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The key question is not where the office is, but where the "people" are.

Microsoft Office, which grew up with a generation, is becoming history.

In October this year, Microsoft announced that it would carry out a "brand rebranding" of Office. The new brand was named Microsoft 365, which still includes office software such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but the word Office will be swept into the old paper pile.

Since its birth in the 1990s, Office has been the most core and mainstream software in the office scene. It can be said that as long as you work with a computer, you can't avoid it. For many people, the three Office pieces even represent all the needs in the office. Later similar software, whether WPS or Google Docs, have adopted a similar functional design.

In recent years, with office software in the direction of SaaS (Software as a Service), Microsoft has also revolutionized Office, no longer just selling software, but also starting to sell services, and launched Office 365 subscription service to make it closer to the cloud.

The "Office" is changing, and so is the way people work. The rise of Slack and other office platforms that pay attention to "collaboration" has changed the market pattern of office software.

Until the post-epidemic era, the pace of change accelerated further, and the place where people worked was no longer limited to the "office", which forced Microsoft to make a little more profound change.

Microsoft transformed the Office brand into Microsoft 365.Microsoft 01, the worldwide productivity tool for most people, especially 90 years later, said that Office was probably the first "productivity software" they used after they came into contact with computers, and it was almost the only choice on the market at that time-it was even a subject of the National computer Rank examination.

But the birth of Office is not as dramatic as many tech giants such as Apple and Facebook.

In the 1980s, when Microsoft was founded, its first software was a spreadsheet software called Multiplan. Microsoft later developed Multi-Tool Word, which are the forerunners of Excel and Word. At that time, Word and Excel were not the only office software on the market. At that time, the market was small, but there were many competitors, including software produced by large companies such as IBM Works.

What really changes the landscape is Windows. With the advent of Windows operating system, especially in the 1990s, and the success of Windows 3.0 and Windows 95, Microsoft has established its dominant position in the field of operating system.

Office also took off.

In 1990, Microsoft first packaged Word 1.1, Excel 2.0 and PowerPoint 2.0 together to form the Office office suite. After that, in the process of Windows sweeping the world and rapidly popularizing, Office has quickly become the mainstream choice.

Although the personal computer is a consumer product and users have the right to make their own decisions, it is still largely affected by the inertia of the organization and society. From the 1990s to the 2000s, generation after generation of students studied Office at school. After entering the workplace, the company used Office. This inertia has continued and has not completely subsided to this day.

For Microsoft, this seems to be the best business model: relying on corporate procurement to generate solid cash flow and profits while building user habits.

Until the late 2000s, the spring tide of the Web 2.0 revolution came, which introduced new variables to the office software market, and also brought a great impact to Office.

Office is software that revolves around office logic. For example, on Word, what the user manipulates is a "virtual piece of paper". Because in the office, when you edit text on a computer, the final destination is usually printing, so most of the functions of Word are to adjust the typesetting of text on "paper".

Wordpress makes it easy for users to quickly build sites and publish content | iTheme, but in the era of Web 2.0, the main publishing carrier is no longer "paper", but "web pages". When a user needs to post text to a web page, he no longer needs those complex typesetting functions, but only needs to simply mark the text and focus on the content itself. In the process, a "web publishing standard" similar to Markdown was born.

Moreover, in the era of Web 2.0, the web itself began to become interactive. Twitter and Facebook give users the ability to "write and publish text" with a simple text box. The birth of Google Docs, but also a "simplified version" of Office, moved to the web page. Users do not need to buy or install software, as long as they go to the web page, they can start editing text, processing tables, and making slides.

This is where the era of SaaS begins.

More and more people are starting to use Web-based, cloud-based software. Because their needs are inherently mild, the Web side is obviously simpler and more flexible.

Today, Google's online office suite, G Suite, has more than 2 billion users. And Google has already set its sights on the classroom, starting to train its own "next generation of users." Through cheap Chromebook, Google has rolled out its hardware into primary and secondary school classrooms. In 2017, Google hardware and software accounted for 60% of the primary and secondary education market in the United States.

This means that the next generation of workers will no longer grow up with Office.

02. Microsoft's "B-side" fulcrum over the past decade, SaaS has become very popular. Office is no longer as dominant as it used to be, but Microsoft has never sat idly by.

Microsoft's card is still on the "B side". With the "B-end" as the fulcrum, Microsoft has successfully reversed the rise of many competitors and maintained its position as the king in the field of office software.

One of the most famous wars is the "blocking" of Slack.

In 2014, Slack was launched, focusing on the chat communication function of the office scene. The team designed a unique information organization framework to increase the efficiency of communication, and the whole platform is very open, and various functions can be extended through third-party interfaces, such as tracking project progress and sharing files with a network disk. All kinds of product details are also polished very finely.

In just one year, the number of Slack users has naturally grown to 1.7 million, making it a unicorn in the office software field.

