This is a valid question raised by Andrew (DabbleDB’s founder) in their forums. With bunch of online applications under zoho brand, obviously, any one-product-competitor would say our weakness is “lack of focus”
To clarify on this,
We have extremely focused independant teams working on each zoho service – in Paul Graham words, each zoho service is a startup, and each product manager is the chief executive for the respective service.
In fact, too much of such independency to zoho teams is hurting us now 😉 Many of our customers have asked for single sign-on support between zoho services which we thought we could take up after each service has its own customers and stands by itself. Now its time and we are on top of it. This is a clear evidence that each zoho service has its own external focus and operate as separate startup.
Zoho Creator has come long way to what it stands today, still lot more ahead. We make almost monthly once major updates, which proves we have dedicated team and validates that we have high priority for it.
In the same post, Andrew had made interesting comment that Zoho Creator has water fall model of app creation and Dabble is more of incremental development. Your observation is wrong, Andrew. We have deliberately separated the “build mode” (app creation environment) and “live mode” (the actual app itself). We feel, when both mode mixed up it confuses the user, especially if the user is not the one who created the application. We do have option for users to change their application as they proceed with their data, like support for field type change, view configurations, filters etc. So, Zoho Creator is very friendly for incremental app creation. Please try it yourself and decide.
Hyther
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