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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

#191

Post by sigzero »

whalesalad wrote: post #168

Definitely disgruntled by the way Google Apps went from being free for the last decade of my life to costing ~$120/mo for myself and my family. I don't think I can leave Google at this point, but if I was strapped for cash I would choose a different platform. Otherwise, I would still go with Google just due to their dominance in this space and integration with other companies. Calendar invites, meet etc being the pri…

$120/mo? What in the world are you doing? Or did you mean a year and not a month there?

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#192

Post by sigzero »

mft_ wrote: post #189
whalesalad wrote: post #168

Definitely disgruntled by the way Google Apps went from being free for the last decade of my life to costing ~$120/mo for myself and my family. I don't think I can leave Google at this point, but if I was strapped for cash I would choose a different platform. Otherwise, I would still go with Google just due to their dominance in this space and integration with other companies. Calendar invites, meet etc being the pri…

I’m torn between not prying, and wondering how you get a family to $120/m, when you can get a basic personal Google account (which comes with access to all of the usual apps) for free?

Business Basic probably and probably has a personal domain attached.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#193

Post by awad »

6510 wrote: post #124
erremerre wrote: post #46

Earlier 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…

There are more smartphones in use than people on the planet so it stands to reason that for many, the smartphone IS their interface to the world the way the desktop was (and maybe still is) for many of us. Seems more like an opportunity to implement a different design paradigm than something to be dismissed outright.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#194

Post by filoleg »

Archelaos wrote: post #142
filoleg wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WHY IN HELL IS EUROPE, WITH ITS INCREDIBLE AMOUNT OF AVAILABLE RESOURCES NOT DOING TH SAME?!? Probably because Euro is much more stable (relative to dollar) than Naira (the official currency of Nigeria). So european companies don’t feel the need to compromise for an inferior service (this claim comes from the article linked in the OP, not from me) or bother creating their own one. If EU countries had an ongoing inf…

> If EU countries had an ongoing inflation rate of 30%+, which would result in GCP/AWS costs for european companies go up insanely every year Inflation would mean that the nominal revenues of EU companies would also increase to the same extent. Thus, the affordability of the foreign service would, ceteris paribus, remain the same.

> Inflation would mean that the nominal revenues of EU companies would also increase to the same extent.

Only if their customers are not from EU (aka their customers pay in USD instead of EUR) or if the company increases pricing to match the inflation on a regular basis (while managing to not lose any customers).

With the first scenario being a very specific edge case, and the second scenario being borderline impossible, I don’t see the inflation being a nothingburger here. Otherwise, the Nigerian companies wouldn’t care about the inflation either.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#196

Post by Fogest »

chucke1992 wrote: post #87
alephnerd wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoho would have been American if Sridhar's visa process wasn't messed up. He used to live in Pleasanton like the rest of the Zoho founders, but they were looking at a multiyear GC backlog, so Sridhar decided to return to India. 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 delt…

The thing is that with India - for example - it is a relatively cheap market and those can afford expensive stuff, but western stuff anyway. Also regarding visa - well there are more indians in the visa queue than probably multiple countries combined. If they make it as fast as other countries - indians will just move in millions and millions simply due to sheer amount of people they have.

> Also regarding visa - well there are more indians in the visa queue than probably multiple countries combined. If they make it as fast as other countries - indians will just move in millions and millions simply due to sheer amount of people they have.

This is already happening in Canada and it is destroying many governmental services like healthcare, education, and of course housing. There definitely need to be reasonable caps in place otherwise services cannot scale up quickly enough to accommodate. I'm sure USA is like Canada in this respect; many services are already woefully underfunded or backlogged without even increasing immigration rates.

I'm also surprised someone who is more well-off would want to leave their country to come to North America. I would think their money would go much further in their own country. But maybe there is more to it than I realize.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#197

Post by sigzero »

GenerWork wrote: post #76
alephnerd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is a less than smart attitude on it. I don't think you have really thought that through.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#198

Post by vitus »

alephnerd wrote: post #104
vitus wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple also buys Google Cloud products for iCloud even though there are alternatives that don't have rival mobile platforms. 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…

> Apple also buys Google Cloud products for iCloud even though there are alternatives that don't have rival mobile platforms. GCP is separate from Google. While they're both Alphabet subsidiaries, the pot of money used by GCP is separate from the pot of money used by the Pixel team (within Google). Kurien doesn't report to Pichai and vice versa. > then I would expect various regulatory agencies to start knocking on o…

> GCP is separate from Google. While they're both Alphabet subsidiaries, the pot of money used by GCP is separate from the pot of money used by the Pixel team (within Google).

