9 ms·

Zoho became a $1B company without external investment

263 points by mikece 4y ago

zdloft 4y ago
My first experience with Zoho was their Zoho mail when working at a small (2 people) civil engineering firm. At first I was turned off because I was used to either Google Workspace or Office but over time I got used to it and we started using more and more of their suite of products. It was really great to be able to add what we needed over time and not have to find multiple different vendors. Our focus was the civil engineering work so administrative tools like this was just something that we needed for decent cost and to work. Zoho provided that. It's amazing to see where they have come. Hope they keep growing and refining their product suite.
- sshine 4y ago
  Zoho's office package feels like the Libre Office of web office packages. But honestly, for a lot of people myself included, that's all you need.
  - Grimburger 4y ago
    I think it would probably suck in a large org, but for small companies it does the job perfectly fine.
sujitjadhav 4y ago
I think Zoho's actual valuation is around $12 billion.
- inigoalonso 4y ago
  I think the title references its annual revenue.
nashashmi 4y ago
the one TC article I am actually yearning to read is behind a paywall!
nabaraz 4y ago
I migrated three of my personal emails from name cheap email hosting to zoho and the spams i received went up by 20x. Out of curiosity, I went ahead and move one of them back to namecheap, I haven't received a single spam in the last week. Is this something to do with spam filter?
- sshine 4y ago
  > Is this something to do with spam filter? Yes, that's my biggest problem with Zoho so far: Having a below-average quality spam filter sucks more than having a below-average quality anything else, since it makes the difference between receiving emails or not. I'm not convinced there is any reason why it's bad. They could up their game here.
  - ZohoMailSupport 4y ago
    Hi, we do understand your concern and we are here to help, make your experience with Zoho Mail, better. We are constantly working towards making our Spam Filter validate and deliver emails, as our customers prefer and we pride ourselves that the progress has so far been upward and steady. Having said that, we would like to get to the bottom of your concern and assist you with suggestions from the various Spam Control options we have or even come up with a better logic to address it. Hence, we request you to write to us at support<at>zohomail<dot>com with elaborate details about the issue. We will definitely have it analysed and sorted at the earliest. Thanks and Regards - Zoho Mail Team
- mackmgg 4y ago
  I noticed this too, but it seems to have dropped off. In the month or so after I migrated from Google to Zoho I had a ton of spam, and was considering other options. But since then I haven't really gotten any more than I did with Google, maybe one obvious spam email every few weeks. I would mark spam as spam during that initial period when there was a lot, so maybe there's just a learning process for new accounts as to what's actually spam?
- ZohoMailSupport 4y ago
  Hi, Sorry to hear that. We would like to have you back on Zoho and address your concerns. Zoho's Spam Filter works on user preferences as well to ensure better spam filtering and Email delivery. In addition, we also have personalisations available to adjust the Spam Filtering for your accounts. Looking forward to have you back on Zoho Mail. Please write to support<at>zohomail<dot>com if you need assistance with any queries or concerns. Thank you. -Zoho Mail Team
jmconfuzeus 4y ago
They have one of the best customer support I've ever experience. However, I find their apps to be quite sluggish. I think they ought to spend more on engineering.
- sshine 4y ago
  > I think they ought to spend more on engineering. Inevitably, yes. But the fact that they can even be competitive at so many things: Webmail, calendar, office, CRM, remote support, meet, chat, etc. ... and be among the cheapest total solution out there, justifies that they're not the best at any one thing.
  - jmconfuzeus 4y ago
    Yes it's crazy. They have a product for almost every problem a small business can have. Most companies would need a trillion dollars in funding before achieving the same thing.
    - rchaud 4y ago
      For the sake of their stock price, it's easier to maintain the pretense that their single piece (cloud storage, document editing, etc) is world-changing in ways that their actual bottom line does not accurately represent, hence the need for said trillion dollars.
zmmmmm 4y ago
Moved my google workspace accounts to Zoho after they retracted the grandfathered free plans a few months ago. Really quite pleasantly surprised. They are definitely a good option for people who want the same rough set of features. I am reassured to know that their business is real and not a ticking time bomb of the typical VC-funded customer acquisition growth-at-all costs operation.
- silisili 4y ago
  Same, and wish I had sooner. Really slick mobile app, and great spam detection.
- sshine 4y ago
