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Is Zoho another decent alternative? I hear a good amount of praise for it here, but don't know which product(s) people are referring to and what they're good at

Is Zoho another decent alternative? I hear a good amount of praise for it here, but don't know which product(s) people are referring to and what they're good at.

solardev 2y ago
I used Zoho when I was younger and trying out new technologies was still fun. Their mail, docs, CRM, contacts programs were all pretty good, and honestly technologically pretty impressive as far as user-friendly SaaSes go. It's too bad they never got popular in the West (it's an Indian company). In everyday life as an adult, they just don't have the mindshare that the big clouds have. I default to Google Workspace for everything (or whatever it's called now) because that's what everyone else in my social circle use and what most employers use, and being able to seamlessly share stuff with other Google users is much lower friction than trying to get them to sign up (much less pay for) yet another similar service. The network effect is more important than any minor difference in technical merit...
- brightball 2y ago
  Yea, I tried going all in on Proton with my consulting work. A client who was using Google scheduled a meeting that I was invited too and I put it on my calendar. Then somebody had to move the meeting but didn’t click the option to send an update when they did. Everyone’s Google calendars updated. My Proton didn’t because they didn’t send the update. Everybody else was on time and I wasn’t, making a terrible impression. In investigating, I found that my Google calendar that had been setup prior to the Proton move also had the update even though it wasn’t on their domain. That is the network effect in action.
  - solardev 2y ago
    Yeah, calendar invites are a big one. But also the ease of being able to manage sharing via Drive (and be automatically alerted when a Google account owner can't access it), co-edit in Docs (and tagging in comments there), being able to use it as SSO in many places, and having all of that synced to your browser and managed by your Workspace admin. It's the ecosystem that's extremely valuable, not necessarily any individual app.

Is Zoho another decent alternative? I hear a good amount of praise for it here, but don't know which product(s) people are referring to and what they're good at.

solardev 2y ago

I used Zoho when I was younger and trying out new technologies was still fun. Their mail, docs, CRM, contacts programs were all pretty good, and honestly technologically pretty impressive as far as user-friendly SaaSes go. It's too bad they never got popular in the West (it's an Indian company). In everyday life as an adult, they just don't have the mindshare that the big clouds have. I default to Google Workspace for everything (or whatever it's called now) because that's what everyone else in my social circle use and what most employers use, and being able to seamlessly share stuff with other Google users is much lower friction than trying to get them to sign up (much less pay for) yet another similar service. The network effect is more important than any minor difference in technical merit...

brightball 2y ago
Yea, I tried going all in on Proton with my consulting work. A client who was using Google scheduled a meeting that I was invited too and I put it on my calendar. Then somebody had to move the meeting but didn’t click the option to send an update when they did. Everyone’s Google calendars updated. My Proton didn’t because they didn’t send the update. Everybody else was on time and I wasn’t, making a terrible impression. In investigating, I found that my Google calendar that had been setup prior to the Proton move also had the update even though it wasn’t on their domain. That is the network effect in action.
- solardev 2y ago
  Yeah, calendar invites are a big one. But also the ease of being able to manage sharing via Drive (and be automatically alerted when a Google account owner can't access it), co-edit in Docs (and tagging in comments there), being able to use it as SSO in many places, and having all of that synced to your browser and managed by your Workspace admin. It's the ecosystem that's extremely valuable, not necessarily any individual app.