🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Rising costs are a feature, not a bug, in Zoho’s strategy

• Zoho’s profit fell as expenses rose 30.5% year on year, outpacing revenue growth of 17.8% 1.
• The jump in spending had a clear driver. Depreciation and amortisation climbed from 5.1 billion rupees (US$55.5 million) to 7.4 billion rupees (US$80 million) after more investment in infrastructure such as software and computing systems 1.
• That pattern fits a wider shift. Software firms are taking on higher operating costs while putting more money into AI and infrastructure, even as global enterprise software spending stays uneven 1.

A single engineer’s output signals a shift in software development

• Sridhar Vembu moved to chief scientist to lean harder into research and development (R&D), with attention on AI. He has said his rough guess is that good programmers now get “two to three times” productivity, with a path to 10x as tools improve 2.
• He also gave a concrete example. One senior Zoho engineer built a complex security tool that runs close to the computer’s core systems in a month, a job that used to take three to four engineers and close to a year 3.
• The engineer credited the Opus 4.5 AI model, an AI system used to help write and analyze code, calling it a “game changer.” That kind of boost could push software companies to revisit staffing levels and delivery schedules as AI takes on more of the workload 4.