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Less Disruption is More Disruptive
Matt Marshall covers an interesting development: Zoho pushes ahead with Microsoft Office compatability, open APIs. Two key excerpts:
The company has released a plugin for Microsoft Office, and opened its APIs. The plugin makes Zoho what Microsoft’s online applications (dubbed Live) should be. It allows Zoho documents to be opened and saved in MS Office with a click (Word and Excel, at least; PowerPoint doesn’t work yet with Zoho, but will come). If you’ve got Microsoft office documents on your local drive and want them available online, you can get them via Zoho with couple of clicks.
The APIs will allow other developers to use Zoho applications. For example, online storage companies will be able to let users open documents through Zoho and save them back to their service without having to download the documents locally.
Zoho is smartly using the Web to build out real client/server functionality, taking advantage of what works well on the desktop (MS Word) and adding features to support collaboration and storage online. By taking itself out of direct competition (at least in the context of this plugin) Zoho can make itself less disruptive to the user, adding greater benefit without requiring major changes from the user.
This is clever. Make it insanely easy, and you have a better opportunity to foment some real change. Also, by being a back-end provider accessed through APIs, Zoho is making it possible to have more types of applications make use - either in-browser applications served like a mainframe, or client programs.
The business model seems clear too - direct subscription revenues. And they keep costs down through development in India. Good lessons for us bootstrappers.