After building a business with Zoho functions, blueprints and if-this-than-that flow -
I can tell you conventional wisdom missing in Zoho like version-control and testing is very much needed.
I can tell you conventional wisdom missing in Zoho like version-control and testing is very much needed.
It seems to be an industry-wise thing and I wonder if it's time for disruption.
It is ready for disruption but to do so, I think it would need a holistic base that is consistent with respect to and between programming language/implementation, infrastructure, api and gui tooling. Now these are mostly manually adapted between each other when stuff gets added and the end result is a lot of leaky abstractions, instability, issues scaling, bugs and inflated infra costs.
Instead of 1000s of features, have 40 good features. Limits how many customers you can get, but should lower development costs as well. There's probably a sweet spot that works.
Deceptively hard. The only way to make this happen is using telemetry, and users don't like that, understandably. My belief is that Excel and Word are so successful because EVERYONE uses a different subset of those thousands of features. A one-lawyer office will differ from a dozen-person firm, a big general contractor will use different features from a small one, etc.
You can't survey users about those features either. Users don't know what your surveys mean half the time. They will answer according to how they think you want them to answer instead of what they really do. Or they will be satisfied but name features they would never use because they heard about them at a conference once. They use different terminology from you, so signal gets lost either way. Ad nauseam.