Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

Zoho continues to rule…the blogosphere!

The latest, greatest Adventnet accomplishment? Zoho Writer supports (some ) offline editing.

The Zoho logo is a familiar one in the blogosphere–Zoho sponsors Techmeme and many individual blogs–and the consistenly glowing blogosphere coverage of every single move Zoho makes is also a standard.

Today’s Zoho product functionality anouncement is given the supra Zoho treatment:

TechCrunch: “While Live Documents Yaps, Zoho Delivers”

GigaOm via Web Worker Daily: “Zoho Seeks to Replace, Not Embrace, Microsoft Office”

Cnet: “Zoho Writer Gets Full Offline Functionality”

WOW? For the Zoho tech blogosphere legions apparently, but a non-event for the marketplace legions of Microsoft Office customers.

Zoho itself acknowledges the incomplete nature of its latest product “update”:

You’ll notice that not all functionalities available online are available in offline mode. This is because some of the functionalities are online specific while others will make their way into the offline mode moving forward.

YAY? NOT for the non-blogging Microsoft masses:

For Zoho Writer to work offline, you’ll need to have Google Gears plug-in installed on your browser (works on Firefox 1.5+, IE 6+).

Microsoft Office beware? My new PC came pre-installed with a free-trial of the Office everyone hopes to “kill,” but NO Google Gears plug-in, or Zoho!

Microsoft banks (literally) on millions of new PC owners dutifully paying their hundreds in Office fees to keep Word, Excel, Powerpoint alive and well…on their hard drives.

Zoho is mainly a FREE online service, striving for offline respectability. Bloggers are happily Web-centric for all their affairs, BUT the security and comfort of a PC-based office computing standard is hard to replace, very hard.

SO, as I wrote in September: Zoho to Beat Microsoft and Google: Only billions in Sales to Go!, still.

ALSO: Zoho at Risk as Yahoo Zimbra Attacks Google Apps and Microsoft Office Gets BIG Sales Boost in Live Documents

PLUS: Zuckerberg Flash: Facebook FREE VPN Is Advertising Supported and Intuit’s New Homestead: Local Advertising Revolution, or Evolution?

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Zillow.com has secured a fresh round of money, the venture capital kind: $87 million to date in VC backing.

Meanwhile, new hire Vanessa Fox has undoubetdly been showing Zillow some SEO gains, Google style.

Fox is Product team Lead at Zillow, ostensibly in charge of the site’s local advertising and email marketing offerings for real estate professionals and independent home buyers and sellers. Nevertheless, she continues to publicly speak on SEO tactics and optimization, sharing tips and tricks for making sure content “ranks well” in search results, an old Google habit.

Fox is a veteran of Google Webmaster Central where she was a “tool builder” for the “Google Index.”

In June, I headlined: Zillow Gets Google Webmaster (secrets?) when Fox announced her departure from Google for Zillow, the lucky new employer.

At the time, Fox was said to be looking forward to the “unique challenges of the vertical and local search space,” at Zillow.

I predicted that Zillow would shoot up in Google SERP rankings shortly after Ms. Fox became a Zillower rather than a Googler, noting Zillow may be “Your edge in real estate, ” BUT ex Google Webmaster Fox will be Zillow’s edge in Google SEO “goodness.”

Has Zillow indeed already benefitted from foxy Google “secrets?” Even if Fox is bound by a non-disclosure, her innate Google “index” knowledge can not be locked up. It is inevitable that Zillow has profited from her insider knowledge of Google’s inner Webmaster sanctum.

Zillow IS ranking nicely at Google for the terms it sells itself on, while coldwellbanker.com and homegain.com are buying AdWords for top spots:

Number 1 for “home values” 

Number 1 for “real estate edge”

Number 3 for “real estate guide”

There is no place like home for Zillow? There is no place like a good Google SERP ranking, as Vanessa Fox knows.

ALSO: Web 3.0: From AOL to TechCrunch, NYC Takes Center Stage

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

YAY Yahoo! The Web Office game is finally gearing up (pun intended) following the snoozer of a Office 2.0 Conference.

Yahoo’s acquisition of Zimbra leaves two big prospective casualities in its wake: Google Apps and Zoho.

Google, of course, can take care of itself. Zoho, on the other hand, is still the little Web Office suite that could, despite being under the wings of Mahatma Gandhi inspired AdventNet.

