation that Mainland Europe, the UK, and Japan fell into.
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Both these points are examples of the insular mindset that is going to doom the US. There is this assumption that we have always been the best and always will be the best.
It was immigrants or the children of immigrants like Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Fermi, von Neumann, etc that ushered the Atomic and Information Age, and it was immigrants like Hinton, le Cunn, Bengio, etc that ushered in the current ML revolution.
Already, a lot of my Chinese and Indian friends who did their PhDs in EE or CS at programs like Stanford or MIT have started returning to China and India because they find the visa process demeaning and very backlogged.
> It was immigrants or the children of immigrants like Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Fermi, von Neumann, etc that ushered the Atomic and Information Age, and it was immigrants like Hinton, le Cunn, Bengio, etc that ushered in the current ML revolution.
You’re not wrong, but America won’t accept it. The middle class has been gutted, and everyone is scrambling over the ruins of it to try to land in the upper class instead of the lower.
People perceive those immigrants as “taking a spot” in the upper class, as if there were a deity determining how many rich people we can have at some inflexible level.
I think people pervasively underestimate the value of education, in literal dollar terms. The US spends a crazy amount just getting someone through high school, much less college and a PhD. I would be pretty okay with a visa process for anyone that has a PhD from a reputable institution (where reputable only means “not a degree farm”).
Having someone with a PhD immigrate here is like their government donating a half million dollars to the US in the form of paying for the immigrants education instead of us. Their home country bears the costs, we reap the benefits. I don’t even really care if they speak English; they’ll learn, or use a translate app, or marry someone that can translate or whatever. They got a PhD, I’m sure they’ll figure it out.
The only real risk is crashing wages, but in a globalized labor market I don’t know if immigration is even relevant. Even if wages did crash, that might be a good thing if the crash wasn’t permanent. Cheap research sounds like the kind of thing that might drive us into new technologies.
> Western, sure. American, not really.
The thing is that I am not sure what american - that is not software services and some PC hardware - is even sold outside of USA. Coca Cola and McDonalds? But aside that I haven't see much american stuff even in Europe. It is usually german home appliances, local food, nestle (swiss) etc.
> True, but there needs to be a middle path between being selective but also attracting the cream of the crop. Take a look at the placement statistics of IIT graduates nowadays (2017 onwards) - barely 5-10% choose to immigrate abroad now, ad it's a similar trend in mid-tier Indian programs as well.
The problem is that even 5% is a lot. Like Indian's population is probably 2-3 times bigger than the whole europe. My own country has less than 9m people and my friend got his USA passport after 5 years only...
> America's innovation ecosystem only worked because we were able to attract the best and the brightest from Russia, India, China, etc. Without that level of openness, we fall to the same pit of stagnation that Mainland Europe, the UK, and Japan fell into.
One of the reason for western stagnation is just the amount of regulations. That's why heavily regulated industries are usually quite successful in Europe (like pharmaceutical companies), but garage startups? Not really. Sweden is basically the only exception. And UK (every 10 years lol).
> Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Fermi, von Neumann
People like this are exceptions really. Though there are always trends over the years when some countries produce more talents than the other. It is like there is a beacon shining at one point and a lot of talents are born close to each other.
> Also regarding visa - well there are more indians in the visa queue than probably multiple countries combined. If they make it as fast as other countries - indians will just move in millions and millions simply due to sheer amount of people they have.
This is already happening in Canada and it is destroying many governmental services like healthcare, education, and of course housing. There definitely need to be reasonable caps in place otherwise services cannot scale up quickly enough to accommodate. I'm sure USA is like Canada in this respect; many services are already woefully underfunded or backlogged without even increasing immigration rates.
I'm also surprised someone who is more well-off would want to leave their country to come to North America. I would think their money would go much further in their own country. But maybe there is more to it than I realize.
> I'm also surprised someone who is more well-off would want to leave their country to come to North America. I would think their money would go much further in their own country. But maybe there is more to it than I realize.
It really depends on how well off you are and the reasons for that. Let's take my home country as an example.
We have IT people earning like 3-5x times more than the regular people (like you get salary 2000$ while the rent will be 200$ at worst, with average salary being below 500$. New apartments cost 100k in the capital but outside the capital even 40k is considered an expensive apartment). And we have police and military earning similar (and more money. Not to mention corruption). Both IT and police can afford buying expensive goods and stuff, can afford apartments, good food and so on.
Both can live like kings, but at the same time people are limited to what they can get and find in their country. It is like to be a king of the village - you are the king, sure, but in the city you have more opportunities, more advancements, more access to resources.
When I was leaving the country we did not even have Spotify, for example. And I was earning like 5x times of the average. But there was no point in that. And that's just a software service - there are issues with medication, education etc. So even if you earn more, it might not be worth it.