  I moved one family member onto Zoho. It has been a very positive experience so far. You get an office system as part of the package. Some cases of the spam filter being too aggressive. I'd move myself if I wasn't so addicted to FastMail's beautiful web+mobile apps.
  - devoutsalsa 4y ago
    I love Fastmail. Switched earlier this year & now I don't lose sleep about my email maybe getting canceled.
    - tenpies 4y ago
      I only have to keep an eye on what fresh authoritarian nightmares the Australian government is up to. Not the worst thing ever, but it does seem all Western jurisdictions are ticking time bombs, and thanks to Five Eyes you're at the discretion of the worst one.
      - zmmmmm 4y ago
        It's sad but this definitely was one of the factors (by far not the only one, probably not even the main one, however still significant) that dissuaded me from moving to FastMail.
breitling 4y ago
The founder and CEO, Sridhar Vembu, is very much publically aligned with right wing extremists in India, where he lives. https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.thewire.in/article/economy/accenture-zoho-rss-event-twitter/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.thewire.in/article/economy/ac... Vote with your wallet and your conscience
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  > Vote with your wallet and your conscience What alternative mail hosting provider do you recommend? Google? Microsoft? Google, in my humble opinion, is the single biggest evil in the digital world today.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    It’s not a contest, but there are plenty of companies that are more evil. Besides companies that are straight up criminal, my vote would go to traditional data brokers. Google might abuse their wealth of data, but at least they won’t happily sell it on the street corner.
    - sgjohnson 4y ago
      > but at least they won’t happily sell it on the street corner. what do you imagine targetted advertising is? they will sell everything they know about you to basically anyone willing to pay in the form of "I'd like to target these particular audiences in my ad campaign", and then when you get conversions from that particular campaign, it's not exactly rocket science to dereference the click to a particular individual, provided that there's a conversion. and if you're a bit more nefarious than that, you don't even need a conversion.
      - kube-system 4y ago
        Yeah, I understand the privacy concerns with targeted advertising, and agree that it is a concern, but it’s once-removed from the type of data you can get from a dedicated data broker. At a data broker you can simply ask for the data you want and they’ll directly provide it. If Google is a chartered fishing expedition, a data broker is a fish market.
Ayesh 4y ago
Probably the only $1b company that didn't convert their playful logo into a 1D one-color generic looking logo. Good for them!
shp0ngle 4y ago
On one hand, good for them! It seems like a fair company with no secret catch. On the other hand… each zoho product I have tried was “like some other thing, but worse”. All the products are basically fine, but not excellent. But again it can find its customers
- prometheon1 4y ago
  A small non-profit that I'm part of uses Zoho mail. In my opinion it is comparable to other webmail services like Gmail, Fastmail, and better than Outlook webmail. It's especially cool that using your own domain is free. I haven't tried any other of their products.
notkurt 4y ago
What's Zoho like these days? My last company heavily relied on the entire Zoho suite for just about everything except email, spent half of my time putting out fires and migrating them to other products. The only thing that didn't cause too much trouble was their CRM product, but even then it had its issues.
- chrisgarand 4y ago
  We use Books, it's okay, if you're relatively small, it will do the job. Their biggest issue is that they focus on too many products, and interoperability between them. Necessary features take forever to be implemented years after they should have been.
- mastercheif 4y ago
  Anything outside of Mail, CRM, Expense, Recruit, and maybe Desk is hair-pullingly terrible. They promise that all of their "apps" are interoperable, but these integrations are either half-assed to the point of uselessness or so full of bugs you can't rely on them. Zoho Projects is the worst of the bunch—most of our teams are keeping secret Asana boards on the side just to avoid using it.
simonswords82 4y ago
Zoho feels like the Walmart SaaS of the Internet. Still, an impressive annual run rate for a boot strapped business.
- randall 4y ago
  So agree. The taste level of the products is terrible but they all interoperate and it’s crazy.
raybb 4y ago
Is the text of the article available anywhere without a subscription?
Willox 4y ago
I've been using Zoho for my personal email since 2014 now. They haven't made me pay (yet) but I've definitely gotten them a _small_ amount of money through recommendations. I'd totally pay, though. That said, I'm not a big fan of their UI and I only really use the service through forwarding to my gmail address and send mail through gmail -> zoho smtp too.
yesimahuman 4y ago
