Image source @ Visual China
Text | Photon Planet, author | Zhang Jin, Editor | Wu Xianzhi
After market inspection and elimination, DingTalk, Tencent Conference, and Enterprise WeChat (hereinafter referred to as "Micro") stand out, constantly iteratively updating in technology, and applied to many scenarios, online education, online office, etc. have become the new trend of the times.
In the post-epidemic era, after the market has been educated once, the collaborative office ushered in a calm, Ali and Tencent seemed to be a foregone conclusion, at this time, halfway out of ByteDance, its Feishu ushered in many eyes as soon as it appeared.
Among them, there are many celebrities such as Lei Jun and Luo Yonghao, and Xiaomi and the new force "Wei Xiaoli" have also migrated to the top, and for a while, Feishu has become a star product.
An office product that uses employees, and it is the manager who decides to pay the bill. DingTalk and Qiwei chose to attack the managers from above, ushering in the first round of victory, facing a strong enemy, Feishu chose to take the mass line to kill a bloody road.
In the second round of the arena, the circumstances of the three are different. Taking Alibaba's corporate culture as an example, DingTalk caters to the control needs of some managers to employees, while Feishu relies on collaboration and information circulation to win the unanimous praise of users, while Qiwei is sandwiched between the two, neither output management concepts, nor wins the hearts of employees, but is more of a basic communication and marketing tool.
However, recently, Micro has begun to integrate Tencent Documents and Tencent Conferences, learning DingTalk and Feishu as a one-stop office platform, from bulk to merger, indicating that the competition in the field of collaborative office software is intensifying, and Micro has begun to seek change.
Connect or tie?
In this field of both to B and to C, the latecomer Qiwei did not jump out of the confinement of DingTalk and wanted to impress enterprise managers.
For example, dingTalk's optimal functions are attendance punch card, process review, financial approval, reimbursement, etc., and the biggest advantage of micro enterprises is to allow sales-oriented enterprises to connect users and how to serve customers. It is weak in terms of documentation and information collaboration.
Many users have begun to use Micro and DingTalk because of the requirements of the company's leaders, and the spontaneous use of Feishu by large-scale individual users rarely appears in the first two. Micro is a product that focuses on enterprise business.
Huang Tieming, vice president of Tencent's WeChat business group, believes that Tencent's WeChat positioning is different from platforms such as DingTalk and Feishu, and the most obvious competitive advantage of Micro is a business tool that is difficult to replace with IM products within similar enterprises.
Based on the audio and video technology and instant messaging technology of Tencent's QQ era, Micro micro is positioned as a connector inside and outside the enterprise, connecting enterprises with their own consumers, partners, upstream and downstream suppliers, and even peers in the entire industry.
Behind this strategy, it still leverages the natural huge traffic pool of personal WeChat. In the 2020 epidemic, when the battle for collaborative office is in full swing, Qiwei is to win back a round in the competition with DingTalk by opening up personal WeChat. With this traffic connection, Micro eventually started the traffic business.
Taking the retail industry as an example, Watson employees can help enterprises establish a private domain traffic pool after adding customers with micro-enterprises. In the promotion festival to send customers a variety of preferential benefits, usually to the user to send coupons, but also to carry out after-sales consulting services, shortening the distance between enterprises and users.
However, micro itself can provide limited functions, the basic functions can only meet the content marketing and the most basic reply services, in order to save development costs, to provide more application scenarios. On this basis, Micro opens a large number of interfaces to ISV service providers, which can provide more differentiated marketing services. For example, some companies need a variety of services such as online shopping malls, intelligent customer service, and brand promotion.
These ISV service providers have software independent development functions, which can improve the stickiness and activity of users after accessing micro-enterprises.
This internal and external connection can be applied to multiple heavy marketing industries including finance, real estate, and catering. Behind this is the dependence of 1.2 billion WeChat social traffic, which is also an advantage that DingTalk and Feishu are difficult to match.
But today, micro-enterprises are more focused on marketing value, compared with DingTalk's "new era office operating system" and Feishu's "one-stop enterprise collaboration platform", the value provided seems to be somewhat thin, and even become a kind of shackles on the road ahead of the development of to B. This is reflected in the user's willingness to use.
"Not as good as Feishu" and "not very useful" are the most comments from users on Micro at present.
In many workplace social platforms, if DingTalk, Qiwei, and Feishu are compared together, they have the most complaints about Qiwei, many of which are titled tencent employees.
The contrast with feishu's reputation is polarized, and the reasons for correcting it are different from Feishu's taking the mass route, and initially micro-enterprises did not focus on employees.
Feishu has a good reputation among users, and the core reason is that its positioning is to reduce the workload of users and improve work efficiency. Many modules such as Feishu documents and conferences draw on mature office software at home and abroad, and are willing to spend a lot of money polishing product details and pay attention to the user experience.