However in case of IT, it is not a problem for me to get a relatively decent salary in a foreign country while as a military person or a police officer it will become close to impossible to reach the same level without a lot of things attached to that. So for people like this, being a king of a village is worth more than being an average in some foreign country. But, each and every time, they are trying to send their children to a foreign country to live or to study.
And that's without people who have no opportunities or cannot learn foreign language and thus cannot leave.
In India you have extremely rich and extremely poor, coming from various developed and underdeveloped countries and all know English most of the time and often has IT education - with their much bigger population just sheer amount of people leaving will be a lot. A lot.
Thanks for that perspective. I wish there was more of a focus on people trying to improve their own countries versus running to another country, but I can understand why people would choose that option.
The problem I've been seeing in Canada is that we have A TON of new people coming from India. Aside from all our services being unable to handle things. The other problem is that people from these cultures tend to stick together, rather than assimilate. When the rates of immigration are kept lower and the people being brought in are more diverse, the problem isn't really present. But when about 90-95% of new people are coming from one country, the problem really surfaces.
People will say they are trying to get away from the bad practices in their country and that they want to improve, however in practice it doesn't seem 100% true. Many continue to operate the same way as where they came from. Especially since they can stay within their Indian communities and rarely need to interact with the existing population. Canada has now began shifting towards a more low trust society. Even things like food banks aren't save from many new immigrants as they are viewing them as places for them to keep more of their salary rather than as places for people really struggling.
And I think this is part of the reason many people start to become against immigration. When they see their own countries culture/norms/values start to get degraded. Many people even start to feel real hatred and racist feelings towards groups because of it.
To me, leaving a country for betterment makes sense in a way. But leaving to another country to copy your own countries practices just seems odd to me.
> Thanks for that perspective. I wish there was more of a focus on people trying to improve their own countries versus running to another country, but I can understand why people would choose that option.
Most of the time the improvements are coming from the top. So what usually happens - and we observe it over the course of history - countries reach peak, then decline and decline until they collapse or fall, and then again rise by using some external means (finding cheap resources etc). Every time you need the government that actually does things (forces/gives morale boost to the people) - or a revolution. Any other time it will be endless bureaucracy in democratic societies (nothing is getting done or takes too much time) or nepotism and corruption (with authoritarian flavor) in less democratic societies.
> People will say they are trying to get away from the bad practices in their country and that they want to improve, however in practice it doesn't seem 100% true
It is not true for sure. Especially with many people coming at once or forming their own small communities. When you are alone - you are forced to adapt. But when you are not alone you can keep your own culture and traditions without changes, while having benefits of a developed society.
I see it all the time - if you are used to throw away trash outside of trash box in your home country, then by coming here you will continue doing that sooner or later with more people from your countries coming here. Same with public transportation - in my country in order to travel from one region to another region, we used to have a train once per day. Per day. Here you get trains once every 10-15 minutes. So even if the public transportation will decline (fall apart, more delays and cancellations) I will feel ok (and a lot of people will feel ok) because I am used to such conditions and with bigger populations coming from the same culture and gaining rights to vote and so on - nobody will care about such things because we are just used to have it worse.
Or another example - in my country we are used to have fully crowded buses, coming every 30 minutes. Here if they cancelled a couple of buses and it would start arriving crowded, I would feel "at home" and it would not be a shock me and I would less likely to care about that because I simply used to it in my home country. It would be a minor issue for me. And you can imagine that with more people coming with the same mentality, it will just degrade the quality of living.
That's why adaptation and supporting the habits, rules and laws of your new country is important - because you came here due to them. You wanted to live in that "clean and nice country". Don't bring your bad habits with you.
Many people thought Alicloud would eat AWS/Azure/GCP's lunch in the developing world, since they expanded really fast and priced aggressively. But there's a limit to what even extremely price-conscious customers will accept, and their service quality and support was just not up to scratch.
Chinese manufacturers are steadily creeping upmarket though: Haier, BYD, Xiaomi, DJI, Anker etc are all producing increasingly solid hardware with software that's distinctly not great, but tolerable (and certainly good enough to compete with Japan/Korea, who don't exactly shine on this front either).
Those companies you listed, especially DJI and Anker, are the exception rather than the rule. In my experience living there for 6 years, Chinese companies at all levels tend to cut corners too easily and focus on short-term profits. Very few are capable or willing to put in what it takes to establish a brand that can compete with Western brands. DJI was helped by being in a relatively new market without long-establish brands, Anker to a similar extent (and also produces less expensive products). It's much easier to buy a foreign brand (like Geely with Volvo) than to try to establish your own brand internationally. Even huge companies like BYD, Huawai, and Xiomi (smaller but very popular in China) have not made headway except in less developed countries.