I haven’t used the products in years but any SaaS company competing directly against Microsoft and Google and actually gaining traction deserves respect in my book and serves as inspiration for other startups hoping to do the same. We have a real risk of businesses only using FAANG products and services because it’s easier and safer and that is a terrible trend for startups.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
eruci 4y ago
I've been using zoho mail for a while now. Recently it stopped working on my Google pixel phone, throwing out an error about an invalid ssl cert. The cert seems valid though, maybe google noticed them just now.
sdssdfsdf1 4y ago
kordlessagain 4y ago
Fun fact. Zoho copied Zoto’s first logo design.
- RoadieRoller 4y ago
  Pogo was (still is?) a famous kids channel in India. There was a lot of comments back then that it was taken from them. Zoho is a $1B without copyright issues on their logo. So it doesn't matter anyway. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:POGO-logo.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:POGO-logo.svg
bobospongecake 4y ago
bprasanna 4y ago
As an Indian I'm proud of what Zoho has achieved. Mainly the founder Sridhar Vembu is down to earth & thinks for the well being of employees and society along with keeping customers in prime seat. Breaking conventional wisdom Zoho opened offices in tier 2 & tier 3 cities of India. Which made it possible for smaller cities to see growth induced by high earning employees of Zoho.
- greazy 4y ago
  What are tier 2 and 3 cities refer to? I've never heard of cities referred to in this manner
  - mohanmca 4y ago
    There is no golden rule, but assume tier-2 cities mayn't have airport, no famous schools, less than 2 or 3 million people living in there. Most of the tier-1 cities has direct international or national airways connectivity. Tier-3 cities may not even have a single factory, it is hub for 100s villages, has decent bus-connectivity to nearest tier-2 city.
    - programmer_dude 4y ago
      Apparently there is an official definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Indian_cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Indian_citie...
  - akmittal 4y ago
    Tier-1 cities are top 7-8 Indian cities based on population. Tier-2 and Tier-3 are smaller cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Indian_cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Indian_citie...
msravi 4y ago
Sridhar Vembu, the founder, is famously responsible for training kids in rural India in software development and associated skills, hiring them post-training, and being responsible for long lasting careers of many youth who couldn't otherwise dream of a career in software development. He established Zoho Schools (https://www.zohoschools.com/ https://www.zohoschools.com/) that trains these kids and provides a stipend for them. The company has offices in Tenkasi, a small Tamilnadu town. His twitter handle (https://twitter.com/svembu https://twitter.com/svembu) is worth a read for his thoughts on small towns, education, infrastructure, and social entrepreneurship in general.
- rss_finder 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - intimidated 4y ago
    Sridhar Vembu is an incredibly thoughtful man. His support of RSS should give you pause—either Sridhar Vembu is a monster, or RSS isn't as monstrous as its opposition insists.
    - nindalf 4y ago
      That’s very cleverly put by you. But it doesn’t have to be so black and white. A person can be kind, thoughtful, help poor folks out … and still harbour hateful ideologies in their heart. Humans are complicated enough that this contradiction is common enough. You think the people who supported the KKK never gave to charity? For non-Indians, some background on the RSS. This was the organisation which was banned for involvement in the assassination of Gandhi. When they were unbanned, it was predicated on a promise of never being involved in politics and elections. They got around that by creating a political wing (the BJP, ruling India for the last 8 years). Till date, the RSS is committed to the core ideology of Hindutva, which envisions India as a purely Hindu state, made solely of Hindus. That’s ominous, considering the hundreds of millions of Indian Muslims and Christians. Lastly, it’s curious that you call out the bogeyman of “media opposition”. Very Trump like. What you fail to mention is that nearly all the media is allied to the BJP-RSS. The few holdouts (like NDTV) will soon be taken over as well.
wodenokoto 4y ago
I remember soho as being a viable competitor to google docs, back when gdocs was new and exciting. And then they faded out and I kinda thought they had died. Then a few months ago I started seeing zoho ads in all the elevators in Dubai.
rchaud 4y ago
This might be one of the only times I've seen the term "$1B company" refer to a billion in revenue, rather than a VC's made-up valuation ("unicorn"). Refreshing.
Jcdirect 4y ago
Wow, so refreshing to see
mydge79 4y ago
Essentially they just made a clone of sap. You Dont need money to start up like that. For some unknown reason, even though both sap and Zoho are absolute rubbish, noone is releasing better software. There are just a bunch of companies that just copy each other. So all of them end up rubbish. The 80s and 90s business software was way more useful and user friendly.

