Give Zoho a Chance

A guest post by Arun Sukumar

Dear readers,

Wishing you and your loved ones a joyful, safe, and luminous Diwali! May this festival of lights bring you clarity, courage, and inspiration.

To mark the occasion, we’re featuring a sharp and timely guest post by Arun Sukumar on the rise of Zoho, the battle over protocol interoperability, and what it means for India’s digital sovereignty. Drawing a through-line from Microsoft’s anti-OSS strategy in the 1990s to today’s Big Tech dominance, Arun argues that supporting Indian tech champions like Zoho makes strategic sense, but must come with demands for openness, interoperability, and real cybersecurity.

We’re also always open to strong, original voices writing on tech in India. If you’ve got a compelling POV, don’t hesitate to pitch us.

Take care and enjoy the festivities!

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In October 1998, computing circles in the United States were abuzz with chatter about a series of leaked memoranda from Microsoft. The memos, titled the “Halloween Documents”, reflected the company’s unease with the rise and popularity of open-source software (OSS). The first and most popular Halloween Document, written by a 23-year-old Indian American engineer named Vinod Vallopilil, acknowledged the long-term competition that OSS presented to Microsoft’s proprietary software. Open-source browsers like Mozilla were already “close to parity” with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, wrote Vallopilil. The young developer’s prescription to the problem had little to do with improved products from Microsoft: the company instead had to “change the rules of the game”. First, Microsoft had to “de-commoditize protocols” that allowed for open-source projects to quickly integrate into web applications. In other words, Internet protocols, such as the ones that were developed by standards bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) should not be readily accessible as simple commodities would be in a market. They had to be transformed into closed protocols to deny “OSS projects entry into the market”. Second, Microsoft had to get into “network and server infrastructure” to capture the downstream market. It was not enough to build internet-facing applications, but also to create storage solutions and programming interfaces that lock in internet users to Microsoft products. It would not be until several years later when another engineer of Indian origin, Amitabh Srivastava, would help realize this vision by developing Microsoft’s cloud computing capability – called Azure. Today, Azure is at the core of Microsoft’s business, and has transformed the company from yet another software vendor to an internet behemoth.

The Halloween Documents are a great illustration of the truth that the Internet’s transformation to what it is today did not happen by chance. The Internet is no longer a genuinely open “network of networks” whose standards and protocols are developed by civic-minded engineers or amateur hobbyists. It has centralized to a significant degree, and Big Tech companies have a major role in the development or management of key Internet infrastructure, protocols, and applications. When the Microsoft memos leaked in 1998, the OSS community was worried that big companies would “crush IETF” and other standards bodies. That hasn’t happened. Big Tech has simply found ways to influence the development of internet protocols, and “de-commoditize” them by building their operation around their proprietary products which dominate user-centric activity like browsing, messaging, and cloud computing.

It is this de-commoditizing impulse of big Internet companies that Zoho and its co-founder Sridhar Vembu has targeted in recent weeks. Vembu has called for the Indian government to force Big Tech to make their protocols open and interoperable in the country – hardly a controversial demand, given that regulators in the European Union have been trying to achieve exactly the same objective for the better part of the last decade. The difference this time around is that the demand comes from someone who runs a billion-dollar company, is considered close to the ruling dispensation, and whose products, most importantly, compete with Microsoft, Salesforce and Google. But that is no reason to dismiss the validity of his arguments: if anything, there are sound business and strategic reasons to implement Vembu’s pitch.

First, it may be necessary to unpack all that has been happening around Zoho recently. In a matter of days, Zoho’s messaging app Arattai has become one of the most downloaded apps in India. Leading government functionaries, including members of the union cabinet, have purportedly switched to Zoho Mail for official use. On October 13, The Hindu reported that lakhs of central government employees’ email services have migrated to Zoho, and that they are being encouraged to use Zoho Office Suite (in lieu of Microsoft Office). All these developments have come on the back of a concerted and visible effort from the Indian to push for the adoption of home-grown technology products. That the Indian government is rooting for Zoho is not particularly surprising. We have entered an era of industrial policy, and governments from Washington D.C. to Seoul have begun to pick winners and national champions in key markets. Extraordinary times have prompted extraordinary promotion by states of certain companies.