> But there's a limit to what even extremely price-conscious customers will accept, and their service quality and support was just not up to scratch
I totally agree! I've worked on Chinese CSPs and they are annoying. IMO they could have been much better, but they are extremely insular and fall into the same trap of lack of localization that I mentioned in my comment.
> American companies need to actually localize and build the "cultural competency"
Not gonna happen.
It's much easier to manage a company that has all-American culture, and American market is the biggest anyway, so it makes sense to focus on it as the priority #1 because that's how you achieve fastest growth.
When a local company starts growing too much and threatens your business, you just buy it and allow it to run as a subsidiary. All the money, none of the effort.
> Not gonna happen
Depending on the market and industry, it's already started. Take a look at Google and Meta's ad buy in India, Brazil, and Indonesia for example.
> When a local company starts growing too much and threatens your business, you just buy it and allow it to run as a subsidiary. All the money, none of the effort
Some do attempt this (eg. Walmart's acquisition of Flipkart) but it doesn't always succeed.
For example, Zoho was an acquisition target of Google and Yahoo back in the day.
And most countries have regulators that try to bar this kind of a move for competitive reasons.
For example, it was Chinese regulators that crashed Intel's attempt at acquiring Tower, and Broadcom's attempt at acquiring Qualcomm, and there's the whole sordid saga around Carl Ghosn's tenure at Nissan.
I'm completely OK with American brands making Americans their primary target again.
56% of Apple's revenue is from outside the US. 38% of Boeing's revenue is from outside the US. 58% of Caterpillar's revenue is from outside the US. (Those are the first three companies I checked.)
If American companies took the attitude "America #1, we don't need foreign customers," I don't think you would like the impact the resulting revenue loss would have on the American economy.
100% agree, than you.
May I ask, where do you find those numbers? Did you actually go to their earnings reports one by one, or is there an easier way?
> on the American economy
looks upward for the trickling down implied here
Add up the employees those companies employ in America and multiply that by their respective proportion of foreign revenue. That's the trickle-down.
But overall total trade deficit is still lopsided correct?
I'm all for increasing exports. What markets are untapped where something could be made in US and exported.
Apple doesn’t make much hardware in the USA anymore, so you have to count the software and hardware IP from the actually hardware/finished product, so accounting what percent of value for an iPhone is generated in China/other countries vs the USA. For Boeing it’s slightly easier, but they also have an international supply chain.
By becoming completely insular, you lose the ability to innovate, as you cater to a subset of consumers and as such aren't being pushed to test the limits of the existing status quo.
For example, look at what happened to Sony - they were a darling of the Consumer Technology space and the Apple of the 1990s-early 2000s, but because they concentrating on the Japanese market at the expense of the global market, they fell drastically behind in innovation.
A similar story happened with Nokia, RIM, GM, etc as well.
Competition from players like BYD, DJI, and Huawei has helped incentivize innovation in the Li-on Battery space (eg. Panasonic, Tesla), the low budget drone space (eg. Andruil, Skydio), and 5-6G sector (eg. Cradlepoint, Qualcomm)
An insular America is an uncompetitive America. An uncompetitive America is a weaker America. A weaker America opens political vacuums from the Red Sea to Central Africa to Myanmar.
I think the key word there was 'primary'. I think it's okay to have a main audience in mind that isn't the entire world.
Primary implies the lack of localization, and localization is a critical piece of innovation, as it forces you to consider additional user experience enhancements.
From a typography standpoint, think about how you would represent Hudum versus Latin fonts on a mobile app or PWA now that Mongolia is deprecating Cyrillic script.
On the Cloud side, a lot of major K8s orchestration and edge computing innovations were sparked by Chinese telcos and tech vendors trying to work around GFW related latency issues.
> On the Cloud side, a lot of major K8s orchestration and edge computing innovations were sparked by Chinese telcos and tech vendors trying to work around GFW related latency issues.
Is there publicly available information on this?
> Primary implies the lack of localization
No, it doesn't.
It absolutely does as a PM or EM.
If my feature's primary market is the US, I'm not going to prioritize Japanese localization or GDPR compliance. Those two epics will remain in the backlog until a sufficiently large enough opportunity arises to justify a pivot to meet those feature requests.
I am not going to justify limited engineering resources to localization if the localization isn't aimed at my primary market.
This is why GOOG or MSFT haven't prioritized building billing infrastructure for Naira, but something a company like Zoho absolutely can.
My hunch is Zoho is using Razorpay (YC W15) for payments, and Razorpay has been pivoting to support the Africa and ASEAN markets (like most Indian companies have been for decades).
Did you read the article? The whole point is that African companies are replacing GOOG and MSFT with Zoho because Zoho is more responsive to their needs.
Increasingly, American companies cannot expect to succeed internationally on the strength of brand alone, if they are not willing to customize their product and service offerings to meet local requirements.
