Zoho Blog

Here is an insightful take on this topic by Sridhar Vembu (Founder of Zoho an India based startup BTW) http://blogs.zoho.com/general/why-it-happened-in-southern-india-an-uno… Although it focuses on only one region of India it provides more clues to answering "Why there are so many engineers in India?"

That makes sense. But I still don't see how it adds up to a bootstrapped product company. Especially not one like Zoho (wide product range, products directly competing with major players, products in long established categories and classes). India is one hell of a resource. It's kind of raw at the moment. IE, you can't easily just buy services there and expect good quality. Being able to make it work well could be one hell of an advantage. As you say, you can't just take elance rates and calculate what you save by producing in India. You would probably end up paying many times more to attract, train & keep the best. Could still be cheaper the California, but probably within range. Basically what I am saying is this: You can probably save a lot and still get quality by being exceptionally good at producing in India. Sounds like Zoho is. But that still doesn't bring your costs down by enough to give a competitive edge to a product company. If you are a service business, cutting production costs (without harming quality) to 60% is a massive edge. If you are a product company, does that still apply? Side note: It sounds like Zoho's important "technology" is knowing how to produce great quality products in India. I wonder if that is technology another company would pay to acquire. How much would it be valued at? - update: - I have just read some of the other comments and found a link that sheds some light on my questions, I think. The product company / service company split…

Status - https://status.zoho.com/ Service updates - https://blogs.zoho.com/service-updates

Sridhar Vembu of Zoho - http://blogs.zoho.com/author/sridhar Craig Newmark - http://craigconnects.org/blog Mark Cuban - http://blogmaverick.com Tim O'Reilly - http://radar.oreilly.com/tim Yeah, I'm pretty sure evidence to the contrary is stronger. A little googling tells me C-levels and founders of forbes 100 are often proflic bloggers. Novell, Cisco, Oracle, a lot of founders of big companies in India, and many here in the non-tech sector blog as well. Insofar as commenting on HN and other similar sites is quite similar to blogging, there's a lot of others here too.

Zoho has been doing this very successfully in India: scooping up bright high school students that cannot get into a college (typically for financial reasons) and training them internally. https://blogs.zoho.com/general/how-we-recruit-on-formal-credentials-vs…

Zoho does this. http://blogs.zoho.com/general/how-we-recruit-on-formal-credentials-vs-…

Thank you for sharing this. Both projects look really cool, but I do a lot of AppEngine development already and need to share the reports with a business partner. Kudos to both projects though. Definitely fills a need. Also, have you guys seen the sample reports from ZohoReports for AppStore sales? The missing link is updating the data, which it seems both of these projects do. http://blogs.zoho.com/general/analyzing-iphone-app-sales-with-zoho-db

Zoho grew out of parent AdventNet (now Zoho Corp) which has been around 13+ years. They became successful selling server and network management software and then started up multiple divisions of which Zoho is the most recent (and glamorous). More here: http://blogs.zoho.com/general/so-whats-in-it-for-zoho

I read this last time 20 years ago as an undergraduate student in India, and I still find it inspiring after all these years. I find it particularly relevant today, when the Federal Reserve and the government are intent on destroying the moral foundation of money. I expand on it at: http://blogs.zoho.com/general/money-as-a-moral-institution

Zoho did it a month before: http://blogs.zoho.com/writer/zoho-writer-extends-mobile-support-adds-o…

While I do think that higher education needs an overhaul, the larger problem is that HE is too often misunderstood. It's not a place where you learn skills that explicitly help you get a job; that's called vocational training, and a whole bunch of places do that extremely well. Hell, if all you're looking to do is work, you probably don't need college at all. Zoho's been hiring kid straight out of high school, with no discernible difference in productivity with their college educated counterparts (http://blogs.zoho.com/general/how-we-recruit-on-formal-credentials-vs-… HE is a place where you go to interact with people and ideas fundamentally different from what you know, receive mentoring on how to consider such ideas, and how to create those ideas on your own. It does not claim to make you a smarter individual, and its value is largely dependent on your own drive to make the experience a success. In essence, it is exactly the same as YCombinator - even in the obfuscated and oft frustrating admissions processes, which is what I believe the article refers to.