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Google has some under fire on many fronts essentially for disappointing users and more than likely due to pressure from competitors.

One “top notch” Google competitor is Zoho – one of the Web’s (in my view the) best office productivity suites. From word processing to presentations and spreadsheets, the Zoho lineup of productivity elements is impressive.

However, the real comparative issue here is not in the completeness of this suite versus Google’s, but in the quality of the applications. Zoho is actually a more complete solution, and in the end much more refined. Any type of logic system I can think of would tend to force people into the camp with the best solutions, so why do we still support all these mediocre Google applications

Zoho is designed for business, while Google Docs is a consumer based set of applications: Perhaps this explains to a degree why Zoho’s applications are so much cleaner and straightforward. My theory on this is that Google has relied for too long on consumer loyalty and their brand. Business applications on the other hand, cannot reside for long under the “branding” umbrella relied on so heavily by Google and others. Let’s take a look at a few of the comparative applications and see how they line up.

ZOHO Writer vs. Google Docs - There is no comparison here. Zoho’s offering is widely accepted as the best online word processor available. Just looking at the two reveals Zoho’s superiority to one Google application. The word processor is the anchor of any office suite and any company aiming to have the best suite onliine or off certainly has to know this. So why is Google’s variant so mediocre? Perhaps because they are not really in the office suite business but the branding business?

Zoho: discoverable, user friendly, aesthetic, accessible

Google: plain, relatively unnavigable, poor features

Google Spreadsheets vs. ZOHO Sheet – Zoho draws heavily from excel in design, but it is far more discoverable if somewhat less complete. Google’s version is by comparison simplistic and crude in my estimation. I really believe though, that Google’s applications were really originally designed for geeks who liked bare bones apps – the trend in design just happened to stay alive in all their subsequent offerings? In any event, a user can do any spreadsheet oriented task with either of these tools – the Zoho one is just better – period.

ZOHO Show vs. Google Presentation – Once again Google has managed to create something so imminently ugly and bare bones that I actually wonder if anyone really uses this. Zoho’s application is not Powerpoint certainly, but it has that look and is very usable for an online presentation application. Neither application is anything to write home about but at least the Zoho version has a few themes and is navigable: Another interesting point to be taken here is how exactly Google considers their application to be a consumer one when the Zoho one is more user friendly?

Conclusion

Ordinarily we would analyze each and every one of the comparative applications in order to quantify the difference between Google’s and Zoho’. To be honest, there really is no comparison to make – Google has effectively pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes with all of these applications. This was to be a random comparison between Google and one of its competitors. As it turns out we now see much more clearly just how much trouble Google is in.

If the consumer (this means the majority) ever breaks free of the familiarity and hype of Google, I think we will see a company scurrying to catch up after its lackadaisical and mediocre efforts to monopolize every sector of the Web. If they would just listen to us, then the most significant Internet company on Earth could easily continue its course – this will not happen until it is too late. Check out Zoho and their fine applications and get back to me to share your views. By the way this post was written on Zoho Writer.