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On March 26, Feishu CEO Xie Xin issued an all-staff letter, saying that Feishu would streamline the size of the team and provide compensation plans and job transfer opportunities for affected students.
After Liang Rubo named Feishu's ROI as not cost-effective, Feishu finally took a concrete step in the "lean investment" of the enterprise service business. Judging from some well-known operational data, there is nothing unexpected about Feishu's layoffs.
For a long time, Feishu has served far fewer users than its competitors with a number of employees far exceeding its competitors. Ye Jun of DingTalk and Zhang Qingyuan of Jinshan Office have both asked the same question, what are so many people doing in Feishu?
At that time, it was rumored that the total number of employees in Feishu exceeded 8,000. The latest information obtained by the industry media some time ago corrected this data, but the total number of employees in Feishu at its peak still exceeded 6,000, and the scale of more than 5,000 people was still more than the total number of employees in DingTalk, WeCom, Tencent Meeting, and Tencent Docs. A natural question is, why is Feishu so bloated?
01 It's not too late to set the table, it's too late to serve
When reviewing the development process of Feishu, there is an unavoidable topic, that is, Feishu was established too late.
From the experience of the Internet industry, small differences in starting time often require a huge and asymmetrical effort to reverse them. Under this premise, a common view is that Feishu's bloated is due to the fact that Feishu needs to catch up with the first-mover advantage of DingTalk and Qiwei through the way of "vigorously producing miracles".
However, in the view of "New Position", although this assertion is correct, it cannot fully explain Feishu's current predicament.
First of all, it should be pointed out that the track of office software is fundamentally different from the traditional Internet in nature. The traditional Internet industry, such as social networking, instant messaging, short video and other software, has outstanding network effects. Compared to other companies that rely on brick-and-mortar businesses, the Internet giants have achieved enviable success over the past decade or two, and network effects are the foundation of their business models.
After all, apart from the Internet, you would be hard-pressed to find any other industry with such ideal business characteristics: each new user will further increase the attractiveness of the product, and at the same time, the marginal cost of serving the new user will be infinitely reduced. In other words, "network effects" are the core reason why the Internet's first-mover advantage is so critical.
But when we use this standard to set office software, we will find that this industry does not meet the characteristics of "network effect". Since it is still based on computer programs, the marginal cost of office software will still decline with the growth of users, but no company will follow it purely because other companies use a certain office software. Users may recommend bringing in new ones, but this is a traditional word-of-mouth spread, not a network effect as mentioned above.
Within Bytes, Feishu and Douyin were established at the same time, both in 2016.
For office software, this time may not be too early, because DingTalk was established in 2014, but it may not be too late, because Qiwei was also launched in 2016. Even if you go back to 2016, compared to Douyin, time may be more on Feishu's side. You must know that Kuaishou was founded in 2011 and fully switched to short video two years later, and short video is still an industry with significant network effects.
In hindsight, Feishu's bigger problem may be that "all in one" strategy, or the way to advance it. The all-in-one concept determines Feishu's route of focusing on ISV and self-development. Under this route, Feishu has to do all the relevant functions that can be thought of, and they have to do it themselves.
Ye Jun didn't understand why it was normal for Feishu to need so many people, because a lot of DingTalk's work was done by service providers, and the two were two completely different models. This has greatly slowed down the pace of Feishu's subsequent products.
For example, the internal project of DingTalk Ali was established in May 2014, and by December 1 of that year, DingTalk launched the 0.1.0 beta version, and launched the 1.0 version in mid-December. In contrast, Feishu established the project in 2016, and Byte did not start to fully use Feishu until the end of 2017, and the internal testing of domestic enterprises will not be until 2018, and the full free opening to the public will not be until 2020.
Therefore, a reasonable summary of Feishu's fate is that it is not too late to set the table, but it is indeed too late to actually serve the food. Today, it is hard for you to imagine that a product that has been established in 2016 will not actually end the "internal test" until 2020. Even if it weren't for the pandemic, this time would have been pushed even later.
02 People who are stumped by Feishu
Among the employees who were optimized, some people were unexpected, especially those who were leveraged.
