It was with shock and disbelief that I learned the passing of Professor Rajeev Motwani of Stanford University, technical adviser and angel investor in numerous companies, including Google.  I was introduced to him by a mutual friend a few months ago. I had read his research papers, and I discussed with him one of my favorite technical obsessions: relational data models and how they intersect with programming languages. He was intrigued by the idea, and suggested we should cooperate on researching it further. I was going to write up a research proposal of sorts, and was looking forward to work with him. Professor Motwani, you will be missed.

Inevitable comparisons are made between the hugely enthusiastic developer response (including from us at Zoho) to Google Wave yesterday with the relatively tepid reponse to Microsoft's new search engine Bing. The real interesting contrast to us, as independent software developers, is the way developers responded to Silverlight as opposed to the reaction yesterday to Google Wave. Both Silverlight and Wave are aimed at taking the internet experience to the next level. To be perfectly honest, Silverlight is a great piece of technology. Google Wave, as yet, is not much more than a concept and an announcement. 

It is easy to dismiss all this with "Oh, the press just loves to hype everything Google, and loves to hate Microsoft," but that cannot explain why even competitors like us are willing to embrace Google's innovations, but stay away from perfectly good innovations from Microsoft, such as Silverlight? 

It comes down to one word: karma. Microsoft just has so much bad karma in this industry that I cannot imagine a company like us trusting them on much of anything. Take Silverlight: Microsoft pledged that they will always support Silverlight on Mac and Linux, and on browsers other than IE. Do you really, really believe their promise? Let's recap some ancient history here: Microsoft used to have IE for Solaris and even had a beta of IE for Linux. That was when IE was way behind Netscape and was trying to catch up. Once Netscape was safely vanquished, Microsoft's commitment to support IE on other platforms vanished. In fact, Microsoft intentionally pulled IE on other platforms, because it was clear to them that making the web experience suck on other platforms was a way to keep Windows firmly entrenched. I am glad they adopted that strategy, because that strategy eventually paved the way for Firefox (and Safari and Chrome ...), and together those browsers have rendered the operating system utterly irrelevant. Apple's resurgence - based on design prowess, not platform dominance - and Vista's failure, have demonstrated that convincingly.

Let's try to imagine what a Google Silverlight would have been. It would have been a fully open source product from Google, with a very liberal open source license (BSD or Apache). It would have all the technical specifications published openly. They would pledge to have the Silverlight VM interoperate with Javascript and HTML5. And a company like Zoho would have a ton of developers working on Google Silverlight based applications by now - as opposed to having exactly ZERO developers working on Microsoft Silverlight. Please note that this has nothing to do with the technology: as I said before, I happen to agree that Silverlight is a great piece of technology. 

What could Microsoft do to earn our trust? For starters, they could really support all the web standards on IE.  IE is increasingly an embarrassment of a browser and a pain for developers to support. The only reason IE is making any progress at all is the competition from Firefox and Safari and Chrome. I know, IE was once known for web innovation, including AJAX - but that was the time Microsoft was really trying to catch up and beat Netscape. Fair or not, the impression independent developers get is that Microsoft would prefer the web to stay crippled, so pesky applications that challenge their cash cows can stay frozen as "online Wordpad", as Bill Gates put it. 

That brings us back to Google: today, it is Google which is driving web standards forward. That is why we at Zoho are firmly aligned with them, even if they are our primary competitor. We believe in an open web, there is plenty of opportunity for all of us. Could Google abuse its position? Well, I am sure they understand karma! 

Today, Google announced Google Wave, described as "What email might look like if it were invented today." From our perspective, the most exciting part of it is the open XMPP based protocol that Google has defined, and their pledge of an open source reference implementation. Having worked with technologies like Google Gears which is used in Zoho Mail & Writer today, with other services to be added soon, we are really excited about Google Wave. Here is a third party (competitor!) perspective on the technology and how we plan to use it.

Currently, our Zoho Chat message bus works across Zoho services to knit them together in real time. A few examples would serve to illustrate this. Let's say you are working in Zoho Mail, and a colleague shares a Zoho Writer document with you. You will see a notification in the chat bar in Zoho Mail, and you can choose to open the document right from that notification. When that document opens in Zoho Writer, the chat bus carries the real time editing information back and forth.  Zoho Meeting, of course uses a real time screen sharing system. 

In other words, real time communications permeates Zoho services. We plan to embrace the Google Wave protocol to make these communications open and interoperable with any other Wave provider, including Google itself. 

How do users benefit? For example, when Google Docs and Zoho Writer both implement the Wave protocol, it would be possible for a user to collaborate on a document across these services. Similarly, a screen sharing session from Zoho Meeting could work with a user logging in from any Wave provider.

We are hugely excited by the potential of this technology and plan to fully embrace it, just as we embrace other open innovations from Google like Gears. Thank you Google!

Zoho is one of the finalists for Webware 100 Awards 2009. According to Webware, 300 finalists were selected from around 5,000 Web 2.0 apps. We are one of the 300 finalists broken into 10 categories. Each category has 30 finalists of which 10 will be selected (based on your voting) as part of the final Webware 100. Zoho is listed under 'Productivity' category and we'd love to win your vote under this category.

ps : We were a winner last year.

Most CRM packages tend to be too heavyweight for the sole proprietor, however. They cost a bundle and contain features that most web workers don’t need. Zoho has a relatively simple CRM solution that’s free for up to three users. Although it takes some figuring out, it’s a good option to consider for web workers.

Everything you need to access appears in the tabs at the top of the screen and the links below them. You can customize most of the reports and dashboards as well as the settings for every tab.

The key reason businesses invest in CRM is for tracking and managing sales leads. The Leads tab lists all the active leads for easy reviewing and updating. After creating a new lead, you can return to that lead to update its page with information including attachments, products and activity tracking. You send emails straight from the application, with a record of the sent email added automatically to the lead’s page.

If you need to track many leads, Zoho CRM keeps all the information in one place for easier management. Once a lead converts to a sale, Zoho CRM removes it from the Leads tab and moves it though the pipeline, automatically creating the account details.

Compared to other CRM solutions, Zoho’s CRM package is affordable and easier to learn. Web workers will more than likely find most of what they need in Zoho CRM for a great price.