While Zoho has been runing a shrewd blogosphere goodwill campaign, blogger boosting–paid and unpaid–can take a product under development only so far when three high powered, highly capitalized, publicly traded behemoths are duking it out for the same territory: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo.

Yahoo has come out enterprise fighting with a bold acquisition of Zimbra:

The acquisition of Zimbra will help Yahoo! to expand its presence in universities, businesses and through ISPs by enabling organizations to host e-mail on or off premises with their own domain. Zimbra’s offerings include rich, AJAX-based e-mail, calendar, and contact management features that can be used both on and offline. Their open platform enhances the user experience by enabling creative mash-ups called Zimlets that tie in valuable Web services to e-mail, and can be tailored to fit the needs of every customer.

Google is plowing along with its enterprise ambitions in a Cap Gemini reseller deal: Can CapGemini Really Make Google Apps Matter in the Enterprise?

BUT Zoho in the Enterprise? NO 2007 WAY! So declares Zoho advisor Zoil Erdos, incredulously: Zoho Business? Google Apps Still Safe: Zoho NOT Enterprise Ready.

Nevertheless, some at Zoho are still Microsoft dreaming: Zoho to Beat Microsoft and Google: Only billions in Sales to Go!

Zoho will undoubetdly persevere with its regular stream of incremental product enhancements and continue to be cheered by a dutifull blogosphere for it. The Zoho virtual handwriting is more and more on the wall, however.

ALSO: Yahoo Buys Zimbra: Beats Google for Web Office Leadership and YAY! Matt Cutts Gets Google Slide Show: Ditch PowerPoint for Presentations?

PLUS: FB Fund: Facebook VCs Divide and Conquer F8 Application Developers

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Hey, Microsoft and Google, did you know that not only has Zoho ”been running circles” around you in online office apps BUT the blogosphere’s favorite underdog is on its way to “become a giant and create the next great business software platform.”

So proudly hails the Zoho blog, courtesy of fan, Jason Hiner, CNET TechRepublic executive editor.

How so? Just look at what Zoho has accomplished in the “last few weeks,” Hiner exhorts: Start & Business.

Zoho Start, ”a user dashboard for files” and Zoho Business, the not ready for enterprise prime time Zoho Google Apps Premiere wannabe.

Microsoft and Google have the time, and money, to stop an impending Zoho Web Office virtual landslide, though.

Microsoft Business Division latest fiscal year report: $16.4 billion in revenues. Google’s latest fiscal year sales: $10.6 billion.

Zoho revenues? Zoho recently confided, in its own forums:

We are still in Beta and have some amount of work to be done before we remove the beta tag. We haven’t decided on our revenue model yet. When we come out of beta, we will definately announce our revenue model. Few things we can tell at this point:

1) There will always be a free version for personal use.

2) We might have a free version for Non Profitabloe Organizations and Educational Institutions.

We can assure that our charges will be very nominal…

Nominal? i.e., cheaper than the already rockbottom $50 Google Apps Premiere!

Zoho game plan to catch up with eveyone’s favorite ”richest man in the world”? Sell millions of Zoho Business @ $40 a pop, starting next year, hopefully.

SEE:  Zoho Business? Google Apps Still Safe: Zoho NOT Enterprise Ready
and: Microsoft Works 9 Frenzy Overblown: What ‘Free, Ad Supported’ Really Means
and Google Apps Packs It Up: StarOffice On Microsoft Desktop Rules
and Hey Google: When Can Matt Cutts Ditch Microsoft PowerPoint?
and OpenProj Unleashed: Projity SaaS Microsoft Office Project ‘Direct Hit’

PLUS: Beware Facebook Platform: Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Nick “Does IT Matter” Carr cites a CapGemini spokesperson on why Google Apps matters in the enterprise, especially the enterprises CapGemini seeks to do business with.

Steve Jones may be a CapGemini “outsourcing exec who oversees the firm’s work with SaaS,” but his pitch for Google Apps is primarlily a Googley one, as presented by Carr:

Google’s package offers two immediate advantages. First, it allows the many thousands of workers who don’t have their own PCs or their own copies of Office - from factory hands to call-center agents - to gain access to email, calendars, and other personal-productivity applications. Up to now, licensing and data-storage costs have prohibited these “disenfranchised employees” from being given access to Office-style apps. Because Google charges only $50 a year per user for Apps and stores all email messages and other data in its own systems, it lowers the cost barrier substantially.

