I can't argue about the ripping off business: I am not nearly experienced enough with your history to argue that.
What I CAN argue is the user interface, because that's something I've got experience with. Yours is awful. You essentially emulate an old version of Office, which had a fairly terrible interface to begin with. It works because you can modify the toolbar to work with it, to add on. Your products look like Office with all the toolbars enabled. There is no acknowledgement that certain buttons are used more than others, no acknowledgement that such a thing as "user flow" exists. It's unoriginal and it is worse than the original design. This is not usable.
Your aesthetic is questionable. Brown and white in Writer is not pretty by any means. The fact that your UI changes with every product means that you lack consistency. Furthermore, in Safari there is severe clipping whenever rounded corners are involved. It looks about as pretty as a bad student project.
Google understands that the Internet has different requirements, a different medium than desktop apps. Their products are lighter than Office, not just in terms of features but in terms of aesthetic. They don't try and fail to emulate Office. They offer one that's more optimized for the Internet. With yours, I'm seeing vast increases in disk usage. That's poorly done.
Of course you have customers. You have a wide set of applications, and a lot of people will use anything that has a wide featureset without design. That doesn't mean you won't get criticism. Many people despair of the fact that there's so much attention on featureset and so little attention on good design. It's the 37signals crowd, I guess you could say. And that crowd looks down on Zoho as a symbol of what's wrong with web design right now.
I mean, don't get me wrong. Good luck with your site: you certainly do have a product that appeals to a particular market. I just wish you guys would put a little more effort into making something that looks and feels beautiful.
Point taken. Design is hard, great design is harder. To contrast with 37Signals, we don't believe, and haven't believed in less is more. As Joel Spolsky has said, nothing sells software better than new features. We are working on new interfaces that will expose the feature set better.
Safari isn't supported yet. We will eventually support it, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
What I CAN argue is the user interface, because that's something I've got experience with. Yours is awful. You essentially emulate an old version of Office, which had a fairly terrible interface to begin with. It works because you can modify the toolbar to work with it, to add on. Your products look like Office with all the toolbars enabled. There is no acknowledgement that certain buttons are used more than others, no acknowledgement that such a thing as "user flow" exists. It's unoriginal and it is worse than the original design. This is not usable.
Your aesthetic is questionable. Brown and white in Writer is not pretty by any means. The fact that your UI changes with every product means that you lack consistency. Furthermore, in Safari there is severe clipping whenever rounded corners are involved. It looks about as pretty as a bad student project.
Google understands that the Internet has different requirements, a different medium than desktop apps. Their products are lighter than Office, not just in terms of features but in terms of aesthetic. They don't try and fail to emulate Office. They offer one that's more optimized for the Internet. With yours, I'm seeing vast increases in disk usage. That's poorly done.
Of course you have customers. You have a wide set of applications, and a lot of people will use anything that has a wide featureset without design. That doesn't mean you won't get criticism. Many people despair of the fact that there's so much attention on featureset and so little attention on good design. It's the 37signals crowd, I guess you could say. And that crowd looks down on Zoho as a symbol of what's wrong with web design right now.
I mean, don't get me wrong. Good luck with your site: you certainly do have a product that appeals to a particular market. I just wish you guys would put a little more effort into making something that looks and feels beautiful.