Taking On Microsoft And Google From India: InstaColl Founders Sumanth Raghavendra, Kaushal Cavale, And Their Mentor Sabeer Bhatia (Part 3)

SM: Back to you, Sumanth and Kaushal. Once Sabeer became your mentor and your financing partner, how did the company’s strategy evolve?

SR and KC: Up to that point we were very conservative because we did not have a lot of money. We had shut down our services group completely because it didn’t make strategic sense. We wanted to focus on building the product. Once Sabeer joined us, we started thinking much bigger. Part of that metamorphosis was his telling us that we needed to be part of something bigger.

At that time we saw we had the ability to make Microsoft Office collaborative. The question was how to make the browser part of that process. We found a way in which we could send the document to the browser, allowing multiple people to work together on the same document via the desktop or via the browser. We started off by looking at apps such as Google Docs to see if we could partner with them, but we realized very quickly that what they had would not meet our requirements. That’s when we decided to build this on our own.

SM: When you analyzed Google Docs and Zoho and determined that they did not meet your technical requirements, where did you find that they fell short?

SR and KC: The main problem came when the document was converted to HTML. Microsoft Office documents are in very complex formats. When they are converted to HTML, a lot of fine detail such as formatting are lost. It’s a one-way trip to hell, if you will. There is no way to get back to the original Office format. It’s not a fault of theirs. If you take a Microsoft Office document on your desktop and convert it to HTML through Microsoft Office itself, and then you try to convert it back into a Microsoft Office desktop application format, you will see that there is a lot of data lost. Once we realized that there was no way to go to HTML in our workflow, the idea of partnering with Google went out the window.

SM: So a key requirement for you was bidirectional conversion?

SR and KC: Correct.

SM: What about the feature set? I use Google Docs a fair bit these days because of its collaboration capabilities. It has so many features that are not available with Microsoft Office.

SR and KC: People don’t realize that what is happening on the front end of the HTML is very small part of the equation. Google and Zoho do not handle the user’s data in the browser. They send what the user types to a server, and the server sends it to an Open Office cluster, which then does all the work. They are not building an office suite; they are building a front-end to an office suite server cluster.

As a result, everything goes to the server and there is a lag effect. You are also limited by what you can build in a front-end because your superset can be only what is available on the server. JavaScript is not fully mature as a programming language and does not offer all the options you might want. It is good for building out a better user experience for HTML. When you want to do something as computing intensive as [work using] desktop Microsoft Office, then you discover limitations. In our case we started off with Microsoft Office and asked ourselves what we had to do to take Microsoft Office to the Web.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Taking On Microsoft And Google From India: InstaColl Founders Sumanth Raghavendra, Kaushal Cavale, And Their Mentor Sabeer Bhatia
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