When they are suddenly notified that they are leaving, it will take them a long time to recover, and some people may even be unable to recover later because their cash flow card is too dead. But there is another group of people, who are more calm, after all, the compensation they can get from the company is quite considerable.
Xie Xin sent an all-staff letter announcing the layoffs on March 26, and Jiang Yi was interviewed that afternoon and told that he was on the list of layoffs. According to Jiang Yi, he actually expected Feishu to come to this point, and even felt that the day when he was really fired came a little late.
Not only Jiang Yi, nor just Feishu's internal employees, Feishu's expectation of streamlining and reducing costs has long been in the consensus of many people. Liang Rubo said at last year's annual meeting that he would focus on the two main businesses of "information platform" and "e-commerce", and criticized Feishu and Volcano Engine by name for not cost-effective, either Feishu can quickly improve its profitability or expand its user scale, or it will have to prepare for "organizational adjustment".
However, in addition to these employees who were forced to leave, there was another person who was stumped by Feishu: CEO Xie Xin.
As mentioned above, Feishu and Douyin were established at the same time, which was the most promising project for Byte at the time. The management has also said that Byte's investment in Feishu is no less than that of Douyin and TikTok.
But today, Feishu's results are clearly very different from Douyin and TikToK. The difference in business performance is also reflected in the career path of the business leader.
A positive example is Han Shangyou, who was first in charge of Douyin live broadcast in 2019, and after the start of Douyin e-commerce was frustrated in the field of short video, it was precisely with live streaming that he successfully broke through. After this battle, Han Sang-woo concurrently served as the head of Douyin Life Service and Douyin Open Platform in 2021, and then the actual head of Douyin in 2022. Such a promotion speed can be called a rocket, and Han Shangyou, who was born in the 90s, is also regarded as the "prince" of bytes.
There are positive examples, and naturally there are negative teaching materials, such as Feishu CEO Xie Xin.
In terms of seniority, except for Zhang Yiming, no one has more weight than him. Although he joined Byte in 2014, he is not the founder. But before joining Byte, he was the CTO of the travel website Cool News. Yes, it's the cool news where Zhang Yiming once worked.
Here is a fact that best reflects Xie Xin's status in bytes.
When Feishu was established, it was part of the Byte Efficiency Engineering (EE) business line, which in turn was part of the Enterprise Services (ES) division. Who is the person in charge of EE at this time? Liang Rubo, who still needs to report to Xie Xin at that time. Later, Liang Rubo "fled" from the Feishu and EE business lines and switched to take charge of the group's human resources and management. At the beginning of 2021, Zhang Yiming "retired" from the front line, and Liang Rubo, as a "more suitable manager" in his mouth, took over the position of CEO of ByteDance.
If we take this history into account, we may be able to better understand Xie Xin's feelings when he faced Liang Rubo's criticism of Feishu by name.
Of course, in any ladder organization, it is possible for your subordinates at a certain period of time to become your leader. Narrow-minded parties may not be able to accept such a gap and become jealous as a result. Xie Xin is already one of the top professional managers in China, and the pattern is certainly not like this. But the objective reality is that he has been spinning around Feishu in the past few years, and to some extent, he has indeed been stumped by Feishu.
03 Write at the end
Feishu's slogan is "Advanced team, use Feishu first".
This is a fairly confident product positioning, and as many industry observers have pointed out, it reveals a strong educational flavor. But basically no customer likes to be educated, and even if you are right, they will not listen to Byte's methodology around OKR, which is the dilemma that Feishu faces in the industry.
Although they are both office software, Feishu and Qiwei DingTalk have completely different backgrounds. The latter two are teaching people to use digital tools, while Feishu is more like preaching advanced management ideas, and it is of course more difficult to get people to accept an idea than to teach people to use a tool. The only good thing is that once the subject chooses to "convert", it is unlikely that others will try to persuade him to "quit", and he may become the next "priest".
This is also the reason why the number of users is far lower than that of competitors, but the popularity of "Feishu is easy to use" reviews is far ahead of competitors.
Objectively speaking, Byte should be the most patient with Feishu since the establishment of this company. However, in the byte system, even if Zhang Yiming and Liang Rubo have been mentally prepared before, the current results prove that this matter may still be a bit too long-term.