Zoho Notebook: my 2 penn'orth/cents

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I was invited to participate in the alpha release programme for Zoho Notebook. Unlike some of the strident commenters over at TechCrunch, I don’t care about the code or whether it has AJAX everywhere (I still think of toilet cleaner) but I do care about:

• Functional appropriateness
• Usability
• Pricing

As a Mac fanboy I can’t comment on comparisons being drawn by folk like Richard MacManus, who provides a clear rundown of how he sees the service. I can compare it with the rather dull and limited Google Notebook. Suffice to say, Google doesn’t get close. Rather than reiterate what many have already said about this service, I’m concentrating on how I think this fits in a professional setting.

Functional appropriateness

Functionally, Zoho Notebook is like a digital dumping ground where you can drop different types of media including voice and video onto a workspace. In turn, you can share those resources as much or as little as is required among your community. I can see huge potential for this among those professionals who need to assemble audit and M&A resources for example. It makes the creation of a multi-disciplinary team very easy with the ongoing ability to collaborate as projects evolve while remaining in an organised, controllable environment.

I can see other use cases arising in forensic work, planning, budget management, time and expense management – the list goes on. In this sense, Zoho Notebook could become the de facto desktop for knowledge workers because you don’t need to leave the service to do pretty much all the tasks you’d expect a knowledge worker to undertake. I can also envisage some interesting mashups using accounting data from a saas player that gets pulled into Notebook on and ad hoc basis. Does this mean Notebook is a ‘silver bullet’ application.

I’m going to stick my neck out and say a qualified ‘yes.’ Notebook has enough going for it that most day to day users will be happy to ‘live’ inside the application. Zoli Erdos has an interesting take on whether the collaboration features put Notebook in the same class as a wiki. Sort of but I’m not sure I’d go quite that far. Dedicated access to wiki folders is how I’d prefer to work – but that’s me.

The ability to add sound and video clips direct from your machine is cool as is the ability to embed video coda a la YouTube and the means to Skype colleagues from inside the app. But. I wonder what the bandwidth implications will be in a live environment. That’s worth checking with Zoho once they go beta.

Usability

Notebook is surprisingly easy to understand and learn. The interface is uncluttered and icons with which Office users will be familiar are all where you’d expect them. In short, it just works. There is one big drawback. Documents, spreadsheets and presentations have to be pulled in from the Zoho stable of services. I would like to see a direct import from Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I’m told ‘it’s planned.’ It needs to be ‘now’ if Zoho Notebook is to stand a real chance of making inroads into Microsoft’s Office market. Users can’t be bothered pulling their own documents into an application, running conversions and then accessing the data. Any friction will be a turn off.

Like others, I found the service to be painfully slow at times but hey – this is an Alpha release. This is an element Zoho needs to address generally, as I find Zoho services slow in comparison to equivalent Google applications. Again, it could be a show stopper for those used to the speed of desktop apps.

One nit. When it’s importing a document like a PDF, I’d like an hour glass or something to visually indicate what’s happening. At present you just see a blank screen with notification of activity relegated to the bottom left hand side of the screen. I don’t care what anyone says, staring at a blank screen when you expect something to be happening is scary.

Pricing

Pricing is the big unknown yet it is the one element where Zoho could breathe serious air into business. Upgrades to Office don’t come cheap and remember those costs are often bundled into the price you pay for replacement kit. I asked Zoho to comment on pricing given the relative dependency on Zoho Sheet, Write and other services. They were coy. If, as I would suspect, Zoho wants this to be the desktop for knowledge workers (again, Zoli talks about demographics but only addresses the student crowd), then the company needs to get creative. If it was me, I’d charge for Notebook as part of an assembled service suite. But that’s me and I’m not Zoho.

Pricing will be a critical element in attracting those who would otherwise be driven by inertia to take Office. The logical thing would be for Zoho to strike a deal with the Dell’s of this world. How that would work is anyone’s guess but I suspect the prospect of uninstalling a ton of cruff – as many new users have to do with PCs these days – compared to simply signing into a service is almost a no brainer. Heck – it might even mean the startup screen for non-Mac users might be clean! -:)

Summary

People are getting excited about Zoho Notebook and I can see why. It’s the first time I’ve seen Zoho put something out where I’ve thought – yep, that does it for me. It’s dangerous to talk about killer apps because the current speed of innovation means no-one knows what’s around the corner. This is the closest I’ve seen to something where I would readily say to clients – go for it, you’ve everything to gain.

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Tagged as: Innovation