> Kurien doesn't report to Pichai and vice versa.

This is patently false. Thomas Kurian reports directly to Sundar Pichai, who is both the CEO of Google as well as Alphabet.

While Kurian likes to refer to himself as the CEO of Google Cloud, that's as much a vanity title as Susan Wojcicki's former title of "CEO of YouTube" -- neither has been an independent company during their tenure, under the Alphabet umbrella or otherwise. (YouTube was once an independent company... pre-acquisition almost 20 years ago.) All Google Cloud employees are Google employees, just as all YouTube employees are Google employees.

> This falls under "competitive intelligence" which ISN'T treated as corporate espionage legally, because you are extrapolating data from sources.

I never said it was corporate espionage. However, it is potentially anti-competitive behavior to use data (market research, whatever you want to call it) from one product to boost another. (Context matters.)

Are you familiar with the EU's Digital Markets Act, which recently went into effect? Google is designated as one of the "gatekeepers" by the European Commission, and the act itself reads:

> The gatekeeper shall not use, in competition with business users, any data that is not publicly available that is generated or provided by those business users in the context of their use of the relevant core platform services or of the services provided together with, or in support of, the relevant core platform services, including data generated or provided by the customers of those business users.

While GCP and other cloud platforms have not yet been explicitly designated as core platform services by the European Commission, it's only a matter of time before that happens.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#199

Post by Archelaos »

filoleg wrote: post #194
Archelaos wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If EU countries had an ongoing inflation rate of 30%+, which would result in GCP/AWS costs for european companies go up insanely every year Inflation would mean that the nominal revenues of EU companies would also increase to the same extent. Thus, the affordability of the foreign service would, ceteris paribus, remain the same.

> Inflation would mean that the nominal revenues of EU companies would also increase to the same extent. Only if their customers are not from EU (aka their customers pay in USD instead of EUR) or if the company increases pricing to match the inflation on a regular basis (while managing to not lose any customers). With the first scenario being a very specific edge case, and the second scenario being borderline impossi…

> Only if their customers are not from EU (aka their customers pay in USD instead of EUR) or if the company increases pricing to match the inflation on a regular basis (while managing to not lose any customers).

Under standard conditions (nothing else then inflation matters), is the same for the domestic market. If we have x % yearly inflation, it means that the exchange rate at the end of the year is x % "higher", meaning the costs for the company are x % higher, but likewise the prices for companies's goods and services are x % higher and thus their revenues. So its profit margin (in percentage of its costs) remains the same.

> Otherwise, the Nigerian companies wouldn’t care about the inflation either.

The real problem is not inflation per se, but accelerated, unpredictable inflation. This ruins the exchange rates of a currency, as it is a risk that is not easy to manage. Due to these unfavourable exchange rates, companies from such countries are exposed to greater cost pressure when they purchase services in countries with a hard currency.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#200

Post by infecto »

alephnerd wrote: post #70
infecto wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Zoho would have been American if Sridhar's visa process wasn't messed up. He used to live in Pleasanton like the rest of the Zoho founders, but they were looking at a multiyear GC backlog, so Sridhar decided to return to India. 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 delt…

This is really is opening too many arguments.

Sure American institutions have insular pigheadedness. Indian/Vietnamese/Chinese/Korean institutions are filled with corruptions and nepotism.

We don’t know for sure Zoho would have been an American company, I would almost argue that their success is because they are in India and can most likely build their product at drastically lower costs than in the US. This is probably one of the reasons they can target SMB, including emerging markets in local currencies.

No doubt localization would have helped but it’s again one of those things where there are too many angles to really accept what is the correct or incorrect path. Uber, perhaps it was that insular pigheadedness you like to mention or perhaps they were really dedicated on having a single app, with a familiar process globally. Grab is indeed hyper local but also drastically different depending on the region your in and is a much different experience than what Uber provides.

I could not speak on the Ford in India but on the flip side Tata could never make it in more developed markets probably with the lack of safety.

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