The Echo Chamber Effect: Why Zoho Arattai has an Uphill Climb to Competing with the dominance of WhatsApp.
The push by Zoho into the already competitive instant messaging market with its Arattai (meaning chatter in Tamil) seems to be already facing the skepticism wall, not because of any obvious technical flaw, but because of that it is not a novel concept. Those in the industry and early adopters are making the rapid argument that, though a perfectly capable messaging application, Arattai has practically nothing left to offer in comparison to the ubiquitous and highly integrated ecosystem of WhatsApp. Currently, in a world where there has been overload of communication apps, being just another similar messaging application with a similar feature list is turning out to be a very significant slip-up, as it does not offer users the necessary burst to make them leave their current, comfortable digital ways of being.
The dilemma to Arattai revolves around the network effect, which WhatsApp has in its favor, the fact that it already has billions of users, all of whom communicate and interact without any issues. Any new messaging platform that should succeed must have something with a new functionality that WhatsApp does not have, or it must focus on a niche community with exceptionally specific functions. The services of Arattai, however, mostly resemble those of WhatsApp: end-to-end encryption, group conversations, voice and video, file sharing, and status updates. Although the reputation of data privacy and the Made in India is admirable, these features are not yet convincing enough to push out a platform that has become a household name to an entire generation of people regarding instant communication. The question is on the minds of the users: why change when the new application directly performs the same task, yet none of my contacts are available?
Moreover, the fact that Arattai is being added to the wider range of Zoho enterprise tools, though advantageous to current Zoho customers, is a two sided sword. It does not appeal much as a standalone and universal communication platform to the general population, instead suggesting itself as a business-focused chat solution instead of an authentic WhatsApp competitor. The smooth merging of personal and business networks is something that is already a convenience to the everyday user, and they do not need to subscribe to a whole ecosystem of business applications to use WhatsApp. This little targeting, combined with the lack of a killer feature that would motivate mass migration, has a crippling effect on how Arattai can escape the nascent user base of its user base.
After all, the destiny of Arattai appears to be related to a cruel reality of the market: the next stage of innovation of the instant messaging service is neither to reproduce the existing feature, but to reinvent the user experience or satisfy the unmet needs. Zoho Arattai will struggle to be another voice in the huge digital hall, silenced by the sound of its giant competitor, without a genuinely new value proposition, a game changer in the realm of communication, a groundbreaking integration of AI, or an entirely decentralized model that will take care of the issue of privacy that no other application will be able to. The option available to Zoho at this stage is to spin radically or accept its position as a small player on its current enterprise platform.
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