Is Zoho Creator high priority for Zoho team?

Posted on July 23, 2006 by Hyther

This is a valid question raised by Andrew (DabbleDB’s founder) in their forums. With bunch of online applications under zoho brand, obviously, any one-product-competitor would say our weakness is “lack of focus”

To clarify on this,

We have extremely focused independant teams working on each zoho service – in Paul Graham words, each zoho service is a startup, and each product manager is the chief executive for the respective service.

In fact, too much of such independency to zoho teams is hurting us now Many of our customers have asked for single sign-on support between zoho services which we thought we could take up after each service has its own customers and stands by itself. Now its time and we are on top of it. This is a clear evidence that each zoho service has its own external focus and operate as separate startup.

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Deluge: Online Scripting Language

Posted on June 26, 2006 by Hyther

Have you seen “import script” option in Zoho Creator -> create application? Wondering what the heck is Deluge? Here is quick intro (too much to say though – will cover in subsequent blog posts)

Deluge is the online scripting environment to create sophisticated database driven applications. With few lines of deluge code you can create your own web application. Everything online!

50 lines of code worth a 500 lines of explanation Here it goes..

Simple 4 steps to try this deluge script
1. Login to Zoho Creator
2. Create Application
3. select, Import Script
4. Copy & Paste this code

Voila! your feedback app is ready. You can embed the feedback form on your website as well.

With Deluge, Zoho Creator goes beyond GUI based app building. Which means, users can use either use GUI to create web apps or write code in Deluge.

How Deluge works ?

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Google Spreadsheets Launch: what does it mean for Zoho Sheet?

Posted on June 6, 2006 by Hyther

Few hours back google has launched its spreadsheets. The attention triggered by this annoucement has increased our zoho sheet traffic and registrations (with google restricting to limited signup). Thank you Google

We anticipated this service from Google. We don’t see them as a threat. Google is focusing more on web 2.0 features like sharing and collaboration (by integrating chat features) rather trying to bring the MS Excel experience on web (though this is pretty early to comment upon). We think, zoho sheet can offer more value to the enterprises and traditional spreadsheet users by bringing most used features of excel on web and more. For instance, our focus would be more on charts, reports, integration with online databases, etc rather focusing on chat kind-of features – this may bring cool effect but not sure how far this would be used by serious users.

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Less is More, But people expect more..

Posted on February 2, 2006 by Hyther

For some people, less is sufficient, less has less confusion, less feels lighter and less is more-than-enough. I agree and for good reason: they’ve been trained to think that way. May be they advocate pareto’s 80-20 rule, just do the 20 percent – the less is more.

But most people want more, they need the extra one feature which may not wanted by most – they really want the long tail of features. The ‘more’ should not spoil the experience they had with ‘less’. Should not complicate the user experience introducing the more. What they really want is More features at the experience of Less – they expect more..

This drives to analogize with the classic example of longtail; Wal-mart and other major retailers don’t carry less popular albums (they carry less, the top 20 percent). The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going.

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Traditional Spreadsheets in a Non-Traditional way

Posted on January 31, 2006 by Hyther

During a chat with Gibu this evening, he raised me this question. How my recent initiative, Zoho Sheet, is positioned against Excel? Let me answer it here.

Excel is one of my favourite software. I love its usability. Perfectly designed for its intended purpose and users. But its not friendly now for internet population who want to consume lot of data from internet into their spreadsheets. Time to give it a thought. Listing here some of the shortcomings of traditional spreadsheets. For now, I refrain getting into pricing.

Sharing is pain. Not collaboration friendly. You cannot share it online with your friends, colleagues and clients. You might be sending it now as email attachments.
Built for non-internet users? Absolutely. You cannot integrate any internet information or mashup with cool web services. How about the spreadsheet integrating sales data from salesforce.com, your yahoo finance data, your favourite books from amazon ?

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Easy->Trivial, Difficult->Easy, Complicated->Possible

Posted on January 24, 2006 by Hyther

Brainpipe has reviewed Zoho Creator. The below one was truly encouraging which the creator team strived for.

“Zoho Creator makes it remarkably easy to create very simple tracking applications, and parent-child relationships are handled so well you donâ€™t even need to know what that means to use it.”

If you take any product feature it could fall under some range in the spectrum of – easy, difficult or complicated. Our objective, here at zoho, was to make the “easy” to “trivial”, “difficult” should be “easy”, and bring the impossible or “complicated” stuff “possible”. Every thing web based. In zoho creator context, it means

1. Creating simple forms or views in page should be “trivial”
2. Relating multiple forms or creating views across multiple data to build a custom page should be fairly “easy”
3.

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We are heading on right direction

Posted on January 20, 2006 by Hyther

Mike made a interesting mention in his Techcrunch post today claiming that

- 99.9% of the Internet population is looking to create new application from scratch
- should allow non-programmers to build applications. Don’t expect people to know PHP or even HTML

He said it perfectly. People want to build applications to their situated needs, their long tail of applications. Home users or small business people want applications that solves their local needs and problems, they want to build apps from scratch in minutes with just few mouse clicks and go live without any coding of PHP or HTML knowledge. They hate to get help from developers.

Happy that our Zoho Creator is heading at right direction

Hyther

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