DISQUS

I agree there is no black swan here. This was very predictable, and if you had been reading Austrian-flavored sites like iTulip, Mish, Prudent Bear, Daily Reckoning (just to give a few illustrative examples among many, many others), they saw this coming. They all predicted nothing less than disaster coming as early as 2004, when it was clear Greenspan had chosen to (yes it was a conscious choice) inflate housing to get the economy out of the dotcom bust. All of these commentators predicted (based on Austrian theory) that this would lead to the mother of all credit bubbles, and end in disaster. Krugman, in the fall of 2004, cheerleading the low interest rate policies of the Fed.

Here is an example of prescience in investment: Bill Bonner of Daily Reckoning has been advocating his "trade of the decade" since 2000: Sell the Dow, buy gold. At that time, Dow was ~12,000 and gold was ~$250 an ounce. His recommendation was based on a healthy common sense, and a firm grounding in Austrian economics.

Fred, I have been very critical of Krugmanite orthodoxy for a while now. His throw-caution-to-the-winds-and-just-spend "solution" makes no sense at all - if easy credit was what got us into this mess, how is easy credit going to fix it?

Krugman has gone further, and in recent weeks has advocated: a) international "cooperation" so there are no responsible governments left - particularly, Germany should not be allowed to free-ride on other people's excess spending, while staying prudent itself b) 50 states are forced to balance their budgets, so move their most critical responsibilities (education in particular) to the Federal budget. Very soon, if Krugman has his way, every significant area of government activity will be supported by the Federal budget and the printing press.

Mises and Hayek had foreseen this, and the Krugmanite path leads straight to socialist dictatorship. History is crystal clear.

I predict that Krugman's 2008 Nobel will come to be seen in hindsight as signaling the intellectual bankruptcy of much of mainstream, academic economists. There is not another economist alive who is so clearly wrong-headed, and yet who is so widely thought to be a genius.

Brilliant! I have been feeling uncomfortable with a lot of advertising for a while, but your post just nailed it for me.

"Remember that perfectly targeted advertising is just information"

That is just pure genius, Dave!

We have always believed there is room in the market for a smaller, focused player. Witness the success and durability of companies such as Intuit and Adobe in the PC software industry, despite the frontal assault from Microsoft repeatedly through their existence. Witness the resurgence of Apple through innovation, when almost anyone "rational" would have written them off as gone a long time ago. Witness the phoenix-like emergence of Firefox, not just as a strong browser, but also as a strong business, from the ashes of Netscape.

And in an adjacent industry, witness how companies like Juniper Networks and Foundry have thrived in the IP networking business, despite their being a fraction of the size of Cisco - and in both cases, the companies got founded after Cisco's market domination was already an established fact.

That's why we have the strong conviction that if we do our jobs right, there is room for us. And I am happy to report customers seem to agree!

Thank you for your encouraging words!

Actually we view it as a "Sharepoint meets YouTube" rather than as a YouTube of documents.
Our target is primarily organizational sharing/collaboration. The emphasis is more on the Sharepointness of it, with YouTube style borrowed.

In keeping with that, we have avoided too much Flash (pun intended!) and kept the players as Javascript/HTML.


Thanks,
Sridhar Vembu

Thank you for considering Zoho! We fully understand the operational issues. We know we have to keep earning trust and credibility, and that only happens by a) being around a long time b) offer a consistent and reliable user experience. The Zoho suite is now entering its 4th year soon, and operationally, we have made heavy investments in infrastructure & operations to keep the user experience very good.

We would hope you will look at us for other offerings, such as Zoho CRM, Projects, Invoice, Creator or Meetings. Starting with those can help you get more comfortable with Zoho.

Finally, we continue to enhance our integration with Google's offerings, so you do not have to switch to experience Zoho!

Thank you again,
Sridhar Vembu

#8 Tom, I understand how you feel about Zoho. Let me explain: Zoho is part of a company called AdventNet, which has been in business 11+ years now. We never raised any outside capital, have been profitable, and Zoho has been funded entirely from internal operations.

