Zoho's Next Big Thing

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Moving the Point of Assembly

Kudos to Zoho. Their efforts remind me of the
early days of the Microsoft Productivity
Environment where core MSOffice editors expanded
their reach through DDE, OLE, rich copy/paste,
data binding, merged content and data, VBA
scripting and the infamous recorder, and a
developer API that meshed platform and
productivity apps so deeply into end user
information that the binding of business processes
to the MOPE is proving near impossible to break.
Even for years after the fact.

A business ecosystem for client/server was born
back in the early 90's, with Microsoft continuing
on to own entirely the client side of the
equation.

Zoho sits at the edge of those trying to reinvent
this productivity environment on the Open-Web.
And what a challenge it is. I say "Open-Web"
because Microsoft is also active in this area with
the MS-Web apps and the Exchange-SharePoint-MOSS-
SQL Server juggernaut.

I hope Zoho will stick to Open-Web formats,
protocols and interfaces. HTML5 and XMPP are
promising, but the temptation to short cut the
slow pace of open standards has to be an issue.
Especially with a unconstrained, marketshare rich
but proprietary Microsoft in position to embrace,
extend and replace those standards.

Microsoft will of course try to split the Web into
a rich Web - poor Web scenario. The "poor Web"
will be based on support for 1998 HTML-CSS. The
"rich Web" will be proprietary, featuring .NET-WPF
platform specific technologies such as OOXML,
Silverlight, Smart-tags, LINQ, XPS and the
SharePoint collaboration protocol. This strategy
can be seen even with the most recent technology
review of the MS-Web apps. They are not HTML+
"content" apps, even though they exploit the Ajax
plug-in model of Open-Web browsers. Instead, they
are exclusive to MSOffice OOXML documents.

Microsoft understands well the basics of building
a dominant platform. They know that it's not the
application; it's binding end user information to
the application ecosystem. They also know that
platform trumps applications every time. This is
what Zoho, Google, Cisco and Apple are up against.

As Microsoft moves the productivity environment to
a MS-Web, their control over business systems and
processes is exposed. Of all the Open-Web
challengers, i think Zoho and Zimbra we're best
positioned to take advantage of this movement.
Where most challengers to the Microsoft desktop
monopoly try to convince end users to "rip-out-
and-replace" MSOffice, Zoho and Zimbra uniquely
try to "re-purpose" existing productivity
environments. It's a difficult path, but nowhere
near as disruptive and costly as the
"replacement" approach. Besides, "re-
purpose" is exactly the same approach that
Microsoft is taking with their MS-Web initiative.

Google is interesting in that they too are intent
on moving the existing point of assembly to the
cloud. Up until today though, Google was stuck in
the no man's land of "replacement". With
the introduction of the Google Chrome Frame plug-
in for IE, they may have taken the lead in re-
purposing existing Microsoft applications to
work with the Open-Web. Very interesting, and i
think Zoho will be a big beneficiary of this
effort.

~ge~

Posted by: gary_edwards   Posted on: 09/22/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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