Channel Insider just released an article detailing Google’s Worst Enemies – a list of the top 7 enemies Google has.
The article lists the 6 usual suspects you’d expect: Amazon in the e-books category; Apple and RIM (Blackberry) for phones; Microsoft (search, apps, phone); Mozilla, the makers of Firefox (a browser that competes with Google’s Chrome); And finally (and probably the biggest one) Facebook, who competes with Google in the social space, but most importantly, for online ad dollars.
Now… guess who rounds up the 7 “worst enemies”?
That aside, we do want to clarify how we compete and collaborate with Google.
We do compete with Google to an extent. They offer Gmail for businesses – we offer a great business-focused hosted e-mail solution. We started offering an online office suite, and Google followed suit with their Writely acquisition. Needless to say, we like our offerings better!
But that’s about it. Other than those two products, we collaborate with Google in multiple ways and whenever possible. We collaborate with Google far and wide – with their Enterprise division, with the Chrome OS folks and in some other areas.
- Zoho was one of the first vendors that, in 2008 allowed allowed people to sign-up for our services with a Google Apps account – even before that became official with the Google Apps Marketplace.
- In 2007, we were one of the first to adopt the Google Gears technology, and launched Zoho Writer offline.
- We’ve been pretty active, and in fact, a top-rated vendor in the Google Apps Marketplace.
- Last week we announced a Google CR-48 giveaway promotion. Of course, we couldn’t have done this without Google!
That’s the nature of the evolving technology industry these days… even Microsoft and Google are, ahem, “collaborating” on search results!
Now, seriously – it’s not so black-and-white and it might sometimes seem from a distance. Sure, if a customer asks us whether they should sign-up with Z Mail or Gmail, well, we’re going to give them our own, biased, point of view. And I’m sure Google does exactly the same. But when you put that in context of all the things we do, you start seeing the big picture.
And that’s not unique to Google, that’s just part of who we are as a company. We recognize customers have choices, and that it is just impossible that 100% of them will chose to go 100% Zoho, for each and every one of their apps. Likewise, we also integrate some of our products with other leading players in the industry. For example, we released a Quickbooks add-on for our Zoho CRM product, right before we launched our own online accounting solution, Zoho Books.
So… no, I don’t think we’re one of Google’s “worst 7 enemies”. Rather than defining ourselves as enemies, we like to think of ourselves as a business’ best online friend!
Rodrigo
Very excited to see what Zoho does here. Actually also surprised that google has done nothing in this area. They did try to partner with salesforce a few years ago, but that never went anywhere.
Very excited to see what Zoho does here. Actually also surprised that google has done nothing in this area. They did try to partner with salesforce a few years ago, but that never went anywhere.
This is incredible... way to go!!! :)Recently in my presentation on online document processing business, I covered Zoho Writer also. Will share the detailed report as soon as it is released. For the time being, some ideas at #...
This is incredible... way to go!!! :)Recently in my presentation on online document processing business, I covered Zoho Writer also. Will share the detailed report as soon as it is released. For the time being, some ideas at #...
Congratulations for being invited to a seat at the high table !! You should now set your sights on the ERP crowd with low cost hosted mini ERP solutions.
Congratulations for being invited to a seat at the high table !! You should now set your sights on the ERP crowd with low cost hosted mini ERP solutions.
Hmm... sincerely, I prefer Zoho when I'm on a slow internet connection. Otherwise, I choose Google.
Hmm... sincerely, I prefer Zoho when I'm on a slow internet connection. Otherwise, I choose Google.