What i respect: a) Zoho's recruitment of smart young hackers in India. They don't look at their degrees, but their skill + tenacity b) Not taking VC money. Granted AdventNet gave them a great start. c) They've built a here to stay business. What I don't respect: a) They basically ripped sugarcrm off with VTiger and called it "REAL open source". Last I checked sugar got past that debate with GPL3, plus zoho relabels v…
Jason, thanks for the complement and the criticism. To clarify a couple of points: Zoho CRM has nothing do with SugarCRM code. It is entirely written in Java - just as all the rest of the Zoho suite, in fact, it shares the same underlying Java distributed framework with the rest of Zoho. vtiger has a clean open source license, same as Firefox (MPL) - the entire product is available on that license - and vtiger offere…
What I CAN argue is the user interface, because that's something I've got experience with. Yours is awful. You essentially emulate an old version of Office, which had a fairly terrible interface to begin with. It works because you can modify the toolbar to work with it, to add on. Your products look like Office with all the toolbars enabled. There is no acknowledgement that certain buttons are used more than others, no acknowledgement that such a thing as "user flow" exists. It's unoriginal and it is worse than the original design. This is not usable.
Your aesthetic is questionable. Brown and white in Writer is not pretty by any means. The fact that your UI changes with every product means that you lack consistency. Furthermore, in Safari there is severe clipping whenever rounded corners are involved. It looks about as pretty as a bad student project.
Google understands that the Internet has different requirements, a different medium than desktop apps. Their products are lighter than Office, not just in terms of features but in terms of aesthetic. They don't try and fail to emulate Office. They offer one that's more optimized for the Internet. With yours, I'm seeing vast increases in disk usage. That's poorly done.
Of course you have customers. You have a wide set of applications, and a lot of people will use anything that has a wide featureset without design. That doesn't mean you won't get criticism. Many people despair of the fact that there's so much attention on featureset and so little attention on good design. It's the 37signals crowd, I guess you could say. And that crowd looks down on Zoho as a symbol of what's wrong with web design right now.
I mean, don't get me wrong. Good luck with your site: you certainly do have a product that appeals to a particular market. I just wish you guys would put a little more effort into making something that looks and feels beautiful.