For example, Feishu has set up a "Everyone is a Product Manager" group to listen to the suggestions of millions of users and modify and debug product details. If the user has any questions on the product, the @official member will soon get a reply.
This requires a lot of labor costs to do. Previously, Feishu officially said that the Feishu team has a scale of thousands of people, and the number of people is still growing.
The emergence of Feishu has made micro-enterprises begin to rethink the value of employees.
Get closer to the Flying Book
For micro-micro, it is not easy to use in the eyes of users who need to often use basic office tools such as documents and conferences. Invisibly, a large number of "advanced" industry employees have been blocked, of which the Internet is the most typical.
An employee of Jitu Express said that in addition to facilitating the forwarding of documents to WeChat friends, other functions of Micro have not improved their work efficiency. However, because it is the company's unified requirements for use, even if it is felt that Feishu is easy to use internally, it is not used internally, and it is only given to the group members Amway.
In the competition with DingTalk, Micro Micro has also continuously made efforts in the advantages of DingTalk such as approval, assessment, and accounting to improve the functions of these modules. Qiwei advertised on Douyin, "Tencent 'Enterprise Aviation Plan', more than 30 employees, 9.9 yuan free to receive Qiwei attendance machine" and other information, revealing the attendance of Qiwei coveting DingTalk.
Bai Qiang works in a software development company, usually communicate directly with WeChat, the project team directly pulls WeChat groups, OA and approval with DingTalk, and also uses graphite documents and Tencent documents.
In this way, companies that use a variety of office tools at the same time are not a minority, because they do not pay attention to the product research and development of basic offices, and Micro and DingTalk only win the favor of managers.
Initially, Tencent's collaborative office market was decentralized, with enterprise micro, Tencent documentation, and Tencent conference respectively. This is related to the fact that the development of domestic to B was not mature at that time, and each family was still in the stage of testing the waters.
In 2016, one year and three months after the release of DingTalk, Tencent also launched Micro Enterprise and officially entered the enterprise office market. For a long time, Micro has only played the role of simple OA, can only connect internal employees, but as an ordinary collaboration software, Tencent has placed it on the edge of the group's business.
With the popularity of the industrial Internet, giants have begun to realize the important role of micro-enterprises and DingTalk in to B. Therefore, in 2019, after Zhang Xiaolong elaborated on the product concept of "people as a service", at the end of the same year, Micro officially connected the WeChat ecology with more than 1 billion users, and opened the diversion process from C-end personal WeChat to B-end Micro.
Since then, Micro has laid the positioning of "connector". However, at that time, Tencent's positioning and strategy did not develop towards one-stop collaborative office, and Tencent documents and Tencent conferences were still used as independent office tools.
Unintentionally planted willows, Tencent Conference was only eight months after its establishment, and under the catalysis of the epidemic, the number of users exceeded 100 million. Micro and Tencent conferences have gradually become two important wings in Tencent's to B business. Micro micro also showed the results of "400 million users" and "5.5 million enterprises and organizations" at the annual press conference on December 23, 2020.
At the beginning, Tencent Conference, which had many praises, had its own micro-documents, but some users called it "more chicken ribs", and later Tencent Conference and Tencent Documents merged. There is also an access point for Tencent Conference in Micro Micro, but it still needs to download the App and cannot be used directly.
It can be seen that Tencent initially did not improve work efficiency as a selling point to market micro-enterprises. From the perspective of the timeline, it can be said that until the emergence of Feishu brought about a new crisis, it promoted the merger of Micro and Tencent Documents and Tencent Conference.
With the lessons of DingTalk and Qiwei, once released, Feishu integrates documents, conferences and other basic office tools in one, and the connection is very smooth. The Feishu sword takes a side and wins the user's heart through "taking the mass line".
The love of individual users for Feishu has made Micro return to enterprise office collaboration from positioning itself as a "connector inside and outside the enterprise".
On August 18, Tencent released its second quarter and first half of 2021 performance report, the financial report pointed out: "The company further opened up communication and efficiency office SaaS tools such as enterprise WeChat, Tencent conference and Tencent documents to support better collaboration between enterprise customers and external users." ”
Earlier, Photon Planet asked a micro employee, who said that the internal product is now making three-in-one products. Recently, the integrated versions of Micro and Tencent Documents and Tencent Conference have been publicly used, and some users have said that the menu bar of Tencent Conference and Tencent Document has appeared in Micro.
For this change, some netizens joked on the social platform that "micro + Tencent conference + Tencent document" is not a flying book.
An internal employee told Photon Planet that the production and research team of Micro Micro actually pays attention to product details, but there is not enough manpower, and now the Micro Team works overtime every day. On a workplace platform, complaints about the heavy overtime of micro enterprises are also common.
Micro began to pay attention to the basic office capabilities, in the product details of the force, trying to reverse the heart of the "masses".
