Much to my great chagrin, Zoho is the little engine that just couldn’t. If web apps were like cities in urban planning, then Zoho would be suffering the “second city syndrome” in comparison to Google, and would languish like Long Beach, Ft. Worth, St. Paul, Oakland, and so many other gems that are blinded by the glare of their more famous relatives.
In the coming posts we’ll look more at Zoho. It really is cool. I’m a big fan of compact and portable apps that are feature-rich, integrated, and can be hidden away when not used. Less is more, friends.
So why am I so unhappy about Zoho? I really want Zoho to succeed. I really do. It just seems so cool. In some aspects, Zoho is miles ahead of Google in the web app space, while in other areas Zoho is so sloppy and inconsistent that it acts like a big paper tiger that no one is paying attention to.
I’m sure Zoho will succeed without me as a client (whether paying or free) of their product. For now, I’ll repeat below a Zoho forum post I entered on November 24, yet as of today (November 29), my forum post hasn’t found any moderator to release it for public view, much less respond. Is anybody home? Granted, it was the Thanksgiving holiday. I have much to be thankful for, as do our friends at Zoho — and Google. But much work remains to be done:
The disconnect and overlap with Tasks and Planner is a big issue – in fact, it speaks to the overall feeling on the whole Zoho platform. For example:
- Why don’t tasks/todos/meetings etc. pop up on the same calendar interface?
- Why does Project have a different calendar interface entirely?
- Why are the Nav buttons slightly different in each app? Look closely at the navigation tools for Writer, Sheet, Planner, Tasks, Project, Notebook. They’re all different – just slightly different enough to make me uncomfortable that Zoho is really one comprehensive package the way that MS Office/Outlook is.
- How do I know that these different applications are talking to each other? In fact, I don’t think they are at all – I have no way of knowing it.
- As was noted in a different forum, I also have had trouble emailing items into planner. Why can’t that somehow be integrated with the existing Zoho mail application?
- Can I email a todo, task, meeting, word doc, sheet doc, etc. into my zoho mail address and have it integrate directly into the correct application? How?
- Why does planner not even load when I jump to it from the Zoho Personal dashboard? I have to log on separately. That, along with the above noted failures to email directly into Planner, suggests to me (rightly or wrongly) that Planner has no relationship at all with the other applications in Zoho. But isn’t that the point of the whole thing?
Apologies to all for this post – this is a little off topic for this forum question. HOWEVER: this issue is critical, and is the single-most concern that is holding me back from using Zoho, paying for Zoho premium, and telling other people to use Zoho as well.
Dear Zoho friends:
Please fix these minor concerns, ASAP. The technology exists, and you clearly have the resources, power, and intelligence to get it done. This is more than just fluffy public relations; I just don’t see consumers (i.e. me) will really get into this product without that foundation of visual and functional consistence that implies a secure, reliable killer app that is around for the long run.
Since my forum post is unavailable to you as of today, dear reader, I re-post it here as a public service. More to come in future posts.
David -
First of all. Thanks for your candor and feedback. I agree that there’s a lot left to be done. But I think over the past months we’ve made some great progress. And some of the things that you describe here are in our pipeline. Yeah, we do have some resources but they are of course limited, to we need to choose what we prioritize.
That said, I’m sure you will have noticed that our apps are increasingly being integrated with each other, and maybe you have noticed that our applications are increasingly sharing the same structure and navigation elements. You can see this for example, with Zoho Projects and the recent Zoho Recruit launch. We’ll continue to do that where it makes sense.
We sincerely value your feedback. It has only taken us a bit to get it up on the forum because of the holidays. In any case, please feel free to reach me directly via e-mail.
best,
Rodrigo Vaca
Zoho.com
David,
Thank you for your post. I am circulating your post widely internally, so all our teams take your message to heart. Our people do care, and read all of this, I assure you.
We do acknowledge we have a lot of work to do, and we are on it. At times, it even feels to us that things move glacially, but that is just the nature of the beast. There are many unseen improvements (security and performance, to mention top two unseen but crucial areas) that we do, and we balance those with what customers want to see in Zoho.
Our infrastructure team spent days and nights during Thanksgiving holidays to upgrade our network infrastructure, so that Zoho services can scale and perform well. They achieved it without taking a downtime.
I am not saying those by way of offering an excuse, just to illustrate the kind of behind-the-scenes stuff that goes on in a complex platform like Zoho.
Once again, thank you for taking the time. We appreciate it and your message is being heard across Zoho.
Sridhar
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