Companies Don't Get Killed by Competition, They Commit Suicide | Hacker News Reader

Companies Don't Get Killed by Competition, They Commit Suicide

blogs.zoho.com

70 pointsterpua17 comments

In addition to being more nimble than the big players, Zoho also competes very aggressively on pricing. One way they can afford to do that is through their unique approach to hiring:

"We hire young professionals whom others disregard. We don’t look at colleges, degrees or grades. Not everyone in India comes from a socio-economic background to get the opportunity to go to a top ranking engineering school, but many are really smart regardless. We even go to poor high-schools, and hire those kids who are bright, but are not going to college due to pressure to start making money right away. They need to support their families. We train them, and in 9 months, they produce at the level of college grads. Their resumes are not as marketable, but I tell you, these kids can code just as well as the rest. Often, better."

(via http://www.sramanamitra.com/2008/01/22/silicon-valleys-unkno...)

This is such a refreshing point of view.

I can assure you, that this is Microsoft's problem: "In any event, hating competitors is a good way to lose objectivity and lose focus on customers."

I'm looking forward to Microsoft's web applications and hope they will fully kick ass. I never really paid much attention to Zoho, but after this post, I wish them nothing but the best of luck adapting. I'm confident that they will.

When talking startups, especially with non-entrepreneurs, the perception of what the challenges are is often very black and white: markets with no competition - easy, markets with competition - impossible.

I guess this is why so many people hunt the "perfect idea", which means something that noone has ever done before.

Personally I have experienced if you have no competition, very likely you will need to make people aware of the fact that they need your product, which is great if you are well capitalized with millions of dollars of VC money.

Conversely, markets with competition means that there are customers and you just have to make your product different by improving on a certain subset of features or making your product easier to use to gain a foothold in the marketplace since already a great number of people will be searching for your type of product anyway.

And then there's the third type, markets with so much competition that there's really no way to distinguish yourself on features, because people think of the product as a commodity, even if it isn't (e.g. Pizza.) that's when you have to start selling on brand and "experience" alone, which is what, I think, a lot of the technical people here are really afraid of: solving a purely social problem with no technological innovation involved.

He's saying it's a failure of spirit; of heart. But isn't it a genuine blow to one's ego, going from the unique, one-and-only to being one of a bunch?

Business-wise, competition can actually benefit you, by "validating your idea", and giving customers a choice and fall-back option.

But good for business or not, it's still a blow to one's ego. I guess the question is whether you are in it to for the the riches, the fame, the ego - or to make some positive contribution to the world.

EDIT this article's attitude reminds me of these comments (about being copied): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=707278 (pg) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=707307 (astrec)

"Zoho Writer is not supported in Safari Please switch to IE 6.0+ or Firefox 2.0+ version for better experience"

Erm yeah... suicide. Even Microsoft is going to be supporting Safari.

its a nice idea and all, but shouldn't zoho wait until it weathers this storm before coming out and saying "let's all be friends".

I'm sorry, but if given a choice between a Microsoft product and a zoho product, pretty much everyone will go for the microsoft product(Everyone has used MS Office). The only exceptions are the techies who have a hard on for hating microsoft.

All this crap about being flexible and innovative, is just that crap. Any feature you come up with, can be easily copied. And Microsoft has one little thing going for it, that Zoho doesn't...they don't have to make a profit.

But the whole point of the article, and I entirely agree, is that you don't have to win anything. If Zoho ends up with 10% paying share of the online office business, that's more than enough for them to keep 350 people employed and give their customers a more reactive platform that Microsoft - not everybody needs it, but those who do will appreciate it and keep paying.

I agree that no business has been killed by fair competition. There are some cases where competition is not fair.

Seriously. I get so tired of hearing about the death of technologies or companies or search engines or whatever. It's all just a game to get readers.

Netscape committed suicide?

Yeah, it did. Netscape 4 was a mess and Netscape 6 took too long.

Most people and companies don't work so well without an oxygen supply... :-)

Netscape was a classic example. Even before they decided to rewrite everything in Java. Charles Ferguson's book is one place to read about this.

I doubt that the web based Microsoft office will be as good as Zoho's offerings which have been optimized for years.

I can even imagine another effect: More people finding out about office webware and then searching for other office suites than MS. Also bloggers pointing out MS office webware alternatives etc.

I certainly wouldn't bet on that. Did you read the UI research the Office team published with the release of the 2007 version?

The amount of work they put in determining what their clients needed and how they used the software and what would make them more productive is staggering. It's the best UI research I've ever read. Here's a presentation about how they went about their work: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-o...

Certainly MS does put a lot of work (and money) into trying to improve their UIs. Unfortunately, whether it's due to the huge feature set of the Office applications or legacy support required by certain clients, the result of their work is not something most would hold up as a shining beacon of UI design.

While Office 2007 is a step up from 2003 in a number of ways, I'd have to agree with onreact that I wouldn't expect much from the eventual web app version of Office. At least not in the initial release.

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