Written by | Wu Xianzhi
Edit | Wang Pan
On the morning of July 11, the "document people" suffered "Black Monday", and the two online collaboration products of WPS and graphite documents were overturned.
First, some Weibo users suspected that WPS had some kind of sensitive word harmony mechanism, which claimed that files stored on cloud disks and local files would be deleted. Then the message continued to ferment, some people speculated, may be saved after being detected sensitive words, and then judged to contain sensitive information files, directly blocked, may also be remotely detected by the background server after directly locking the local file, the user has no other way but to appeal.
On social platforms, many text creators have said that they will switch to other products.
Subsequently, the official Weibo of WPS clarified that it denied deleting the user's local files. He also pointed out that the user was sharing a link to an online document and was suspected of violating the law, so he "prohibited others from accessing the link according to law".
Some of the people who saw the WPS rumors had just switched to graphite documents and ended up with embarrassment. At about 12:00 a.m., a user encountered a flash crash while editing text using a graphite document, and the page said "Server unavailable, please try again later." Even if service is later resumed, the "documentation people" do not buy it.
One after the other, two things, indicating that users have stable and private demands for document editing, the cross-examination caused by WPS and graphite overturning may be a microcosm of the second half of online collaborative office.
"Small but beautiful" declined
In 2020, the epidemic has greatly stimulated the demand for online offices, and the industry has ushered in a major outbreak.
At that time, the entrants included Internet giants such as Baidu, Ali, Tencent, and Byte, as well as some products that had long been laid out and known for their functionality, such as the 34-year-old Kingsoft, which had already appeared in 2016.
This story about collaborative office products began with Kingsoft and Graphite Lying Win. On November 18, 2019, Lei Jun wore a red tie, a navy blue suit, and an old cadre style, ringing the bell of the mainland market for the first time. At the time, he said two impressive numbers, one was 31 and the other was 20.
"From the founding of Kingsoft in 1988 to today, WPS has gone a full 31 years. From 1999, when Kingsoft Office was the main business body to prepare for listing, to today, we have waited for 20 years. "Under the blessing of various attributes such as industry leader, only this one, and the background of technology giants, Kingsoft Office soared 205% on the first day of opening, and 2 months later, the outbreak of the epidemic broke out, the stock price was as high as high, and the market value was once close to 240 billion yuan."
Spring Breeze also stopped at graphite documents. February 2020 has been two years since Graphite's last B round of financing, and finally in the midst of the epidemic, finally looking forward to a B+ round of financing of tens of millions of dollars.
Kingsoft and Graphite, the beginning is picturesque, reverse Office, beyond Office, both rely on the "free Dafa" to seize most of the domestic individual user market, and Kingsoft and Yongzhong also share the Internet giants can not reach the G-end big customers.
However, after the golden period of 2020, WPS growth is weakening. On the one hand, revenue growth slipped to 12.3%, and for the first time in the first quarter of this year, there was a quarter-on-quarter decline. On the other hand, half of the revenue comes from the C-end market (as of Q1 2022, personal office service subscription revenue accounted for 49%), due to the unspeakably excellent growth of MAU, the per capita consumption of paying users is not high, dragging down the overall revenue.
Zeng Ke (pseudonym), who works in the investment department of a national team background and has many years of procurement experience in the system, mentioned that "all service providers who want to take the G-end business will eventually become sluggish because of security and compliance, and the larger the transaction, the more sluggish it is." ”
Judging from the financial report, Kingsoft has indeed bid farewell to the era of high growth. As of the first quarter of this year, the average growth rate in the past seven quarters has been below 20%. Not only is the paying user base low, but the growth rate has slipped from 98.5% in Q2 2020 to 29.3% in Q4 2021, even if the per capita consumption of paying users reaches 35.8 yuan, the scale of 20 million users cannot support the market value of 100 billion.
WPS beat Office for free, but it was difficult to open up the paid market. As we all know, tool-based applications have been trapped in low payment for a long time, and user accounts lack multi-scenario binding, which is easy to be shared in many scenarios (scientific name "white prostitute"). Compared with the 50 million paid users of Baidu network disk in 2019, WPS paid users were only 25.37 million as of the first quarter of this year, only half of Baidu network disk.
Kingsoft Office has long unlocked paid functions, and the commercialization of graphite documents has been cautious. At present, individual users are 9 yuan per month and 108 yuan per year; Enterprise-level users, basic class package year 360 yuan / person / year, advanced version package year 600 yuan / person / year.
The dilemma of graphite documents is that cloud Office is facing the market of individual users, both to face the competition from WPS, and in the enterprise market, it is difficult to win the favor of customers by Office alone, especially after the online collaboration platform packages Office, recruitment, organization, OKR and other functions, the services provided by Graphite are extremely cold in any case.
More importantly, as a collaboration platform, many competitors have long left the tool attribute and begun to move towards the platform. In addition, at present, enterprises pay more attention to what kind of management concepts the collaboration platform can output for themselves, such as the ideal car from the use of flying books to practice OKR, primary and secondary schools widely use DingTalk to establish home-school connections, and enterprises and micro-enterprises occupy the marketing field.
