Sridhar Vembu

By now it is conventional wisdom to say that there was an IBM Era of computing, then a Microsoft Era, and now we are in the Google Era. In this post, I will explain why Microsoft was not the “next IBM” and why Google is not the “next Microsoft” - there are significant qualitative differences among them, quite apart from their status as the dominant, era-defining players. Understanding that qualitative difference is crucial for third party vendors, like Zoho, to thrive. I was reminded of this because of the IBM/Google partnership unveiled last week. As an aside, I have coined a kind of Moores Law on these computing eras: The dominant technology company in a generation reaches its pinnacle at about half the size of the dominant company in the previous generation, and it retains its dominance for half as long. The original IBM mainframe era (in c... (more)

Cloud Economics: Microsoft, Google & Amazon

Sridhar Vembu's blog Yesterday Microsoft launched its Azure cloud platform, so it is time for another spreadsheet. To properly compare Microsoft, Google and Amazon, I am using the gross profit (instead of revenue) and net profit numbers. Gross profit is, in some sense, the real revenue of a company after paying its outside suppliers; gross profit is what is available to pay its employees, pay the rent, and so on. For a software company, the cost of goods sold is close to zero, so most of the revenue is gross profit. But for a retailer, as much as 70-80% of revenue goes to its su... (more)

Opinion: The Real Cost of Acquisitions - the Zimbra Story

There are reports that Yahoo has put Zimbra on the block. Honestly, this came as no surprise at all to us at Zoho. I remember scratching my head when the acquisition was made; I didn't see how an enterprise/business focused open source offering like Zimbra fit with Yahoo, as a technology, as a business or strategically. Zimbra is an open source installable product offering primarily intended to be installed within medium to large organizations. Yahoo has never made an installed product in its history and is mainly focused on consumers, with an occasional foray to sell those consu... (more)