Taking On Microsoft And Google From India: InstaColl Founders Sumanth Raghavendra, Kaushal Cavale, And Their Mentor Sabeer Bhatia (Part 4)

SM: Tell me more about the architecture underpinning your product. What enables you to do what you can now do in the browser?

SR and KC: We explored many options. The first thing that came to mind were plug-ins. Even though the browser is popular for HTML, there are numerous plug-ins that make a supplemental and Web experience. Flash and applets are examples of plug-ins. Most people now consider them extensions of the browsing experience. We evaluated two primary options, Flash and its basic programming framework, and Java applets and their more advanced programming framework.

While the Java applet was more powerful at that time, it had a high overhead experience for HTML. We then started exploring Flash and Flex. We felt that ActionScript could give us everything we needed. Even though it was not as powerful as Java, it was a lot more powerful than JavaScript. We started developing with ActionScript as the base and figured out how to engineer all of the features that you have in the Microsoft Office desktop apps into the Flash runtime. That is where we are now. We have developed all the apps for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, and we have done it completely from scratch using ActionScript.

SM: Help me to understand how the rivalry between Adobe and Apple affects you.

SR and KC: Flash is the most ubiquitous runtime in the world; it [goes to] 98% of all computers. That is a great advantage for us because we don’t have to create different runtimes for different types of browsers. Apple will not put Flash on the iPad. That does not affect us until we see that people want business applications on the iPad.

SM: If Apple succeeds in doing what it wants to do with the iPad, it will be a content consumption device. Apple expects both business and consumer content to be accessed by users through the iPad. The rivalry could be a factor, right?

SR and KC: Microsoft Office is not prominent on the Mac. Mac has its own office software suite. Apple has not made inroads into the Microsoft Office market.

SM: Mac today has made great headway into the enterprise. One of the reasons for that is that Microsoft Office is fully available on the Mac.

SB: We are dependent on Flash because it’s on 98% of computers today. However, this battle will definitely affect us. If and when iPad- or Apple-based technologies become more ubiquitous, we will have to create a branch of our software that runs on that platform as well. At the moment, the most robust platform for our type of product is Flash.

SR and KC: Adobe has come out with a way to convert the runtime to run natively on the iPhone in a non-Flash environment. It looks as though Adobe is providing recourse to people who want to use the iPad.

SM: How much market validation do you have, and what is your go-to-market strategy?

SR and KC: When you share your Microsoft Office documents across different platforms you don’t want to lose portability. We are the only online solution that offers that. You can have a Microsoft Office document and upload it to our server and then return it to the Microsoft application, and it will all work seamlessly. We have tested with 70,000 beta users, and we feel they have validated our approach. We don’t have to play catch-up to Microsoft for everything that happens in the market. We have the collaborative features Microsoft does not have.

In terms of our go-to-market strategy, we have four ways to go. We don’t want to go head-to-head against Microsoft and challenge them where they are already established. We want to offer Office in different formats. Our first strategy is Office as a service. Under that model people could subscribe to the free offering on the Web. People who want to go beyond basic feature sets can then unlock advanced features by upgrading to a paid version. This is the aspect of our plan that we are going to launch in the next few weeks.

This segment is part 4 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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