>A weaker America opens political vacuums from the Red Sea to Central Africa to Myanmar.
I'm 100% OK with this. If we need to become weaker in order to shrink the size of our military, then we should do exactly that.
This is why China is investing so heavily in EVs and green energy. They don’t want to have to go to war over oil in the future, and they would rather be immune to oil price fluctuations. Same with imported coal and natural gas. It is just as much about national security as it is about environment.
The USA could do the same, but it produces a lot of oil and gas so there is more resistance against it. But they make those a part of the world market, so whenever Russia or the Middle East go nuts, the price of oil rises and affects consumers at home as well as allies, and we feel compelled to be implied militarily.
That is a less than smart attitude on it. I don't think you have really thought that through.
The resulting global conflicts will be painful for everyone, including the US itself.
Would you trade geopolitical places with China?
Deterrence is better than response. See Yemen
The problem is that with giant trade deficits since the the Reagan Era, either Americans scale down their consumption habits by a lot, or America needs to export more.
America can't rely on the global appetite for the US dollar and US Treasury Bonds forever to keep consuming what other countries consume.
The Petro Dollar is not going anywhere anytime soon, but it definitely has a future expiration date. The global demand for the dollar and US bonds won't disappear tomorrow, but it will cool down somewhere in the future, and thus America can't let go of international markets, unless it wants to downsize a lot.
And the problem with Downsizing is that due to the absurd levels of wealth concentration, the middle-class and the poor are really poorly equipped for such a thing.
We are not on the 50's and 60's anymore when the US share of the global GDP was almost half of it, if we measure it using PPP, it is only about 15%, less than China. America can't just rest on its laurels, it needs to be globally competitive.
US is tiny. Sure, economy is currently a multiplier, but less than 5% of world population lives in US.
If you are a bit smart and grok those numbers, you will leave such... non-smart opinions behind, or competition will steam roll you.
Or don't, rest of the world deserves some good economical growth too, much more than spoiled west TBH.
If you want to grow, you target customers, not Americans or American customers.
Is it some sort of MATA (with T standing for "Target")?
Americans are out of money and wall street needs to keep the ponzi of infinite growth going.
This is loser talk.
Hello alephnerd, Loved reading your insights. I am one of the editors of this story, and I was surprised when the reporters told me that most other tools (Google and Microsoft) did not allow African entrepreneurs to pay in local currencies. That does seem like something that can be easily fixed, if there's will. Here's hoping that all global companies make the playing field even for all global entrepreneurs.
My hunch is Zoho is using Razorpay (YC W15) internally for payments.
A company like GOOG can't justify using a product like Razorpay that is directly competing with internal platforms.
> That does seem like something that can be easily fixed
It's a very hard problem due to KYC, AML, and a multitude of other compliance and legal headaches. That's why Stripe and Razorpay can justify multi-billion dollar valuations.
> A company like GOOG can't justify using a product like Razorpay that is directly competing with internal platforms.
This does seem silly, though, even though it's probably already obvious to say. If they want to build something, and why not, build an integrating service over the top of that one and the internal ones, and figure out how to select the one to use based on the currency/location/etc.
No company ever pays a competitor.
It's partially for financial reasons (why should I pay you to undermine my lead) as well as competitive (the competitor can extrapolate our own internal trends, and then potentially use it against us in competitive deals).
This is why Walmart is famous for forcing every single one of it's vendors not use Amazon services in a Walmart related SKU (eg. If I'm selling a SaaS to Walmart, I either need to migrate the Walmart portion to GCP or Azure, or not get the Walmart contract).
>No company ever pays a competitor.
Didn't Apple use a bunch of Samsung components in the iPhone for years?
It was because they had no choice.
Samsung holds the patent and all the IP for OLED displays.
The moment a Samsung competitor is large enough, they move to them. For example, switching from Samsung foundaries to TSMC by 2018.
Apple also buys Google Cloud products for iCloud even though there are alternatives that don't have rival mobile platforms.
If Google used market research from Cloud customer usage patterns to bolster its Android products, then I would expect various regulatory agencies to start knocking on our door with (more) antitrust action and calling for a breakup of the company.
Similarly, I'd be surprised if Samsung uses its foundry customer data for market research for its smartphone segment.
> Apple also buys Google Cloud products for iCloud even though there are alternatives that don't have rival mobile platforms.
GCP is separate from Google. While they're both Alphabet subsidiaries, the pot of money used by GCP is separate from the pot of money used by the Pixel team (within Google).
Kurien doesn't report to Pichai and vice versa.
> then I would expect various regulatory agencies to start knocking on our door with (more) antitrust action and calling for a breakup of the company
This falls under "competitive intelligence" which ISN'T treated as corporate espionage legally, because you are extrapolating data from sources.