263 points by mikece 4y ago

My first experience with Zoho was their Zoho mail when working at a small (2 people) civil engineering firm. At first I was turned off because I was used to either Google Workspace or Office but over time I got used to it and we started using more and more of their suite of products. It was really great to be able to add what we needed over time and not have to find multiple different vendors. Our focus was the civil engineering work so administrative tools like this was just something that we needed for decent cost and to work. Zoho provided that. It's amazing to see where they have come. Hope they keep growing and refining their product suite.

sshine 4y ago
Zoho's office package feels like the Libre Office of web office packages. But honestly, for a lot of people myself included, that's all you need.
- Grimburger 4y ago
  I think it would probably suck in a large org, but for small companies it does the job perfectly fine.

sujitjadhav 4y ago

I think Zoho's actual valuation is around $12 billion.

inigoalonso 4y ago
I think the title references its annual revenue.

nashashmi 4y ago

the one TC article I am actually yearning to read is behind a paywall!

nabaraz 4y ago

I migrated three of my personal emails from name cheap email hosting to zoho and the spams i received went up by 20x. Out of curiosity, I went ahead and move one of them back to namecheap, I haven't received a single spam in the last week. Is this something to do with spam filter?

sshine 4y ago
> Is this something to do with spam filter? Yes, that's my biggest problem with Zoho so far: Having a below-average quality spam filter sucks more than having a below-average quality anything else, since it makes the difference between receiving emails or not. I'm not convinced there is any reason why it's bad. They could up their game here.
- ZohoMailSupport 4y ago
  Hi, we do understand your concern and we are here to help, make your experience with Zoho Mail, better. We are constantly working towards making our Spam Filter validate and deliver emails, as our customers prefer and we pride ourselves that the progress has so far been upward and steady. Having said that, we would like to get to the bottom of your concern and assist you with suggestions from the various Spam Control options we have or even come up with a better logic to address it. Hence, we request you to write to us at support<at>zohomail<dot>com with elaborate details about the issue. We will definitely have it analysed and sorted at the earliest. Thanks and Regards - Zoho Mail Team
mackmgg 4y ago
I noticed this too, but it seems to have dropped off. In the month or so after I migrated from Google to Zoho I had a ton of spam, and was considering other options. But since then I haven't really gotten any more than I did with Google, maybe one obvious spam email every few weeks. I would mark spam as spam during that initial period when there was a lot, so maybe there's just a learning process for new accounts as to what's actually spam?
ZohoMailSupport 4y ago
Hi, Sorry to hear that. We would like to have you back on Zoho and address your concerns. Zoho's Spam Filter works on user preferences as well to ensure better spam filtering and Email delivery. In addition, we also have personalisations available to adjust the Spam Filtering for your accounts. Looking forward to have you back on Zoho Mail. Please write to support<at>zohomail<dot>com if you need assistance with any queries or concerns. Thank you. -Zoho Mail Team

jmconfuzeus 4y ago

They have one of the best customer support I've ever experience. However, I find their apps to be quite sluggish. I think they ought to spend more on engineering.

sshine 4y ago
> I think they ought to spend more on engineering. Inevitably, yes. But the fact that they can even be competitive at so many things: Webmail, calendar, office, CRM, remote support, meet, chat, etc. ... and be among the cheapest total solution out there, justifies that they're not the best at any one thing.
- jmconfuzeus 4y ago
  Yes it's crazy. They have a product for almost every problem a small business can have. Most companies would need a trillion dollars in funding before achieving the same thing.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    For the sake of their stock price, it's easier to maintain the pretense that their single piece (cloud storage, document editing, etc) is world-changing in ways that their actual bottom line does not accurately represent, hence the need for said trillion dollars.

zmmmmm 4y ago

Moved my google workspace accounts to Zoho after they retracted the grandfathered free plans a few months ago. Really quite pleasantly surprised. They are definitely a good option for people who want the same rough set of features. I am reassured to know that their business is real and not a ticking time bomb of the typical VC-funded customer acquisition growth-at-all costs operation.

