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Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

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Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#71

Post by resolutebat »

alephnerd wrote: post #2

> 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…

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).

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#72

Post by bluGill »

patrickhogan1 wrote: post #9

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.

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)

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#73

Post by sofixa »

alephnerd wrote: post #44
johnchristopher wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

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.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#74

Post by alephnerd »

dieulot wrote: post #58
alephnerd wrote: post #2

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#75

Post by patrickhogan1 »

dartharva wrote: post #67
patrickhogan1 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#76

Post by GenerWork »

alephnerd wrote: post #5
_chu1 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm completely OK with American brands making Americans their primary target again.

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 fel…

>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.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#77

Post by mynameismon »

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.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#79

Post by alephnerd »

resolutebat wrote: post #71
alephnerd wrote: post #2

> 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…

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 so…

> 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.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#80

Post by jlangenauer »

alephnerd wrote: post #74
dieulot wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 de…

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.)

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