61–70 of 213 posts
> 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.
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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 mayb…
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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 wi…
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.
> 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 wel…
I'm completely OK with American brands making Americans their primary target again.
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.
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>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.
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.
> 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 wel…
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.
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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 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.
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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.
I'm all for increasing exports. What markets are untapped where something could be made in US and exported.
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> 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,…
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.
> 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 wel…
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. Wi…
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.