Second, Google Apps simplifies collaboration, particularly between employees working at different companies. With Office and other traditional apps, such collaboration usually entails “lobbing emails over the firewall” with attached files. Such “paper-shuffling” leads to a proliferation of different versions of documents, adding complexity and delays to the process. With Apps, a single version of a document is maintained by Google, and people from different companies can work on it simultaneously. That, can greatly speed up the work of inter-company teams.

Jones has apparently been brushing up on the Google Apps enterprise sales pitch:

EMAIL AND CALENDAR FOR DESKLESS WORKERS

Enterprises in industries like services, hospitality, manufacturing and retail have traditionally been unable to provide all their employees with the most basic messaging and calendaring tools that employees at headquarters take for granted.

Analysts estimate that up to 45% of employees do not have a company-provided email address. While some of the benefits of providing company-wide email might be obvious (like reduced paperwork and improved communications), other benefits of providing email to every single employee include improved employee morale, and reduction of the digital divide that for years has separated office workers from deskless employees.

ENTERPRISE COLLABORATION WITH GOOGLE DOCS AND SPREADHSEETS

Web-based word processing and spreadsheet program that makes collaboration more efficient. It lets you keep a document online that others in your organization can edit and update simultaneously right from their browsers, so you don’t need to keep track of attachments and who has the latest version of a file. Multiple people can make changes at once, and see other people’s edits as they happen in real-time. And each revision is automatically saved for you, so you can see who changed what, when, and revert to an older version at any point.

It’s easy to get files into and out of Docs & Spreadsheets. To start from an existing file saved on your computer, simply upload the document and pick up where you left off. To work on documents offline or distribute them as attachments, simply save a copy of a Docs & Spreadsheets file to your computer in the format that works best for you.

YAY! For Google Apps in the enterprise? NO! CapGemini has yet to produce an in-house Google Apps testimonial!

Google Apps is now one year old, Google Enterprise Search, however, is a Googleplex “old timer.” Nevertheless, GOOG continues to be 99% AdWords pure!

No matter how much Google wants it, betting on a a Googley consumerization of the enterprise is not a winning hand, as I discuss in Office 2.0: Zoho Business and Google Apps FAIL to Dazzle

ALSO: Microsoft Works 9 Frenzy Overblown: What ‘Free, Ad Supported’ Really Means
and Google Apps Packs It Up: StarOffice On Microsoft Desktop Rules
and Hey Google: When Can Matt Cutts Ditch Microsoft PowerPoint?
and OpenProj Unleashed: Projity SaaS Microsoft Office Project ‘Direct Hit’

PLUS: Twitter VMA Power or MTV Crossover Dreams?

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

YAY! Google gets another high profile pusher of its ”Search, Ads & Apps”: CapGemini.

Meanwhile at the Office 2.0 Conference last week, Google Apps FAILED to dazzle. Ditto for Zoho (purportedly now for) Business.

While Office 2.0 Conference attendees self-reported two days of Web Office shock and awe, the reported wi-fi connection problems at the host hotel in San Francisco says more about the current prospects of Enterprise 2.0 than the evangelism/marketing/PR of the scores of panelists and vendors hyping and demoing the dawn of a golden Web productivity day.

If you can’t connect to the Internet, you can’t collaborate via the Web! If high-flying, high-paying enterprise execs from “Global 2000 companies” are Internet challenged at the upscale St. Regis, what are the typical non first-class travelling office road warriors to do when they want to connect to Google Apps or Zoho for the vaunted Office 2.0 anytime, anywhere collaboration?

Despite the urge to believe (and party), Office 2.0 was a disappointing snooze, as I analyze in Zoho Business? Google Apps Still Safe: Zoho NOT Enterprise Ready.

NO Google Wiki! No Zoho Enterprise! Despite the pre-hype. Where was the Office 2.0 shock & awe? Left at the office.

Avenue A Razorfish “The Workplace”:

WE’RE ALL READING EACH OTHER’S BLOGS. This has resulted in all of us having more similar opinions than we may realize. Which means that conferences are becoming less about the exchange of ideas and more about networking and product demos. Not a bad thing, but nevertheless different to the conferences of the past. Along those lines, conferences have become sites for the promotion of products and consultancy services. Ideas we save for private strategy sessions only. There are exceptions but it feels like this more and more.

AND, while the Office 2.0 Conference is a wrap, the Web Office promo machine continues in the blogosphere.

ALSO SEE:  Can CapGemini Really Make Google Apps Matter in the Enterprise?

PLUS: Twitter VMA Power or MTV Crossover Dreams?

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN