OK, OK, I admit, the title is a bit tongue-in-cheek… but real. Sophisticated Excel users have long complained that none of the online spreadsheets support Macros or Pivot Tables. The answer has so far been sorry, no can do…
Will Google Spreadsheets ever have advanced features like pivot tables, macros or offline database integrations? (This was actually my question) Scott said they are constantly trying to find the balance between speed and utility. It will never be a heavy duty analytics program because that would be too heavy and bulky for the average user.
EditGrid’s David Lee also suggested Pivot Table are too difficult to do online. Well, maybe, but here they are both, in Zoho Sheet. Not that it comes a real surprise, in fact ever since the launch of Zoho DB pivot tables were just a matter of time, and Zoho has promised macros for some time, too.
I admit I probably don’t appreciate the importance of these two features, as I’ve said before, the level of my spreadsheet competency is probably stuck somewhere at Lotus 1-2-3. . But even I used very limited Excel macros in the past, although typically be recording and editing afterward, rather than writing them in Visual Basic. Now Zoho Sheet can interpret VB directly, without using Microsoft’s back-end, and that means you can import your Excel spreadsheet, the macros no longer die. No other spreadsheet (other than Excel itself) supports VB macros.
I got lost about two thirds of the way in to this post from Steve Gillmor but the first third was a great read. Actually the whole thing was but I just got a bit lost as I think some of the things going on in Steve’s fast thinking brain didn’t quite make it through to the keyboard so you’re left having to assume some things. I’m assuming he likes Mesh though. I think he does.
Commenters on TechCrunch were ruthless, I won’t even begin quoting them. But don’t get me wrong: this is a good article, which would have been a great fit for ReadWriteWeb, but the TC crowd expects short, to-the-point, fairly descriptive posts. In the words of TC owner Mike Arrington:
Steve is an acquired taste. his writing isn’t efficiently packaged into bite sized chunks like a lot of people have come to expect. but if you decide to give it the attention it needs, you may find that you come away a little bit smarter after you’re finished.
Yes. And perhaps Mike is trying to redefine TC’s style himself. But you have to know your readers, Mike - perhaps a a new tab for Essays would be appropriate - or if you want Gillmor’s writing part of the main flow, a graphical “grab a coffee this is a long one” icon would help.
Now, on to the bigger question, why Live Mesh is just Barely Live. (And yes, this will be a long post, too, but due to the screenprints.)
The first leaked news declared this a solution to “sync everything with everything”. Then came Amit Mital, Live Mesh General Manager with a visionary video and announcement at the Web 2.0 Expo last week, adding towards the end: initially it will sync only Windows PC’s, adding more platforms and devices over time. Ahh! So it’s a … Foldershare for now.
Minutes after the presentation I was chatting with a startup CEO who reminded me he had seen a similar video from Microsoft years ago: kid playing, Mom capturing video on cell-phone, family watching it almost real-time on various devices, executive-type Dad watching video on his laptop at an airport feeling “almost at home”. Great video, and yes, it was conceptually familiar, but what has materialized of it?
Live Mesh will be great when it really happens, but for now it’s largely waporware: pre-announcement, typical Microsoft-style. And now, if you’re still here, why don’t you follow me through the hoops of trying to sign up for (Barely) Live Mesh.
Google Search and several Microsoft blogs point to http://mesh.com so that’s where we start:
Hm… I could never figure out why I so often get signed out of Live Network (good old passport style), and if that’s the case why can I not sign back here. But that’s OK, we just take a detour to live.com, sign in and come back to mesh.com:
I though I had just signed in, but fine, let’s do it again. Oops:
The sign-in button changes to sign up - as in sign up for a waiting list. Not fun.. but let’s do it anyway. Btw, before the wait-list screen there was another screen where I had to agree to some terms - sort of usual for actually using a service, but for getting on a waiting list?
Now we’re in something called Microsoft Connect. Is this the same thing? Who knows…let’s click Register (but why, after sign-up, sign-in, agree, now register? WTF?)
I’m starting to really not like this. So far I’ve been presented with a maze of registration, confirmation, you-name-it screens, and I don’t know where the hell I am. Let’s backtrack a bit.
Oh, several screens above, at the waiting list signup, it stated on the next screen I should click Connection Directory, a small option on the top, not the main Register for Connect link… but who reads small prints, all screens should offer enough navigational clues to not get me lost. OK, redoing, now…
This jungle is the Connection Directory. No sign of Live Mesh, at least not on the first page. Text search to the rescue: there we are… somewhere towards the bottom (scroll way down) there is Live Mesh Tech Preview! Voila! (or not). The button to click is Apply Now! As if I hadn’t done it a zillion times already…
Hm.. I can do this now with my eyes closed… click.. click..click.
Geez, this looks like a plain old BS signup form again. I’ve had it. Done. I let others experiment with Microsoft’s Windows Dead Mesh. Let me know when it’s Live. For real.
Just days ago we read that China, already the world leader in cellphone use, has surpassed the USA as the No. 1 nation in Internet users., so of course it’s a huge market that SaaS providers would love to enter. What better way than have the market come to you?
That’s what happened to Zoho when their Beijing Office was contacted by PC Stars, the largest online distributor in China with more than 2400 resellers and over 1000 system integrators. The are assembling a portal at Baihui, currently offering specific search and productivity tools. Their search products appear to be geared to product groups like software, hardware, games and automotive.
For the productivity apps they teamed up with Zoho, who would provide white-label versions of their products. After a few months of private beta testing, Baihui built a new data center (*), and today they are launching the Zoho Suite under their own brand:
These apps will be offered free to individual users, just like they are in the US, and CRM will have a similar pricing, too: free for the first 3 users, then 99RMB /user/months, which is about $14, close to the US pricing. (I would have thought Chinese prices to be less, but they know what they’re doing…) Baihui will later add other Zoho (Business) products.
Zoho’s current user base is 800,000 adding 100k about every 5-6 weeks, and they certainly expect that number to jump with the China deal.
OEM-ing their product is not unusual for Zoho, and especially for the parent company: there are other deals under consideration, and if you own a D-Link access point, chances are the wifi-manager software you have is from Adventnet. I plan to write a backgrounder on Adventnet, their approach to business and their international presence in the near future.
(* Please note, Baihui’s investment is into their own data center, running the Zoho Apps, not Zoho’s parent company, Adventnet, as (first) incorrectly reported on TechCrunch.) Update: it’s now fixed on TC.
There’s somerenewedchatter about Microsoft’s plans for a subscription-based Office and even a free, ad-based alternative. Some rumors put the subscription price in the $12/ month range, which I believe is way too expensive for basic productivity tools, hence the need for another business model: offering MS Works for free, supported by advertising.
MS Works is nowadays widely considered a “dumbed down” version of its big brother, the real MS Office suite, but I beg to disagree.
Two decades ago MS Works was my main productivity suite: I was happily crunching numbers, generating charts, including them as well as data from my database in word-processing documents. In other words, I had a perfectly working and lightweight integrated office suite at the time when Word, Excel and Powerpoint were fragmented individual applications not talking to each other. For all its capabilities Works was very lightweight, I could use it on a laptop with 640K memory (that’s K, not MB!) and two 720k floppy drives - no hard-disk at all.
I can’t say this enough, Microsoft had a perfectly working integrated suite 20 years ago, which should have become what Office is today. But I guess you need bloatware to charge bloated prices, so Microsoft shoved Works aside, favoring the higher margin, high-end but fragmented products, which took years to become a true Office Suite.
The 80/20 rule applies for the MS Office Suite, in fact I’d rather say 90/10: 90% of users only need 10% of the functionality. MS Works has that - but now that it’s making a comeback (?), an ironic situation develops: the new online challengers like Google Docs and the Zoho Suite were targeting the mainstream Office Suite, and while in terms on features (needed or not) they are still behind Word, Excel..etc, the comparison to Works would quite possibly have a different outcome. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show turned out to offer richer functionality than Works, and then we did not even look at the collaboration, mobility offered by the fact that they are Web-based.
Conclusion: MS Works should have been a winner 20 years ago, and ever since. Now it’s too little, too late.
