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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.
Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
131–140 of 213 posts
Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 si…
But these are exactly in Africa, phone only.
Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#133I 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.
Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm completely OK with American brands making Americans their primary target again.
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 de…
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Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#135One 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.
Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#136Zoho 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.
Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#138Zoho users should be prepared for the surprise price increase. Price per user: Zoho Workplace $0.68 Google Workspace $6 Microsoft 365 $6
per year?
Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#139Zoho 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.
Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders
#140Zoho 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.
> 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.