silisili 4y ago
Same, and wish I had sooner. Really slick mobile app, and great spam detection.
sshine 4y ago
I moved one family member onto Zoho. It has been a very positive experience so far. You get an office system as part of the package. Some cases of the spam filter being too aggressive. I'd move myself if I wasn't so addicted to FastMail's beautiful web+mobile apps.
- devoutsalsa 4y ago
  I love Fastmail. Switched earlier this year & now I don't lose sleep about my email maybe getting canceled.
  - tenpies 4y ago
    I only have to keep an eye on what fresh authoritarian nightmares the Australian government is up to. Not the worst thing ever, but it does seem all Western jurisdictions are ticking time bombs, and thanks to Five Eyes you're at the discretion of the worst one.
    - zmmmmm 4y ago
      It's sad but this definitely was one of the factors (by far not the only one, probably not even the main one, however still significant) that dissuaded me from moving to FastMail.

breitling 4y ago

The founder and CEO, Sridhar Vembu, is very much publically aligned with right wing extremists in India, where he lives. https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.thewire.in/article/economy/accenture-zoho-rss-event-twitter/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.thewire.in/article/economy/ac... Vote with your wallet and your conscience

sgjohnson 4y ago
> Vote with your wallet and your conscience What alternative mail hosting provider do you recommend? Google? Microsoft? Google, in my humble opinion, is the single biggest evil in the digital world today.
- kube-system 4y ago
  It’s not a contest, but there are plenty of companies that are more evil. Besides companies that are straight up criminal, my vote would go to traditional data brokers. Google might abuse their wealth of data, but at least they won’t happily sell it on the street corner.
  - sgjohnson 4y ago
    > but at least they won’t happily sell it on the street corner. what do you imagine targetted advertising is? they will sell everything they know about you to basically anyone willing to pay in the form of "I'd like to target these particular audiences in my ad campaign", and then when you get conversions from that particular campaign, it's not exactly rocket science to dereference the click to a particular individual, provided that there's a conversion. and if you're a bit more nefarious than that, you don't even need a conversion.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      Yeah, I understand the privacy concerns with targeted advertising, and agree that it is a concern, but it’s once-removed from the type of data you can get from a dedicated data broker. At a data broker you can simply ask for the data you want and they’ll directly provide it. If Google is a chartered fishing expedition, a data broker is a fish market.

Ayesh 4y ago

Probably the only $1b company that didn't convert their playful logo into a 1D one-color generic looking logo. Good for them!

shp0ngle 4y ago

On one hand, good for them! It seems like a fair company with no secret catch. On the other hand… each zoho product I have tried was “like some other thing, but worse”. All the products are basically fine, but not excellent. But again it can find its customers

prometheon1 4y ago
A small non-profit that I'm part of uses Zoho mail. In my opinion it is comparable to other webmail services like Gmail, Fastmail, and better than Outlook webmail. It's especially cool that using your own domain is free. I haven't tried any other of their products.

notkurt 4y ago

What's Zoho like these days? My last company heavily relied on the entire Zoho suite for just about everything except email, spent half of my time putting out fires and migrating them to other products. The only thing that didn't cause too much trouble was their CRM product, but even then it had its issues.

chrisgarand 4y ago
We use Books, it's okay, if you're relatively small, it will do the job. Their biggest issue is that they focus on too many products, and interoperability between them. Necessary features take forever to be implemented years after they should have been.
mastercheif 4y ago
Anything outside of Mail, CRM, Expense, Recruit, and maybe Desk is hair-pullingly terrible. They promise that all of their "apps" are interoperable, but these integrations are either half-assed to the point of uselessness or so full of bugs you can't rely on them. Zoho Projects is the worst of the bunch—most of our teams are keeping secret Asana boards on the side just to avoid using it.

simonswords82 4y ago

Zoho feels like the Walmart SaaS of the Internet. Still, an impressive annual run rate for a boot strapped business.

randall 4y ago
So agree. The taste level of the products is terrible but they all interoperate and it’s crazy.

raybb 4y ago

Is the text of the article available anywhere without a subscription?

Willox 4y ago

I've been using Zoho for my personal email since 2014 now. They haven't made me pay (yet) but I've definitely gotten them a _small_ amount of money through recommendations. I'd totally pay, though. That said, I'm not a big fan of their UI and I only really use the service through forwarding to my gmail address and send mail through gmail -> zoho smtp too.

yesimahuman 4y ago

I haven’t used the products in years but any SaaS company competing directly against Microsoft and Google and actually gaining traction deserves respect in my book and serves as inspiration for other startups hoping to do the same. We have a real risk of businesses only using FAANG products and services because it’s easier and safer and that is a terrible trend for startups.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

eruci 4y ago

I've been using zoho mail for a while now. Recently it stopped working on my Google pixel phone, throwing out an error about an invalid ssl cert. The cert seems valid though, maybe google noticed them just now.

sdssdfsdf1 4y ago

kordlessagain 4y ago

Fun fact. Zoho copied Zoto’s first logo design.