Please keep in mind that only about half of Zoho actually even faces Google. Zoho has a very thriving offerings in CRM, Project Management & most recently Human Resource Management. We also provide a compelling web meeting solution, and an online application creator that is the most popular in its market.

While we face giants, we believe if we execute really well and keep customers happy, there is a market space for us. After all companies like Intuit have done well while facing Microsoft all their existence, because they serve their customer well. Even in markets where Microsoft has been absolutely dominant for a while, you look closer(OS - Apple is thriving, Linux taking off in a big way, Browsers - Firefox exploding in popularity ...) you find thriving vendors who execute well.

Thanks,
Sridhar

To be fair to Technorati, I find a lot of splogs in Blogsearch too. I am not sure what the solution is.

Yeah, I am worried about the guy there getting calls from Bollywood ;-)

Sridhar

Hey, thanks for quoting me! I am glad you found them useful. Generally I keep my comments that don't concern my professional identity separate, while giving my email address to the author, so as to keep my views separate from my employment. This is just for your eyes only, since you were generous enough to quote my comment.

Typical late cycle "new era" thinking - I say that as a Paul Graham fan. Paul thinks he has discovered something new here - but just go back and look at the late 80's-early 90's PC era (thousands of PC companies in just the US, most bootstrapped - and this was after a big bust in the mid 80's that killed the non-IBM clone vendors - does that sound familiar?), and the early internet access era in the mid 90s (7000 ISPs, most bootstrapped again). The number of web startups today is probably of a similar magnitude. This is a point in time snapshot of an industry in transition. The next logical cycle is relentless consolidation. Consolidation is driven not by the dictates of ambitious capitalists, but by the needs of the consumers.

All you guys have to get in the queue after me - not only did I invent it, I did it almost accidentally.

http://blogs.zoho.com/general/i-think-i-may-hav...

I agree being first doesn't confer any huge advantage - but it takes more than half an hour of programming time though!

The Zoho vision is to offer a comprehensive suite, with depth and breadth, and I think the market is big enough to support a decent business for Zoho, even if Google "wins".

Sridhar

I made up a comic on this:
http://toondoo.com/toondoo/View.toon?param=28682

Ms. Clark,
I respect your view point. Again, all we can go by is our own observation and experience. The science here is still in a fairly unsettled state. So I will *not* make any blanket statements (i.e about what works for other autistic kids), but I will say that our kid regressed fairly late (his diagnosis itself happened just around 5 years, and that diagnosis had used phrases like "higher functioning" - yet after that came a fairly serious regression, which we would attribute to the last minute catch-up shots we did, to get the school to admit him).

Our experience with DAN was *not* the way you have outlined. We researched a lot, spoke to parents, met parents, and at no point were we made any promises. In fact, most DAN doctors will tell you that *even* with all this, there are many cases where the kids haven't made much progress. Heck, one of the doctors told us, in our very first meeting, that their own kid didn't make much progress. So much for marketing.

What we tried in the beginning was something simple - remove wheat and milk from our kid's diet (which is perfectly harmless to try). That had one specific, remarkable result: he got potty trained within a couple of weeks of that (which was well after his 6th birthday).

Since then, he has made steady (if at times slow) progress. Could we be on a completely wrong track? That possibility always exists, but at this point, we have a fair degree of conviction in what we are doing. Your mileage may vary, of course. Each person has to evaluate the claims and counter-claims and come to their own conclusion.

Let me finish my last post on this thread with an anecdote from my professional career. In digital cellular, there are two prevailing technologies GSM and CDMA, with today CDMA being accepted as the superior technology (GSM is also moving to a flavor of CDMA in the next generation). I worked for the company behind CDMA(Qualcomm), as an engineer in the mid 90s, and worked on aspects of CDMA technology.

At that time (early to mid 90's) a famous technology journalist said "CDMA will never work, it is against the laws of Physics". There was swirling controversy around CDMA. Qualcomm was accused of peddling snake oil. I vividly remember being an engineer in Qualcomm, when the press was carrying a lot of stories on this controversy (there wasn't much of an internet then). It felt bad to be talked about in those terms, yet working on the technology, we knew it was solid.