At the same time, Feishu also affected DingTalk and began to complete the functions in the basic office module. For example, in mid-October last year, Alibaba released the "DingTalk Meeting" at the 2021 Future Organization Conference, connecting collaboration functions such as video conferencing, schedules, and projects through documents, so that the strategy of cloud peg integration has been upgraded again. One DingTalk employee said that DingTalk documents and internal horse racing to see who can run first.
What the hell are you grabbing?
The competition of enterprise office market enters the midfield, and the appearance of flying books will stir up the war situation. In essence, this is a contest of to B, each family is full of energy, and no one is willing to bow their heads and concede defeat first.
A Tencent employee told Photon Planet that micro is now the core department and has attracted much attention. The importance of winning the office market for all players is self-evident.
In the enterprise service market, enterprise data is a key battle, which is the key reason why Internet giants have broken through in the field of enterprise office software. Similarly, in the past two years, the hot AI, chips, a number of unicorn companies even if there are advanced technologies, when the Internet giants enter, they must also be afraid of three points, because the Internet giants have accumulated data on users' eating, wearing, and living, and have a large number of application scenarios.
Three months ago, DingTalk announced that the number of users has exceeded 500 million, and the number of WeChat users that Tencent has connected and served through micro-enterprise has reached 400 million, after news that Feishu DAU reached 3 million. It can be said that the three applications cover almost all mainstream B-end users in China.
Collaborative office software is more like the drainage platform of Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance. Whoever wins the business wins the ticket to the B-end market. Taking the fiercely competitive cloud computing market as an example, with the pioneers of DingTalk, Qiwei and Feishu paving the way, business development is bound to be smoother.
Different from the C-end, the market share can be obtained by throwing money at marketing, and then form a giant monopoly, and the first-mover advantage of the B-end is an insurmountable mountain.
Although Qiwei and DingTalk have a first-mover advantage in time, it seems that the user stickiness of both is not high at present. Pushing from top to bottom, the effect is not good. Feishu made Qiwei and DingTalk feel the crisis coming.
There are not a few enterprises that have migrated from DingTalk and Micro to Feishu, among which the new forces of car manufacturing are the most typical.
At the beginning of last year, Xiaopeng was still a customer of DingTalk and claimed to have saved at least 18 million yuan in costs in the years of using DingTalk. According to the prospectus of Xiaopeng Motors, in the first half of 2020, the number of employees of Xiaopeng Motors was 3676. In less than half a year, all members of Xiaopeng migrated to Feishu. Half a year earlier, Ideal Auto was also one of DingTalk's core customers, and also moved to Feishu. Weilai also completed the switch from micro to feishu in 2021. Of course, these several will still use micro-micro in some links, such as establishing contact with customers.
The new forces favor Feishu because the efficiency, collaboration, information flow, OKR, etc. advocated by Feishu are indeed reflected in the tools. Unlike Micro, the Feishu mass line has achieved certain victories.
Whether it is from the "upper" manager or from the "lower" employee, in the end, each family competes for the whole enterprise. The change of office software from DingTalk, Micro, and Feishu has allowed the industry to see that to win the tickets of the to B industry, users must really see the value.
From the very beginning, Feishu has acted against micro-enterprises and nails, and has implemented it from below. At present, corporate customers, sales-oriented to micro enterprises, small and medium-sized private enterprises choose DingTalk, Feishu users stay more in Internet companies.
Behind the enterprise office software is the embodiment of the management culture of each enterprise. For example, a number of private enterprises choose DingTalk, more is to value the "strong control" output of DingTalk, and the Internet upstart ByteDance has become the desire of young people, and its management concept is also valued by the outside world.
Feishu focuses on the vertical downward efficiency, and DingTalk is committed to a large and complete ecosystem, becoming the entrance to enterprise informatization. Compared with the output concept of DingTalk and Feishu, the enterprise micro positioned in the "enterprise internal and external connector" is sandwiched in the middle, which is more of a marketing tool. Dislocated competition, micro-enterprises deviate from the "mainstream" farther and farther.
Under the low user stickiness, micro enterprises have gradually become zombie products on the terminals of employees of various enterprises.
Ma Li works in a listed manufacturing company, recently gave the company office software evaluation, after inspecting DingTalk, Feishu, Qiwei three products, and finally chose Qiwei. Asked why, he said it was the easiest to use, just like WeChat.
Some traditional industry sales personnel said that the basic marketing function of micro-enterprise is very limited, a complete set of marketing methods to be applied to micro-micro, the development of more functions, need to go through the company's multiple links of evaluation and audit inspection, often take a long time, the effect also needs time to test. In the end, Micro micro only became a simple reply tool for sending coupons and holiday greetings to customers.
As for whether from top to bottom or from bottom to top, managers push hard and users take the initiative to use, who is more useful has yet to be verified, but in the enterprise service market, it is only attendance punch card and marketing, users are not active, so that enterprise office software becomes a zombie tool, and user data collection is more limited.
Competition will eventually return to the use of the service ecology behind the use of enterprises, and micro enterprises still need time to revitalize the entire ecology.