RoadieRoller 4y ago
Pogo was (still is?) a famous kids channel in India. There was a lot of comments back then that it was taken from them. Zoho is a $1B without copyright issues on their logo. So it doesn't matter anyway. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:POGO-logo.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:POGO-logo.svg

bobospongecake 4y ago

bprasanna 4y ago

As an Indian I'm proud of what Zoho has achieved. Mainly the founder Sridhar Vembu is down to earth & thinks for the well being of employees and society along with keeping customers in prime seat. Breaking conventional wisdom Zoho opened offices in tier 2 & tier 3 cities of India. Which made it possible for smaller cities to see growth induced by high earning employees of Zoho.

greazy 4y ago
What are tier 2 and 3 cities refer to? I've never heard of cities referred to in this manner
- mohanmca 4y ago
  There is no golden rule, but assume tier-2 cities mayn't have airport, no famous schools, less than 2 or 3 million people living in there. Most of the tier-1 cities has direct international or national airways connectivity. Tier-3 cities may not even have a single factory, it is hub for 100s villages, has decent bus-connectivity to nearest tier-2 city.
  - programmer_dude 4y ago
    Apparently there is an official definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Indian_cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Indian_citie...
- akmittal 4y ago
  Tier-1 cities are top 7-8 Indian cities based on population. Tier-2 and Tier-3 are smaller cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Indian_cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Indian_citie...

msravi 4y ago

Sridhar Vembu, the founder, is famously responsible for training kids in rural India in software development and associated skills, hiring them post-training, and being responsible for long lasting careers of many youth who couldn't otherwise dream of a career in software development. He established Zoho Schools (https://www.zohoschools.com/ https://www.zohoschools.com/) that trains these kids and provides a stipend for them. The company has offices in Tenkasi, a small Tamilnadu town. His twitter handle (https://twitter.com/svembu https://twitter.com/svembu) is worth a read for his thoughts on small towns, education, infrastructure, and social entrepreneurship in general.

rss_finder 4y ago
[flagged]
- intimidated 4y ago
  Sridhar Vembu is an incredibly thoughtful man. His support of RSS should give you pause—either Sridhar Vembu is a monster, or RSS isn't as monstrous as its opposition insists.
  - nindalf 4y ago
    That’s very cleverly put by you. But it doesn’t have to be so black and white. A person can be kind, thoughtful, help poor folks out … and still harbour hateful ideologies in their heart. Humans are complicated enough that this contradiction is common enough. You think the people who supported the KKK never gave to charity? For non-Indians, some background on the RSS. This was the organisation which was banned for involvement in the assassination of Gandhi. When they were unbanned, it was predicated on a promise of never being involved in politics and elections. They got around that by creating a political wing (the BJP, ruling India for the last 8 years). Till date, the RSS is committed to the core ideology of Hindutva, which envisions India as a purely Hindu state, made solely of Hindus. That’s ominous, considering the hundreds of millions of Indian Muslims and Christians. Lastly, it’s curious that you call out the bogeyman of “media opposition”. Very Trump like. What you fail to mention is that nearly all the media is allied to the BJP-RSS. The few holdouts (like NDTV) will soon be taken over as well.

wodenokoto 4y ago

I remember soho as being a viable competitor to google docs, back when gdocs was new and exciting. And then they faded out and I kinda thought they had died. Then a few months ago I started seeing zoho ads in all the elevators in Dubai.

rchaud 4y ago

This might be one of the only times I've seen the term "$1B company" refer to a billion in revenue, rather than a VC's made-up valuation ("unicorn"). Refreshing.

Jcdirect 4y ago

Wow, so refreshing to see

mydge79 4y ago

Essentially they just made a clone of sap. You Dont need money to start up like that. For some unknown reason, even though both sap and Zoho are absolute rubbish, noone is releasing better software. There are just a bunch of companies that just copy each other. So all of them end up rubbish. The 80s and 90s business software was way more useful and user friendly.