As I've mentioned on here before, Competitive Intel is SOP for all companies, and every largeish (post-Series D) company has a CompIntel department under their PM or PMM org.
> GCP is separate from Google. While they're both Alphabet subsidiaries, the pot of money used by GCP is separate from the pot of money used by the Pixel team (within Google).
> Kurien doesn't report to Pichai and vice versa.
This is patently false. Thomas Kurian reports directly to Sundar Pichai, who is both the CEO of Google as well as Alphabet.
While Kurian likes to refer to himself as the CEO of Google Cloud, that's as much a vanity title as Susan Wojcicki's former title of "CEO of YouTube" -- neither has been an independent company during their tenure, under the Alphabet umbrella or otherwise. (YouTube was once an independent company... pre-acquisition almost 20 years ago.) All Google Cloud employees are Google employees, just as all YouTube employees are Google employees.
> This falls under "competitive intelligence" which ISN'T treated as corporate espionage legally, because you are extrapolating data from sources.
I never said it was corporate espionage. However, it is potentially anti-competitive behavior to use data (market research, whatever you want to call it) from one product to boost another. (Context matters.)
Are you familiar with the EU's Digital Markets Act, which recently went into effect? Google is designated as one of the "gatekeepers" by the European Commission, and the act itself reads:
> The gatekeeper shall not use, in competition with business users, any data that is not publicly available that is generated or provided by those business users in the context of their use of the relevant core platform services or of the services provided together with, or in support of, the relevant core platform services, including data generated or provided by the customers of those business users.
While GCP and other cloud platforms have not yet been explicitly designated as core platform services by the European Commission, it's only a matter of time before that happens.
It happens.
Larger corps with lot of departments, sometimes the left and doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
And sometimes suppliers get bought by the competitor and there is no fast easy substitute.
And sometimes your own products suck.
How hard could it be for a company as large as Google to hire a few dozen lawyers and accountants in every country they're able to do business in?
Not very hard but they should prefer big fat clients over tiny ones. Google products are at the top of my list of things to avoid. I don't have time for their endless work for free assignments. I'll reluctantly use their services if they are just to good but I keep in mind I'm not client material.
I hear of zoho for the first time, it apparently has 100m users. I hear they have actual support. There are employees on this page answering questions, or should I say busting myths? I haven't seen any of their products and it already sounds superior.
> Sticking to principles like Data Security, Privacy,
Isn't that something Europe has but the US chose not to (at least regarding computer/ad/tech industry) ?
European regulators talk big, but European companies (German+French) have really horrid internal security practices.
I don't want to name names as it can affect me professionally, but I would never trust a European (German+French) digital platform developed by one of their traditional conglomerates - even a stereotypically non-technical American F500 like Home Depot has way better technical and security practices than some of the European (German+French) conglomerates I've dealt with.
These are organizations where managing ACLs are a brand new practice.
If we're sharing anecadata, I've interacted professionally with organisations of all sizes and types (from startups to big banks to public sector) from all around the world, and I strongly disagree.
Legacy companies exist everywhere. Big banks with weird "security" practices exist everywhere. There's nothing special about French or German companies' digital security. If anything, they're often better than American ones because there's regulations forcing them to deal with some things like securing private data, meanwhile companies like Equifax can leak everything about everyone and not care in the slightest.
I wasn't talking about European financial companies - they're actually pretty decent at security because European financial regulators actually have teeth, and the internal platforms for a Deustche Bank or BNP Paribas are fairly forward facing (or at least as forward facing as very large and old conglomerates can be).
The companies I'd be worried about are outside the financial sector. I know it's all anecdotal so we're just randos on the internet yelling at each other, but actual enforcement of European data and security regulations (outside of the financial sector) are minimal, and more critically, very basic platform security practices haven't percolated.
That said, I can safely say that Equifax has completely revamped their infra to prevent a leak like the one they previously faced. They had a complete rearchitecture and heads rolled.
And I'm not talking about financial sector exclusively either. All sorts of companies, even centuries old ones, are taking security seriously and even if there often is lots of legacy stuff, there's no material differences with Indonesian or American or Brazilian companies
Not only currency, but Albo outdated payment methods like credit card or PayPal only? What?? Srsly?
What about other robust methods like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blik
The price of being first - you are much slower to make any new changes.
I'm Polish, our internet infrastructure is miles better than German. Paying via phone is norm. Were I cross the German border, I'd think it's a museum.
But we didn't do anything particularly right. We just could implement our infrastructure on the newest ideas, while for Germany they're stuck with what they had as pioneers.
> If we become too insular, then we doom our larger economy to the same mistakes France, Germany, UK, and Japan made.
