Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
For companies trying to build a strong work culture, discipline may sound like an obvious answer. But Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu believes that asking employees to simply follow a “disciplined” culture can create a problem of its own.
In a post on X, Vembu discussed two different ways organisations can function. In one, employees wait for instructions from senior leaders and follow clearly defined goals. In the other, employees take the initiative, make their own decisions and challenge each other.
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According to Vembu, companies that rely heavily on metrics often end up encouraging employees to wait for directions from the top. This can make an organisation more predictable, but it also creates a risk if senior leadership takes the wrong decision.
An initiative-driven workplace has the opposite problem. Employees may disagree frequently and question each other’s decisions. Vembu said such an environment can feel chaotic and leave people with a constant feeling that their work is “not good enough”.
He gave a programmer-focused example to explain the point that “every smart programmer looks at another programmer’s code and thinks ‘it sucks, I can do better’”
Vembu says this is the trade-off companies have to deal with. A workplace can offer employees certainty and comfort, but may lose some of their initiative. Or it can encourage people to take charge, while accepting disagreements and uncertainty. He said trying to combine both by creating “a highly disciplined culture of seizing the initiative” can result in “the worst of both worlds”.
Zoho is struggling to do business
Vembu’s comments on workplace culture come as Zoho itself faces a difficult business environment. The company is dealing with a sharp rise in memory costs, driven in part by demand from AI data centres, along with increasing AI token costs.
Sharing a report that claimed memory prices had risen 500 percent in 12 months, Vembu said the situation was making business increasingly difficult.
“Memory prices, along with AI token prices, have made business very difficult. We have held back from raising prices but it is becoming hard,” he wrote.
Data from Tom’s Hardware cited in the report shows how steep the increase has been. Average prices for some DDR5 memory kits rose from around $90 in August 2025 to $425 in August 2026. A 128GB DDR5-6400 kit has climbed to $3,399, compared with its previous low of $329.
Vembu also believes the memory crunch could force software developers to rethink how programming languages are designed. “For a long time, programming languages were designed with the assumption that memory is ‘free.’ That era has now ended,” he said.
He wants more memory-efficient languages and smarter compilers, including for AI systems. For Vembu, improving code safety and developer productivity should not come at the cost of excessive memory use.
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SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
