Something in the numbers for Salesforce made Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu unimpressed with the announcement of a Google Apps integration deal with Salesforce. Vembu provided a look at Salesforce’s balance sheet, and he didn’t care much for how the numbers added.

“Salesforce spends nearly 8 times on sales/marketing as it spends on R&D. Sounds to me a text book definition of “business model bloat’,” said Vembu. “If you are a customer of Salesforce, it makes you feel really happy that the company spends 8x on selling to you as in writing the code, right?”

That imbalance of selling to research makes Salesforce’s Google Apps deal look like a doomed prospect to Vembu. Benioff offered to acquire Zoho, a prospect that held no appeal for Vembu.

“I told him there is just no cultural fit between our companies and such an acquisition would be miserable for both parties,” said Vembu, who thinks Benioff is stuck in the 1990s in thinking of software and business models.

For similar reasons, Vembu thinks Google Apps integrating into Salesforce won’t be a “durable” business model. Vembu also mentioned Google as Zoho’s principal competitor, a position we think may be a one-sided thought on the Zoho CEO’s part.

Zoho, after all, does not compete on paid search ads, Google’s main revenue source. Google could fold up its Apps business tomorrow, and not impact the bottom line in any appreciable manner.

1. Google Gears—heralded as a step toward the browser as a desktop

9. Facebook API—duh.

17. Zoho Notebook—compiles all kinds of information and enables you to share it

18. Radiohead’s In Rainbows—check out our our coverage of In Rainbows if you missed this ongoing story

20. Mint.com—brings all your personal finance information together, from bank accounts to credit cards

21. Microsoft Popfly—hailed as better than Yahoo Pipes, Popfly is the best masherupper around.

23. Ask.com—commended for Ask3D and AskEraser

The PC World story has met mixed reviews. At this writing, the “Recommend this story?” vote was almost exactly 50/50. What do you think? What did they miss?

via

Comments

Also like Google’s offering, a lesser version of Zoho Apps will be absolutely free.  A “Pro” version will cost $40 per user per year, according to Read/WriteWeb’s Richard MacManus, who notes that this will make it $10 cheaper per user than Google’s Premier Edition.

Will it be as popular?  A sort of “temperature check” may be obtained by dropping in on the Zoho Online Office for Facebook; I’m rather underwhelmed by the 79 “daily active users,” but there’s been a fairly steady stream of comments over the past few months.  Then again, the attitude embodied by those comments isn’t overly positive.

Flip your coin, then, especially since the average Facebook user probably isn’t in Zoho Business’s target demographic.

As for when people will actually be able to get their hands on Zoho Business, MacManus reports that it should go into public beta in October, and then “go 1.0 during Q1 2008.”  A bit more information is available thanks to Raju Vegesna and the official Zoho Blog, and if you’re extra interested, there’s also a video featuring some screenshots.

“You can now create documents, spreadsheets and presentations from Facebook,” announced Raju Vegesna on the official Zoho blog.  “You can also view and edit all your existing documents, spreadsheets and presentations (both personal and shared) from Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show.”

Perhaps we should first address the issue of “who cares?” – after all, Facebook is a social network, not a homework aid.  Jeff Nolan brings up another point, writing, “my reaction is ‘big whoop’.  I’m checking out a lot of Facebook applications and far too many of them think that just iframing their app in a Facebook wrapper is something we should get excited about.”

Yet we’ve seen (multiple times) how Facebook’s large user base can benefit a service.  And Vegesna states, “Considering the fact that 30% of our users are students, we couldn’t resist.”

These are busy days for Zoho – just a short while ago, the company released iZoho (an iPhone-specific version), and before that, SteekR integrated Zoho.  As for the future, Vegesna left a hint on Jeff Nolan’s blog: “We plan to integrate Zoho further info [sic] Facebook app.”

I just wouldn’t trust that it’ll stick around for very long.

Gaining trust for a small company is going to be very hard.

That said, the new version of Zoho Writer is very nice.

What do you think? Does Zoho have a chance now that Google has started coming into the Web Office market?

Add to Del.icio.us | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …

I can see how useful it will be for collaborating on the many group writing projects we have in our PR and SEO firm. We do use jot.com as a Wiki, but that’s more for spreadsheet collaboration.

The list of features for Writely is amazingly long. Whatever you might use a text editor for is applicable for Writely including creating blog posts, MS Word docs, PDFs, web pages, and even Open Office docs. There are tagging features and some cool right click options too.

Do you want a Writely invite? You can either leave a comment here (I only have 5 left) or you can visit the Chat room at Google Blogscoped.

There are also other online word processors like Zoho Writer that do not require an invite.

Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.

Steve Gillmor insisted that Office is dead in a podcast conversation with Robert Scoble. The subject also came up on This Week in Tech. Bill Gates, the consensus goes, should be quaking in his boots since so much of Microsoft’s business is wrapped up in sales of Office. The threat is the growing number of web-based services that do pretty much what office does.

There’s Gmail as a replacement for Outlook, for example. I talk to more and more people for whom Gmail is their only email client. Online word processors are also cropping up, like Writely and Zoho Writer. Dan Bricklin (who developed VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet) has produced a wiki-based spreadsheet application. Who needs to install bloated software on a computer when these tools are readily available online? The tools-and your documents-are available wherever you are, the argument goes; you’re not hosed if you’re away from the computer.

All of which is true. There are still plenty of reasons to believe that Office will thrive for the foreseeable future, though. To begin with, high-speed Internet access just isn’t pervasive yet. It’s not available on airplanes where I do much of my work, and while it will become common, it won’t happen soon. Further, the cost of on-board access may keep many laptop users offline. And while I can get online in just about any airport, my $25-plus T*Mobile hotspit account works only in a small percentage of airports. Every airport has a deal with a different service provider and getting online is $9.95 or more in most airports, more than I’m usually willing to spend for the 15 minutes of connectivity I need to check my email or post to my blog. Now I need to pony up that money just to crank out a word-processor document? Please.

While all these AJAX-based tools are definitely cool, they also are incomplete. I’ve played with Writely and I like it, but it doesn’t help me if I need to incorporate something as simple as a table or a graphic. Mail merge? Forget it. Further, these tools aren’t interrelated. I can’t bring data from a spreadsheet into a presentation and have it automatically update when I make a change to the spreadsheet. This probably won’t always be the case, but it is for now, and likely for a while.

But the biggest obstacle to adoption of these is the CIO. Most Office installations aren’t attributed to sole practitioners like me. They’re site licenses bought by businesses large and small. Each of these businesses has a security-conscious IT manager who is concerned about putting the company’s intellectual assets at risk. The notion of creating sensitive internal documents on a web-based services will undoubtedly send tremors of terror along the spines of these already-paranoid executives.

If the IT staff doesn’t seem like an obstacle, consider the employees who use Office. Not the high-tech, early adopting, gadget loving employees, but everyone else. I worked with a company recently where there was damn near a revolt over switching the staff from WordPerfect to Word. People threatened to quit. Others were threatened with termination if they continued to resist. It was ugly. Change is hard and slow.

Finally, let’s not forget that Microsoft has already taken a few tiny steps into this space with its Windows Live beta. I don’t know everything Redmond has in mind, but imagine being able to work on a document in Word on your PC, then when you’re traveling, being able to pull that document up over the web using Live. It’s not an outrageous concept. NewsGator acquired FeedDemon and is planning to allow you to synch your FeedDemon RSS feeds with a NewsGator Live version.

So don’t look for Office to lose its relevance anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean communicators shouldn’t pay attention to tools like Writely, which could dramatically simplify the collaborative creation of documents.

Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.