Fast foward 12 years, today, CDMA is widely accepted as the superior technology in cellular.

So for those of you who think of science in black-and-white (truth or falsehood) terms, realize that it is a messy, rough (and very human) process for anything new to get accepted. Truth doesn't make a glorious appearance on the stage. It makes tentative, halting steps towards eventual acceptance, with a lot of backsliding along the way.

So all I ask of the critics: keep an open mind.

Sridhar

Kev,
I am not here to persuade you of the merits of what we do. We have seen progress with our son, and we are encouraged by that. If we stop seeing progress, we will try something else. You are overinterpreting the word "experimentation" - in my book, I would call everything we do, including "approved" therapies, like ABA, an experiment, meaning that the outcome is not known in advance. In that vein, not doing anything is also an experiment - a null experiment, if you will.

We are not injecting ginger and vinegar, I assure you. Don't conflate a the entire universe of parents trying various things with this.

Sridhar

Kev,
I am not trying to tell you what is right for your kid, and same way, just grant us that we are smart enought to evaluate what works for our kid. And I have been around both academia and industry enough never to accept authority without question. I have seen numerous times in my technology career how authority figures have been wrong or on the wrong track, and how unheralded engineers and scientists, toiling in obscurity, have made critical breakthroughs.

If "quackery" is the word you want to use for what I would call honest experimentation (which by definition admits the possibility of failure), that is fine by me. I am not here to persuade. All I ask is for people to investigate these things for themselves, and not accept their pediatricians (or anyone's word, including mine) as gospel truth.

I wish you well for your kid.

Sridhar

#51>>It’s possible that the rise in autism can be attributed to better diagnosis.

As many others pointed out, it is impossible to miss an autistic kid, and particularly so in a school setting. School districts are struggling to create special needs classes for our children, because there is just no way most of our kids can function in a normal classroom.

The US achieved universal schooling decades ago, and if autism rates 30 years ago were as high as they are today, it is just not possible for teachers of that time to not have noticed these kids. So the only possible other explanation would be that these kids were kept at home. Where would those autistic kids be now (i.e the ones who didn't go to school)?

I want to emphasize that it is not just "quirkiness" or "not being sociable" we are talking about here. I am not a very social person myself, and many people would consider me a bit quirky, but that is far, very far from the condition that afflicts my son. People who are talking about accepting diversity cannot possibly be talking about the same condition. At this point, I would be overjoyed if my son (and countless others like him) could post a comment in a blog someday.

@35, before you pronounce "nonsense", it is worth keeping in mind that a lot of parents have observed it. Second, biochemistry is sufficiently complex that even now we don't understand a lot of what is going on inside our bodies from a biochemical point of view. That is why drug discovery is so hard, and so hit and miss. Most doctor's understanding of the human body is "mechanistic" in nature (i.e what parts go where, how to fix them up etc), and while huge advances have been made in the surgical professions, illnesses like Asthma are still far from a cure (and incidentally, childhood asthma has gone up substantially too).

Ponder this: Would being trained as an auto-mechanic automatically lead to an understanding of the chemistry of gasoline or thermodynamics of internal combustion?

Sridhar

I have posted links to a couple of books on the subject of vaccinations, and how to be safe. I want to say that I am not an anti-vaccination activist, but I still believe we are way over-doing it - the number of shots we give our kids has gone up like factor of 3 in the last 15 years. See my post at http://blogs.zoho.com/general/scoble-on-autism/
for more information.

Robert, your post means a lot to me and countless parents in our situation. Thank you.

Sridhar

Robert,
Thank you for spreading the word on autism. I know Zoho can take care of itself, and it is the autistic kids that need real help!

To be honest, it is my wife Pramila who is the real source of strength for me in all this. She has it 100 times harder than me, yet somehow she finds the strength to keep going. Having an autistic child has made both of us better people, better able to relate to and appreciate suffering of all kinds.

Thank you again.

Sridhar

Robert, Thanks for the kind words about Zoho Notebook! It is our first step in knitting our online apps together. It is gratifying to see the reception it received.