It is also not the case that the major technology companies of our time have thrived on technical brilliance alone. US government contracts were critical to the early success of Microsoft. When Microsoft agreed to develop an operating system for IBM computers in the eighties, Bill Gates’ team famously had neither exposure to the OS market nor any expertise developing such software. So, Microsoft simply hired Tim Paterson, the developer who would go on to create MS-DOS. Microsoft rode on the back of IBM’s government relationships, snagging in the process the biggest and most deep-pocketed client in the world for its OS and Word Processors. As Microsoft made inroads into Europe in the nineties, it was the bundling together of Microsoft Office and MS Windows/ DOS that prompted the European Commission to award the company its public contracts. The EC, according to an investigation by Computer Weekly, skipped public consultations and chose Microsoft by invoking a little-used clause meant for the acquisition of “technical products that […] could only be delivered by a particular supplier”. Google’s misuse of licensing agreements to bundle and prominently highlight its proprietary services in any mobile that relied on the Android OS has been investigated and fined by Europe and other jurisdictions. In September 2025, Amazon paid billions of dollars to the US Federal Trade Commission to settle a lawsuit that alleged the company had tricked Amazon Prime users not only into renewing their subscriptions but also made it difficult for them to cancel subsequently. Amazon, the FTC alleged, had extensively deployed “dark patterns”, i.e., deceptive user interfaces that made it difficult for Amazon users to even buy products without a Prime subscription. Suffice to say, the modern digital economy is not exactly characterized by fair competition. Government support of Zoho is no different from the regulatory shield and diplomatic cover that US and Chinese technology companies have enjoyed for long from their parent states.

Still, the government and Vembu could make a better case for public adoption of Zoho than an appeal to nationalism. Even as Zoho’s popularity has soared, users have flagged concerns regarding Arattai’s encryption. Although Vembu says only “secret rebels” need to worry about surveillance on Arattai, Zoho has done well to announce a roll-out of end-to-end encryption for the platform from next month. Privacy and patriotism are not mutually exclusive – if users perceive their digital platforms to be insecure, they will vote with their feet. An official meanwhile has said the switch to Zoho for government employees was prompted by security concerns around OSS. There is some truth to this concern – given especially the pervasive capture of the OSS supply chain by Chinese actors – but to taint all open-source products as compromised is counterproductive to the country’s own aspirations to be a software powerhouse. Most major proprietary software today run on OSS tools. Microsoft, which decried the rise of OSS in the nineties, ended up buying GitHub, the world’s biggest open-source repository in 2018. If security was such an overwhelming concern, what explains the Indian Defence ministry’s own reliance on OSS for its indigenous operating system Maya?

Ultimately, the government should lay the groundwork for a digital economy that gives Zoho and other Indian companies a fighting chance to compete with Big Tech. Protocol interoperability, which Vembu has sought, is a necessary first step. Indian users on Whatsapp must be able to make digital payments through whatever services they prefer, rather than being forced into an in-house payments system. They should be able to effortlessly migrate from Amazon Web Services to Zoho and vice-versa without any concern for data integrity in the process. They should also be able to message anyone from any platform, without having to open multiple apps in the process. Interoperability, however, should be between like platforms that offer comparable cybersecurity. It is neither in the government’s interest or Zoho to seek to replace existing digital services in the name of nationalist appeal unless security and scale concerns are fully addressed.

Strategically too, an “open protocols” economy will benefit India, making migration of data and review of algorithms by Indian entities easier in exceptional cases of national security. Instead of banning TikTok in 2020, the government could have considered a sale and migration of the company’s India operations to an Indian entity with the resources to manage the platform’s data. Zoho, in this scheme of things, is also a valuable strategic asset because it operates in the arena of cloud computing, and can arguably scale up to meet such contingencies. It is for the same reason that the Trump administration has chosen Larry Ellison’s Oracle to manage TikTok US’ data and algorithms after the Chinese social media giant finalizes the sale of its US operations to an investor consortium.

The bottom-line is that there are good reasons for the Indian government to back Zoho. Facilitating its entry and those of Indian entrants into new segments of the digital economy requires policy action on open protocols. If it does go down that path, it is also New Delhi’s responsibility to hold Zoho’s feet to the fire on data protection and cybersecurity.

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Arun Sukumar is an assistant professor of international relations at Ashoka University, and the author of “Midnight’s Machines”. His work explores the intersections of technology, policy, and global affairs.