And that’s why Microsoft will ultimately try to quell the embarrassing Windows Vista debacle by making a bold move with Windows 7 to win back customer loyalty and generate positive spin for its most important product.
What will happen next?
My prognosis is that Microsoft will use smoke and mirrors to conjure up an early release of Windows 7, the next edition of the world’s most widely-used operating system. Then they will quietly and unofficially allow IT departments to migrate straight from Windows XP to Windows 7.
Yes, we’re almost there. Except that it doesn’t take care of customers (including yours truly) royally sc***ed by Vista. I wasn’t kidding when I said:
Windows 7, whenever it comes, should be released as “Vista Final”, free to all Vista victims along with Microsoft’s letter of apology.
Here’s the full winner list, the top 100 web applications selected by 1.9 million voters.
Now, what about that “we don’t like work”? Well, out of all catogories Productivity attracted the least active voting, only 64,000 votes in total. Incidentally it’ sthe category I am typically interested in - a sure sign that I must have my head screwed on the wrong way. This was also the category fatally skewed last year, at Webware 2007, when it was lumped together with Commerce, and of course got dominated by giants like Amazon, eBay and PayPal.
This year I’m glad to see Productivity become a category on its own, and the winners are (click on the icons for detail):
Outlook read backwards is Kooltuo. Wow, it would make a good startup name. No, I did not go crazy, but TechCrunch reports that Microsoft just signed a letter of intent to acquire Xobni. And Xobni = Inbox, backwards.
Not that it’s a surprise: I wish I could predict everything with such certainty. This is what wrote in February, when Bill Gates presented Xobni for Outlook as “the next generation of social networking” at the Microsoft Office Developers Conference:
What does it mean when Bill Gates presents your product, a super-cool Outlook plugin to his crowd of developers?
Gates’s message: now go back and copy this fast. That would be the classic Microsoft style, as many software startups can attest to. It would also put the market introduction to somewhere … around 2015? Unlikely.
Microsoft will acquire Xobni in no time. Sweet and fast deal. Congratulations to the Xobni team and investors!
So, yes, congratulations to the Xobni team! On a personal note, I regret I can’t try Xobni, as I long ago ditched Outlook along with a lot of desktop bloatware, and am in happier land now, using Web-based applications. I’m perfectly happy ( and productive) with the combination of Gmail and the Zoho apps, and if I ever leave Gmail, it will be for another web-mail, not back to the desktop. The air is fresher in the Cloud.
The key in “going enterprise” is no doubt the new security/permissioning scheme. That said, Zoho CRM has already been functionally rich even before today’s upgrade. I’ve repeatedly stated that supporting business processes like Sales Order Management, Procurement, Inventory Management, Invoicing Zoho really has a mini-ERP system, under the disguise of the CRM label.. In fact let’s just stop here for a minute.
Today’s announcement aside, I still consider Zoho’s primary focus to be the small business (SMB) market. As for CRM, it really comes down to the classic breadth vs. depth of functionality question. Zoho CRM’s breadth, along with the other productivity applications allows many SMB’s to use it as their single, only business application. The market leader in SaaS CRM, Salesforce.com clearly supports fewer business processes, offering more depth in each - probably a better fit for larger enterprises which likely run several applications anyway. This matrix provides an overview of Zoho CRM vs. Salesforce CRM Group and Professional Editions. (click on pic for detail)
Having done a functional comparison, a quick look at pricing demonstrates why Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu called Salesforce.com still very expensive:
No wonder Larry Dignan at ZDNet declares “Zoho aims to poach Salesforce.com customers.” But Larry (and Marc), you ain’t seen nothing yet… just wait till Zoho comes out with a Salesforce.com importer .
Clearly, Salesforce.com does keep a close eye on Zoho, otherwise why would they spend money on the Google Adword “Zoho CRM“?
But again, reality check: Salesforce.com does own the Enterprise space. For now.
Finally, a word about integration. After all, Zoho is known for their almost endless range of products, they should work together… Currently Zoho Sheet, the spreadsheet application is fully integrated with CRM - most data can be edited either inside CRM or in the spreadsheet format that many business users are more familiar with.