There are indications that the "small and beautiful" model may not be the ultimate form of online office.
The scenes of Feishu, DingTalk and Qiwei are differentiated
In the past, "Baidu Hi" changed its name to the flow gradually lost its voice, WPS documents are more than enough, lack of collaboration, but graphite documents rely on "small and beautiful", lying in personal application scenarios, begging ordinary users for 9 yuan per month.
Strictly speaking, the online office market is divided into three categories, one is individual users, which include both a large number of students and personal text workers, such as online writers and self-media people. These users are extremely price-sensitive and have low penetration of paid memberships. "I just coded a word, but you asked me for money?"
The second category is small and medium-sized enterprise users, a number of tool-based products are very attractive to them, compared with individual users, as long as they provide low threshold, high efficiency, their willingness to pay is relatively high. For a long time, DingTalk relied on low thresholds and enterprises rely on the "building block" product matrix, and once gained a good market share.
The third category is large and medium-sized enterprises, which not only have demand for online office, but also hope to improve efficiency and change management concepts through online collaboration platforms.
Overall, in just two years, Feishu, DingTalk, and Tencent's collaborative office system (Micro, Tencent Conference, Tencent Documents), which are still in bulk, have basically divided the enterprise market, and in the field of segmentation, the three have established their own "spheres of influence".
An enterprise collaboration platform often outputs the management philosophy of the enterprise.
"Tencent's thinking of doing to B business determines that they will eventually enter the market in bulk." Zeng Ke analyzed that on the one hand, Tencent considers that small and micro enterprises have different needs and provides different products. On the other hand, it may be to enter enterprises and institutions in a gradual form.
He believes that the domestic government and enterprise service market prevails in integrated procurement, and one head can determine everything. Therefore, there is great uncertainty about how much market share Tencent can gain. However, in some industries that require frequent communication with outside the organization, micro enterprises have very good prospects, such as sales, property management, citizen management and so on.
A property manager mentioned that the collaboration between Micro And WeChat has maximized the efficiency of communication, "the enterprise WeChat group message has a strong reminder in the dialog box, but only one message can be sent in a group a day."
Similarly, DingTalk cannot completely cover all areas. For many students, "DingTalk is the devil", but for teachers, DingTalk is an angel, providing no less than offline solutions for teachers and students, home and school. Lin Wei (pseudonym) is an educator in a certain place, according to her understanding, almost all the primary and secondary schools in the city have been nailed.
"DingTalk mainly improves homework collection, learning supervision, homework correction, and then to achievement evaluation, which is interlinked." The above-mentioned person mentioned that in many functional settings, there are even advantages over offline. "For failing assignments, teachers can give one-on-one feedback to avoid public feedback leading to a blow to students' self-confidence; For passing assignments, the platform can intelligently generate teachers' instructions, pull in the distance between teachers and students, and improve communication efficiency. ”
What really makes primary school students appreciate the power of DingTalk is actually in the video teaching scene. Teachers can not only create effective online connections through the way of connecting wheat, but also quickly and accurately understand the students' listening status. In addition, for teachers of general subjects, even if each class has an independent group, they can teach across groups at the same time.
In contrast, Feishu is more suitable for companies that have efficiency teams, target traction, or improve the ability of organizations to be agile. In May, at the Feishu Spring Infinite Future Conference, it completed the upgrade to people. We have made a detailed interpretation in the article "Flying Book People, Moving "People" to Flying Books", and will not repeat them here.
The only thing to note is that some start-up teams and growth companies that took the two financing of AT have successively abandoned micro-enterprises or DingTalk and become users of Feishu. This does not mean that at two products are not good, but business managers are beginning to adopt online collaboration platforms in a targeted manner.
From tool to output concept
A sentence in "Political Order in a Changing Society" can be applied to enterprise management: organization is the road to enterprise management, the basis for institutional stability, and therefore the premise for releasing individual creativity.
However, it is puzzling that the three major collaboration platforms have not yet launched offline features (such as offline document editing), which may be the last dignity left for WPS.
WPS and graphite documents are only the tool era of online collaboration, while DingTalk, Qiwei and Feishu represent the advent of the platform era. Corporate governance is not something that can be achieved by a single Chunhua, three or five books, and a number of executive heads, but requires the reconstruction of traditional forms of connectivity.
The iteration of connection is reflected in the transformation from the text era of paper, pen and seal to digital approval; Dual titles and ranks, to modular flat organizations; Offline language communication, to chat tools and much more. DingTalk, Qiwei, and Feishu cannot be universally applicable, which not only has Ali, Tencent, and Byte have completely different understandings of management, but also all walks of life have different demands.
For the education industry, the problems of the whole process and humanization are more prominent, so DingTalk is suitable. For sales, advertising, property and other industries, micro-enterprises that are connected with WeChat can help practitioners maintain continuous and efficient communication with customers, and even conversion. For those companies looking to package people and things, Feishu is a better choice.
As for those who are eager to get rid of the "Leviathan", WPS, graphite documents, belong to the niche "peach blossom source", and there are always people who are willing to pay for it.
Because of creativity, it will never succumb to the system.