Zoho offline: Is being first enough?
As Mike Arrington points out at TechCrunch, Zoho has launched offline support for its Zoho Writer application (although it’s read-only for now) using Google Gears — which is more than a little ironic, considering Google still hasn’t offered the same functionality for Google Docs.
But while that irony makes for a funny post, does it really amount to anything from a competitive point of view? I’m not so sure it does. Implementing Gears support for Google Docs would probably take about half an hour of programming time — and in all likelihood requires little more than a piece of script to be turned on.
There’s no question that having offline support is a key feature, and Zoho should be congratulated for offering it. But Is being first enough to give it any kind of compelling advantage over Google Docs? Unlikely.
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- implementing offline support for read-only probably is very simple;
- implementing offline support for read-write is probably considerably harder;
- Google is most likely waiting for the latter to be complete before releasing either;
- Google is probably prioritising Gears support for Gmail over Docs because there is certainly considerably greater demand for that.
I'm a little surprised that Gears support for Gmail is taking so long, but remember that Gears itself is really at "alpha" quality - making such a key product as Gmail dependent on it at this early stage is probably not a risk worth taking.
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A year ago I asked almost the same question: Would You Rather Be First to Market or Better? - except in my view Zoho has always been on the "better", not on the "first" side :-)
(Fyi, I am now an advisor to Zoho, but not at the time of writing the above article)
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The Zoho vision is to offer a comprehensive suite, with depth and breadth, and I think the market is big enough to support a decent business for Zoho, even if Google "wins".
Sridhar
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