Zoho plans to integrate Writer, their word processor, Mail (still in private beta) as well as some of the business applications, namely recently released Invoice and People. When all that’s done, Zoho will have a more complete offering than two industry giants, Salesforce.com and Google together. I can’t wait…
(Disclaimer: I am an Advisor to Zoho. Take anything I say with a grain of salt. In fact with a pound of salt. Don’t believe a single word of mine about Zoho products: go ahead and check them out yourself).
I am a big fan of Software as a Service, but it frustrates the hell out of me to see industry pundits over-hype it without really understanding it. Here are 3 killer (in the bad sense) half-truths about SaaS:
1 - SaaS is simpler, easier to implement than On-premise software (see update at the bottom)
2 - SaaS is for the SMB market
3 - SaaS is bought, not sold, it’s the end of Enterprise Sales
Let’s examine them in detail:
1 - SaaS is simpler, easier to implement than On-premise software.
The only part that’s absolutely true is the technical installation, which the customer no longer has to worry about with SaaS. But we all know that this is a fraction of a typical implementation. Implementations are all about business process and training, hence the difficulty / duration / cost of an implementation depends on the complexity of business and the size of the organization - these two tend to correlate with each other.
It just so happens that all SaaS solutions so far have started (and many stay) at the SMB level, so they are simpler not by virtue of being SaaS but by their target market’s needs.
2 - SaaS is for the SMB market
Yes, traditionally all SaaS started with Small Businesses, but that does not mean it may not move upstream. Salesforce.com and several HCM applications have proven technical scalability, but they offer partial / departmental functionality. I am a strong believer that in 4-5 years most software developed will be SaaS, and that in 10 years it will be the predominant method of “consuming” software by large enterprises - but I can’t prove it. There’s no empirical evidence, since there has not been any Integrated Enterprise SaaS available so far. The closest to it is NetSuite today (but it’s still SMB focused), and SAP’s Business ByDesign tomorrow. In fact despite SAP’s official positioning, driven by market focus and current limitations (functional and infrastructure), I believe that SAP will use BBD to learn the SaaS game - i.e. BBD will be a test bed for a future Enterprise SaaS offering. But we’re not there yet. (longer discussion here)
3 - SaaS is bought, not sold, it’s the end of Enterprise Sales
Hey, I’ve said this myself, so it must be true (?). Well, it depends on the position of the sun, the constellation of the stars, and several other factors, but mostly the first two we’ve just covered.
SaaS for very small business: that’s the clear-cut lab case for the click-to buy pull model to work. In fact in this respect (sales model) I believe the business size is the no.1 determinator. Some solutions will have to be configured and may even require pre-sales business process consulting. This inflexion point will clearly be higher for functionally simpler solutions, like CRM and lower for integrated business management systems, like NetSuite or SAP’s Business ByDesign.
Once you reach that inflexion point, you’re in a more interactive, lengthier sales process, and that’s typically face to face. At least that’s what we’re conditioned to: but it does not have to be that way. That will be the subject of another post - to come soon.
Update: Ben Kepes challenged #1 on his blog, and to some extent I have to agree. My post here is continuation of a discussion we started at the virtual SAP Marketing Community Meeting, and my mind-set was still business process software, e.g. CRM, ERP..etc, but I forgot to specify that. Instead of replicating the argument, why don’t you read my response to his response at Ben’s place.
Personally, I think the Microsoft and Yahoo matchup is like two tired swimmers who bump into each other and then wind up drowning each other in their scramble to survive. But Yahoo will be the first to go under in this embrace.
It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.
Imagine a circus act in which two enormous, clumsy, awkward elephants that don’t really like each other are supposed to mate while riding on skateboards.
. But even I used very limited Excel macros in the past, although typically be recording and editing afterward, rather than writing them in Visual Basic. Now Zoho Sheet can interpret VB directly, without using Microsoft’s back-end, and that means you can import your Excel spreadsheet, the macros no longer die. No other spreadsheet (other than Excel itself) supports VB macros.
MS Works is nowadays widely considered a “dumbed down” version of its big brother, the real MS Office suite, but I beg to disagree.
The 2008 
This was also the category fatally skewed last year, at 
Outlook read backwards is Kooltuo. Wow, it would make a good startup name
. 
Zoli Erdos