Compared with all the office software in the past, the biggest feature of Slack is that it is a typical "C-end software". In the early days, it did not even have a sales team, and it relied entirely on word of mouth to spread and grow-just like most SaaS office software.

This kind of communication is often "bottom-up" within the team. It is a small number of grass-roots employees who start to use it first, find it easy to use, and transmit it to team leaders, bosses, and then to the whole company.

At that time, many people thought that the C-side model, which was used by employees spontaneously and then extended to the whole company, would beat the B-side model of "selling to the boss and then pushing it to the employees."

In 2015, Microsoft made a sky-high offer for Slack, a valuation premium of three times that of Slack at the time, but it was still rejected by Slack. It is rumored that at that time, Bill Gates personally opposed the acquisition, believing that Microsoft needed to build a similar platform on its own, not by acquisition.

After a year of hard work, Microsoft created its own Slack.

Microsoft's Teams resists the attacks of Slack and Zoom. Microsoft launched Teams in 2016. It has many similarities with Slack in core functions, but it is obviously a product closer to B-end ideas. Teams focuses on security, stability, and bundled sales with Office.

Relying on a strong sales and service team, Microsoft launched a fierce sales offensive to those old Office customers, providing customized service solutions, and even at a loss to help customers bear the cost of platform migration. The cost of this transfer can sometimes be as high as millions of dollars.

But Microsoft finally did, and when Slack went public with 1000 million daily active users in 2019, Microsoft announced that the number of daily active users of Teams had exceeded 13 million, giving Slack a slap in the face and declaring the victory of the "blocking war."

Afterwards, Slack protested to the European Commission, saying that Microsoft bundled Teams and Office on suspicion of unfair competition, but did not achieve any substantive results.

With the B end as the fulcrum, Teams also defeated another rival, Zoom.

In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 epidemic began to spread in the United States, and various companies and schools took measures to telecommute and attend classes. Within a few weeks, with its excellent product design, Zoom quickly occupied the top spot in the app store and became the choice of most C-end users.

In April, while Zoom was busy fixing a private bug, Microsoft mobilized 50 employees and launched an offensive against teachers in the New York education system to help them quickly switch from Zoom to Microsoft Teams. At the same time, Microsoft's engineer team worked closely with the technical support team to meet the needs of teachers and quickly developed new features such as "raise your hand to speak" for the classroom scene, which won the recognition of a large number of teachers.

In just a month, Microsoft dampened the momentum of Zoom and ensured that Teams would not be knocked out of the competition.

Over the past 30 years, Microsoft has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to do to B business, from Windows to Office to Azure cloud services. It is through the B fulcrum that Microsoft has become one of the most evergreen companies in Silicon Valley by providing secure, stable and customizable services.

Microsoft achieved what it is today by taking down the "office", but the "office" is not the future.

03, the era without "office" in the course of the development of Office, Microsoft has not made an attempt to "face the individual".

Office 365, for example, was originally a reform aimed at individual users. By switching from buyout to subscription, Microsoft lowered the price of its products, allowing users to pay a relatively small monthly and annual fee to use the latest set of Office products and cloud synchronization across devices.

However, whether individual users are willing to pay, or from the stability, are far less than enterprises, can not bring rich income. A series of startups, including Slack and Zoom, basically follow the rule that "the closer you are to C and away from B, the harder it is to make money."

Windows 11 system Microsoft 365 software concept map | Microsoft can grasp the current market and revenue if it grasps the B side, but only by grasping the C side can it grasp the needs of future users and grasp the direction of development.

The day before the Office rebranding announcement, Microsoft attended the Meta Connect conference and announced that the two companies would work together in VR to bring Office, Teams, and even Xbox cloud games to Meta's Quest VR platform.

"We are bringing Teams's immersive conferencing experience to Meta Quest, providing users with a new way to connect to each other. After that, we will also bring Windows 365 to Quest, where users can get a personalized Windows experience in a whole new way. "Microsoft CEO Nadella said at the press conference.

Obviously, Meta Quest is not a "productivity device" and meta-universe is not an "office space", but Microsoft still chooses them as its next destination.

Because for Microsoft, the crux of the problem is not where the future office is, but where the people are.

With Windows bundling, the days when you can sell software with corporate purchases are long gone, and as the boundaries between work and life blur, Microsoft must focus more on building the service itself. Over the past few years, Microsoft has spent a lot of time optimizing the Office suite's experience on Mac and iPad to achieve this goal.

Of course, for most users, change won't come that fast. We will still use Word, Excel and PPT for a long time in the future.

In his keynote speech, Nadella explained the long-term goal of the new brand Microsoft 365: "to provide a complete, cloud-first experience that helps users save time, cost, complexity, and provide more innovation, flexibility and flexibility. "

To put it simply, Microsoft wants to liberate the service from the past operating system and software into a mobile, more flexible thing.

This is also the point of abandoning the old Office brand: the future is no longer limited to the office.

This article is from the official account of Wechat: geek Park (ID:geekpark), author: Jesse, Editor: Jingyu

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