On the positive side, each of the Zoho apps appear to be more robust than the majority of the competition. While none is perfect The overall collection is trending in the right direction. I believe that with a little more development work Zoho could easily become the dominant player in cloud based, general business applications.

But the thing that I find so incredibly frustrating is that there is also a history of Zoho not fully understanding the needs of their users. For almost every application you can browse the forums and find feature requests that are very reasonable, and in many cases necessary for businesses to operate efficiently. Here are a few of the examples:

• No native Apps for either iPhone or Android mobile devices
• No ability to work offline for Docs, Calendar, Mail, and CRM. These are essential for business people who travel.
• Failure of the Zoho Calendar to synchronize dynamically with other calendaring applications (including mobile devices) in real time. In fact, Zoho cannot even synchronize dynamically in real time between their own applications - Calendar, Project and CRM.
• Failure of Zoho to communicate development priorities for each of the applications.
• Reliance on Google Gears and failure to anticipate the rise of HTML 5.
• Customer service is flat out horrible. Posts go unanswered in the forums for weeks and months. I have had more than one instance where my efforts to resolve an issue in ZCRM have resulted in repeated Zoho Meetings to demonstrate the problems I experienced. In each case I was told that I had done things properly and the team would have to look into why it was not working. I was promised follow-up. But I never received it. So I had to call support on my own, go through another Zoho Meeting, get told the same thing and wit for the phone call that never came.

I want to stress that the Zoho Teams are so close to the holy grail on so many fronts. I think that is what makes it particularly frustrating. Your products are generally above average and It does appear that there is a commitment to continuous development.

My concern is really what direction that development will take. I need to determine if Zoho is going the same direction that our company needs it to go. Based on the responses from customer service I have legitimate doubts that the development team is really paying attention to the finer points of their user's needs. I really want Zoho to succeed and I would love to recommend that our company expand out use of the Zoho products.

So the ball is in your court Zoho.

What are you going to do next? Can you please provide a detailed plan showing the features under development, the priority for each of those developments, and a general timetable for implementation. I understand that timetables are tricky. I don't expect an exact commitment. I would be happy to see a range. If you can give us a 3 - 4 month window as a target that would be good enough. And if you find that you are going to miss that target please let us know right away.

Being open and candid will go a long way towards building customer goodwill and a loyal base of Zoho users.

Chuck Sena