What are those? (Besides Japan’s which you’ve answered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40143090)
The exact same mistakes as Japan - deciding to concentrate on their large local market which is protected via tariffs, but then completely outsourcing IP in non-target markets via JVs (eg. Renault's JVs in India, Volkswagen's JVs in China, Dassault and Thales JVs in India, Airbus JVs in China), but also failing to attract enough talent from abroad to innovate in these countries.
The Eurozone crisis also completely destroyed Western Europe's competitiveness (like the Asian Financial Crisis and Black Thursday did for Japan).
American companies make JVs abroad as well, but will also help transfer promising employees to the US, give them a competitive salary, and sponsor their visa process.
If you're smart enough to become a MechE for Dassault in India, you're also smart enough to become a MechE for Ford R&D in the US or India. Going from earning €25k in India to €45-50k in France or Germany isn't worth it, compared to moving to America and earning €90-110k.
Germany's automotive industry is a great example of this. In the 1990s-2000s, they began a MASSIVE expansion into China. Chinese consumers ditched their bicycles and motorbikes for the VW Jetta. But while VW continued to concentrate on ICE vehicles, Chinese challenger brands in the 2000s began researching EV technology as they were already the goto suppliers for batteries. Fast forward to today, and now German companies are dependent on Chinese EV R&D in order to build European EV platforms.
This is not exactly the fault of VW/Renault etc. China has quite explicitly encouraged technology transfer as an important strategic imperative for their local firms, so if these companies wanted to play in the (obviously growing) Chinese market, technology transfer was the price to be paid.
(Another example of this is the high-speed trains in China - the first generation was built by JVs with Siemens/Hitachi/etc with an explicit policy of technology transfer, but the newest trains in China are now local, built on top of the technology that has been acquired.)
And they're doing the same in India.
There's a reason I mentioned Renault and Dassault - to show that it's not just a China thing.
Every country pushes for JVs, but it's up to the individual companies themselves to defend their IP, or at least integrate the host country's talent base with the home country's innovation system so that it's mutually beneficial (eg. What Japanese companies did in Korea in the 1970s-80s).
American companies do that (eg. L1/2 transfers and O-1 visas) but European and Japanese companies don't as often.
US companies haven't had any more success in protecting their IP in China and avoiding "tech transfer" than European companies; it's endemic to operating in China ("somehow" your tech leaks from your JV to your Chinese competitors, who in some cases may even be owned by the same group of people through a web of shell companies). (The solar panel industry is a good example of this.)
Actually Germany's and Japan car industry are more innovative than American one's (and much more sucessfull on the international level)
What mistake did Japan make btw?
Not concentrating on localization and expanding their TAM.
Japanese firms had much less money to play around with after the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s, and localization costs a LOT of money.
Japan is already a large (125M+ pop, $4T GDP) market with an insular population that only really speaks Japanese.
This meant Japanese companies line Sony, Toshiba, etc can survive by just selling to Japanese customers without having to worry about spending money on innovating or building competitive products, as non-Japanese companies didn't care as much about Japanese localization and Japanese consumers couldn't really afford dollar denominated products on a Japanese salary.
Within 15 years, Japan got overshadowed by Korea, which to Japanese before rhe 2010s was what Americans think of Mexico. Korea has a much smaller population and historically had a much poorer population than Japan (they only caught up in median household incomes recently-ish - last 5 years), and as such Korean companies were more international facing and open to adopting best practices from abroad and competing in the developing world (it was Korean companies like Samsung that paved the path for Apple to begin manufacturing in China, India, and Vietnam)
Companies like Sony, Toyota, and Kirin got overshadowed by Samsung (Korea), Hyundai (Korea), and Lotte (Korea), and Korean conglomerates like Lotte began buying up Japanese prestige brands, and even Japanese-Koreans became like Mayoshi Son major titans of industry
> localization costs a LOT of money.
Not necessarily, on the tech side, but localized support can get pretty hairy.
Also, it depends on what your product is. Many different nations have many different laws, and localization is more than just changing the words in your screens.
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Only made them a top 5 economy with a tiny population, few natural resources and little to no land.
Sounds like being a U.S. vassal state is an excellent place to be.
Which is actually truer than one may think. Most U.S. “vassal states” do excellently, including much of Europe, Israel, Saudi Arabia, etc.
The primary reason behind that is they are not vassal states. The U.S. doesn’t have vassal states (outside of maybe Puerto Rico) and yes it has expectations of its allies but those are surprisingly low compared to even the shitties states to be vassals of. Compare what the U.S. expects of Saudi Arabia or Japan (what impositions does it place?) to what Russia expects of its vassal states (many of which it has literally taken over by force), or China (look at what China is doing to BRI countries like Pakistan and Sri Lanka…hollowing their economy out and getting paid for the privilege…) or even India (which has gone on an all out economic war against Mauritius because a couple of clowns in their government said something they didn’t like).
