Zoho

Zoho is one of those sites that would really take quite a bit of time to explore properly, which I haven't been able to do since my internet connection at home has been out for the past week (bad DSL gateway). Others have commented on Zoho's features and functionality, so I won't try to duplicate what's already been written. I am intrigued by the idea of an online office productivity suite that is essentially free for the individual user--which would give Microsoft Office some serious competition.

One downside, though: if you aren't connected online, you have no access to Zoho. And if I'd had some documents on Zoho I needed to work on, not having internet access at home for the past week I'd have been out of luck.

The business major in me wondered, what is Zoho's business model? Here's this great set of free online productivity tools, but what's underwriting the cost of programming, maintaining servers, security, etc.? That's not cheap. Zoho does offer a business version for $50 per person per year, but that seems inadequate to cover the expenses. I dug a little further and found that Zoho is funded by the profits of AdventNet, a smallish privately-held software firm in Pleasanton. So far, OK, but AdventNet isn't a major player in the high-tech field, and what happens if the cost of running Zoho starts to exceed AdventNet's profits? Would it be sold off to one of the bigger tech firms, or would AdventNet start cutting back on software development or start charging license fees? Given today's economy, one never knows...

I started thinking abou this when I came across an article last week about Twitter, which still hadn't developed any kind of dependable revenue stream to fund its operations. (And of course now I don't remember where I saw the article!). So here's a related article, printed last year, from Wired:
www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2008/08/portfolio_0804

If the link doesn't work, try entering "twitter business model wired" in Yahoo search.