Heck, even to the extent China or India are succeeding economically it’s because of the U.S. economic ties. China is almost entirely built by American investment over the past few decades. And even the subject of this specific story, Zoho, part of the Indian IT ecosystem, is entirely a result of US economic partnership starting in the 90s.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that American “vassal statehood” is literally the only path to economic success and prosperity since WW2.
The recent decline of Japan caused by American restrictions and vassalization is well documented, same for Germany.
That's not the mainstream economic consensus, nor what the Japanese economists themselves think.
One thing often forgotten is that the trade surplus of Germany and Japan was so high that it was literally squeezing out the growth of other export developing countries. That kind of artificially overleveraged bubble is unsustainable for any nation, and the Japanese failed to make the neccesary reforms till it burst. Germany managed to come out fine, while setting the stage for the rest of Asian tigers to rise.
First of all, Maldives not Mauritius. Their current president won on a campaign of India out and then a minister said Indians smell and something about cowdung. I guess we Indians need to develop thick skins and still go to Maldives for leisure travel because self respect is only reserved for westerners.
Frankly it is simply the US dollar being overvalued. It is making US exports way too expensive for most of the world. Google can't really compete and make any money.
That is definitely a factor. ZIRP from 2008-2015 and 2020-2022 will do some damage to exports.
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> WHY IN HELL IS EUROPE, WITH ITS INCREDIBLE AMOUNT OF AVAILABLE RESOURCES NOT DOING TH SAME?!?
Probably because Euro is much more stable (relative to dollar) than Naira (the official currency of Nigeria). So european companies don’t feel the need to compromise for an inferior service (this claim comes from the article linked in the OP, not from me) or bother creating their own one.
If EU countries had an ongoing inflation rate of 30%+, which would result in GCP/AWS costs for european companies go up insanely every year (without GCP/AWS increasing pricing on their end and usage staying constant), I bet EU would consider switching to a cloud provider that accepts EUR instead of USD as well[0].
That’s not a good problem to have at all.
0. I have no idea if GCP/AWS accept payments in EUR. So that statement was written with a scenario in mind where GCP/AWS only accept USD (to draw an analogy with the situation in Nigeria).
> If EU countries had an ongoing inflation rate of 30%+, which would result in GCP/AWS costs for european companies go up insanely every year
Inflation would mean that the nominal revenues of EU companies would also increase to the same extent. Thus, the affordability of the foreign service would, ceteris paribus, remain the same.
> Inflation would mean that the nominal revenues of EU companies would also increase to the same extent.
Only if their customers are not from EU (aka their customers pay in USD instead of EUR) or if the company increases pricing to match the inflation on a regular basis (while managing to not lose any customers).
With the first scenario being a very specific edge case, and the second scenario being borderline impossible, I don’t see the inflation being a nothingburger here. Otherwise, the Nigerian companies wouldn’t care about the inflation either.
> Only if their customers are not from EU (aka their customers pay in USD instead of EUR) or if the company increases pricing to match the inflation on a regular basis (while managing to not lose any customers).
Under standard conditions (nothing else then inflation matters), is the same for the domestic market. If we have x % yearly inflation, it means that the exchange rate at the end of the year is x % "higher", meaning the costs for the company are x % higher, but likewise the prices for companies's goods and services are x % higher and thus their revenues. So its profit margin (in percentage of its costs) remains the same.
> Otherwise, the Nigerian companies wouldn’t care about the inflation either.
The real problem is not inflation per se, but accelerated, unpredictable inflation. This ruins the exchange rates of a currency, as it is a risk that is not easy to manage. Due to these unfavourable exchange rates, companies from such countries are exposed to greater cost pressure when they purchase services in countries with a hard currency.
Calm down. This is just a single (private - so no public data or real numbers - just what they claim) Indian company (unsupported by the Indian Govt in any way shape or form) doing a decent job. It has nothing to do with political will.
You say it takes political will, but this isn’t a political decision by African companies. The first three bullet points tell you what’s going on pretty well: African companies are choosing to use a more affordable competitor that they can use local currencies to pay for even though the product isn’t quite as good (per the article, I have no horse in this race myself) and doesn’t have the same level of developer community support. It’s an affordability tradeoff, which is valid, but fundamentally it didn’t take any crap like the political will to do it, just buying decisions at the corporate level.
And if you dig down, all you’re really getting is that Google and Microsoft are the established players but Zoho is making a nice business for itself at their expense with African startups.
What is it that Africa does? Choose the cheaper alternative they can pay with their own currency?
How can the EU (Remember, Europe also has large parts of Russia and other countries) do to mimic that? Become much poorer and change the public currency to something Google does not want.
Lower vages in developing countries have always been one of the major drives for outsourcing. Without market ristrictions, as long as there is no other advantage that an industrialised country can provide, the business will in the long run move to the developing country.
It does seem telling that I don't use a single Europe-based tech service that I know of, even a free one. In fact the only tech companies I can think of, some game developers, are in the UK, no longer in the EU.
do what exactly? it doesn't seem like these African startups are choosing it because of some regulation based on "political will". they're choosing Zoho because it's cheaper and they can use their currency. if they were richer and Google supported their currency (like most EU startups) they would probably choose Google.
The problem is EU does not want home-grown ecosystem. EU wants BigTech they can do business (as well as „business“) with.
Big old businesses are very reliant on export to certain markets. E.g. German car industry in China. Thus there's a big push to not have protectionist policies due to fear of retaliation. But such approach does not help to build local ecosystems in newer niches.
Could you imagine EU doing to TikTok what US did?
> Could you imagine EU doing to TikTok what US did?
Since they seem to have no qualms picking fights with big US tech when they run afoul of their regulations...yes. Yes I can absolutely imagine that.
Plus, establishing a homegrown market is not "protectionist politics". It's allowing for, and enabling, competition, which, according to every proponent of capitalism, is a good thing (which is funny, because capitalisms systems actively enable and encourage to stifle competition as muc as possible, because it threatens the bottom line of established players. But I digress).
What is China going to be (officially) angry about? That the EU takes their own money to fund startups and alternatives, in, and for, their own home market?
> Since they seem to have no qualms picking fights with big US tech when they run afoul of their regulations...yes. Yes I can absolutely imagine that.
Meh. It's just squeezing some cash.
> Plus, establishing a homegrown market is not "protectionist politics".
It's 100% protectionist politics once you start doing more interesting things :)
> It's allowing for, and enabling, competition, which, according to every proponent of capitalism
Ah yes. That's exactly what modern europe is known for :)
> What is China going to be (officially) angry about? That the EU takes their own money to fund startups and alternatives, in, and for, their own home market?
China doesn't need to be officially angry. They can simply retaliate by forcing EU-related companies out. Sort of like they already do, just more strictly. Which is funny that China has all sorts of protectionist policies, but what if West retaliates... All hell breaks loose.
> It's 100% protectionist politics once you start doing more interesting things :)
So its aggressive economic politics now if country A buy less from country B, by making the stuff it needs itself? That doesn't compute.
> They can simply retaliate by forcing EU-related companies out.
Sure, they can do that. Only, given that the EU is their most important trading partner, and forcing companies out would probably spiral China into a recession, destroying decades worth of economic growth in the process, I somewhat doubt that China is willing to shoot itself in the foot just to throw a tantrum.
> So its aggressive economic politics now if country A buy less from country B, by making the stuff it needs itself? That doesn't compute.
Yes it is. The problem with modern manufacturing (and services to lesser extent) is not to build something, but find a market for it.
> Sure, they can do that. Only, given that the EU is their most important trading partner, and forcing companies out would probably spiral China into a recession, destroying decades worth of economic growth in the process, I somewhat doubt that China is willing to shoot itself in the foot just to throw a tantrum.
China is already doing all sort of protectionist practices. And West does not retaliate. Furthermore, it plays along to make a quick buck in massive Chinese market.
Do you want what would send China into a recession for sure? Chinese economy is export-driven. If West limited import from China (effectively capping Chinese export), that'd do a lot of damage to China. And China knows that very well.
Your rant has very little to do with the article, I recommend you read it. Why even mention fossil fuels?
Also keep in mind that aggressive shills like yourself often turn people away from the cause you try to promote.
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Ok, but can Zoho offer things like HIPPA compliance or “EU only” hosting and services for data protection?
Kudos to businesses who can make use of this Zoho in a safe way but one would hate to expose one’s users to a company based in some strange dictatorship of a country.
I think it took longer for you to write that post than to just do the search.
https://www.zoho.com/crm/hipaa/
https://www.zoho.com/gdpr.html
https://www.zoho.com/know-your-datacenter.html
On the flip side I have known of Zoho for at least a decade, they are not a new player..I never realized they were an Indian company.
Good catch, I did a search but none of these were in the top results for me (I guess that's the state of search these days).
My main point however was that India doesn't have an agreement with the EU regarding the transfer and protection of personal data (e.g. the EU-US Privacy Shield and related). So while the links above state how much Zoho cares about privacy, the platform is not suitable for use-cases including personal information.
No problems. They were at the top of my search for both google and kagi.
Thank you, I looked at Zoho a number of years ago and when I reached out to their team they did not recommend using them for HIPAA related transactions. I'm happy to see that change!
> but one would hate to expose one’s users to a company based in some strange dictatorship of a country.
And how much would one hate to expose said data to this?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/16/house-fisa-g...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/us/politics/senate-passes...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/12/us/politics/surveillance-...
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/20/1246076114/senate-passes-reau...