Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Scenic spots are full, cinemas are full, Spring Festival passenger flow is high, everything is moving from the old model to the new normal, and the collaborative office track has also ushered in a switching period.

In the first three years of the demand blowout, the collaborative office track developed rapidly. With free strategy and spare no effort in marketing, Ali, Tencent, byte collaborative office products have stood firm in the head echelon. According to QuestMobile, the number of monthly active users of nails was 253 million in November 2022, ranking first in the domestic cooperative office track, followed by WeCom's 110 million and Flying Book's 9.3 million.

But "free" can not be long-term, recently, nail, WeCom, Tencent conference, Feishu and other products have been launched into commercial programs. The cry of online course users "do not update Tencent meeting" is the best footnote for the industry to enter the cash-out period.

"first occupy the market, then promote the transformation, and then achieve profit", can this classic paradigm of Internet products be established again?

I'm afraid it's hard. First, the collaborative office To B attribute is strong, the Internet logic of chasing DAU and MAU may not be applicable. Second, the Chinese market is too special, it is difficult to strike a balance between scale and customization, relevant manufacturers are doomed to be unable to simply apply overseas SaaS commercial experience, local collaborative office players must find a localization path.

"Royal Sanjia" is already on the way of exploration-nailing used to have only the basic functions of attendance, chat and examination and approval, but now it has clearly defined the PaaS and ecological strategy, and tried to promote the coordination of the industrial chain. WeCom has opened up Wechat moments, video accounts, Tencent conferences and Tencent documents, opening up a Tencent-style C2B route. Feishu takes "easy to use" and "advanced" as the core output products, trying to introduce some new style to the B side.

The horse racing enclosure has come to an end, and the domestic cooperative office track has entered a new stage. There is not much experience to follow in the new stage, and the challenges are only increasing compared with the previous ones.

At present, Ali, Tencent and byte have all entered the stage of commercialization on the collaborative office track, and the commercialization ideas of the three companies are very significant in terms of commonness and differences.

In terms of commonness, the three companies all implement echelon pricing according to the amount of rights and interests, the degree of customization and whether they are privatized or not.

Nail has a free standard version, a professional version with more rights, a more customized version, and a proprietary version that meets the needs of proprietary private cloud deployment.

Tencent Conference launches free version and member version to C-side, commercial version and enterprise version to B-side.

There are three editions of Flying Book: basic edition, enterprise edition and flagship edition.

The difference is reflected in that there are obvious differences in their commercial selling points and logic due to the different capabilities of the large groups that rely on them.

The key word for nailing is "ecology". After several generations of version updates, the nail clearly defines the development path-- the core functions are done by themselves, and the rest is left to the ecology. Specifically, on the basis of the early "three axes", nails have made efforts in recent years to make up for the shortcomings of audio, video and office suites, while focusing on PaaS, so that the professional applications of industry applications, human and property production, supply and marketing research, as well as related hardware requirements, are handed over to ecological solutions.

What underpins this thinking is the market size of nails. According to the data disclosed at the product launch of Nail 7.0, as of September 30, 2022, the number of nail users exceeded 600 million and the number of enterprise organizations exceeded 23 million. Such market penetration not only attracts ecological partners, but also expands the commercialization path of nails.

The revenue from nailing is mainly divided into two parts: the first is the subscription revenue from different versions of nails and products such as low-code platforms and Teambition, a team collaboration tool; the second is from ecology, where software and hardware partners earn income from nails, from which nails will receive a certain commission. This is similar to Apple's App Store logic, except that this is a B-end "app mall".

Photo Source: the collaborative office layout of Tencent, the official website, consists of WeCom, Tencent Conference and Tencent documents. According to the Q3 earnings call in 2022, company executives mentioned that there is already a paid subscription product that will be packaged with all three. Some companies have started purchasing.

"connection" is the key word for understanding Tencent-style paths. Take WeCom as an example. Wechat has more than 1.2 billion monthly active users, as well as multiple capabilities such as WeChat Pay, moments, video number, and Sosou, which have created a highly localized traffic ecology and transformation path. The connection with Wechat is the biggest difference between WeCom and similar products.

There are two kinds of WeCom accounts. Basic accounts call basic APIs such as address book, authentication and OA application, while interworking accounts can call interworking interfaces related to customer contact, customer base and customer circle of friends. The latter is more expensive and is the core selling point of WeCom, which also makes Tencent's collaborative office path unique.

Photo Source: Ma Huateng, WeCom's official website, mentioned in a previous internal speech that Tencent's advantages are the collaborative work ability of representatives of "three great stars" (WeCom, Tencent Conference and Tencent documents), as well as the closed-loop business of TO C and TO B connected by Mini Program. "these are very good, there are none in the world, why not take advantage of this?" It is pointless to compete with others for things that are not bad for the Tencent family.

Compared with the first two, the byte Flying Book expanded a little later in the domestic market, but also because of this, Fei Shu has more youthful characteristics.

"easy to use" and "advanced" are important labels of Flying Book. "easy to use" is embodied in excellent collaborative office experience. In recent years, Feishu has also tried to extend "easy to use" to the field of organizational manpower in the way of self-developed products. At present, Feishu has launched "Feishu Office", which includes office collaboration products, and "Feishu People", which includes personnel, recruitment, performance, OKR and other products.

Picture source: the "advanced" website of Feishu shows that Feishu sells not only tools, but also methodologies that fit with tools (such as OKR, "Context, not Control" management style). Feishu tries to use the growth of Douyin and the experience of well-known companies in various industries to prove its supporting significance to the industry benchmark and attract more enterprises to pay for "advanced".

However, in the context of nail force to make up for deficiencies, WeCom through Tencent meetings and Tencent documents, the tool experience difference of "Royal Sanjia" is decreasing. How to keep the advantage of "easy to use" and make more industries and enterprises accept the "advanced" methodology is an important challenge for "newcomers" flying books.

Two major traps: burning money and balancing the three paths, in addition to the influence of their respective groups, we will also find that "Royal three" have adopted different attitudes on some key issues, such as nailing to make it clear that they want to be a "platform" and handing differentiated needs to other SaaS manufacturers, while Flying Book is more inclined to polish its products to the best state.

At this stage of the collaborative office track, it is not time to judge "who is right and who is wrong". The domestic market environment is special, and the industry often mentions "small and medium-sized enterprises are not willing to pay, the retention rate is low" and "large enterprises generally require customization", which means that the industry can not simply copy overseas SaaS experience, but also guard against falling into a trap in the process of exploration.

The trap here also has the color of localization, of which the most obvious one is "burning money".

For the collaborative office track, the first three years were a rare period of market expansion. Nails, Tencent conferences, Feishu and other products have used free strategies to seize the market, and the number of users of Tencent conference has exceeded 100 million in just 245 days. But the other side of the free strategy is cost pressure. The logic of "marginal decreasing cost" does not apply to collaborative work. The larger the scale, the greater the cost of technical resources (bandwidth, server, storage) and human costs (R & D, sales, management).

According to Caijing magazine, the monthly cost of nailing audio and video technology resources is about 250 million yuan in November 2022. Of these, more than 70% are network bandwidth costs, and more than 20% are server and storage costs. Over the past three years, the annual network bandwidth cost of nails has been 1.5 billion-2 billion yuan, or more than 2 billion yuan in extreme cases.

The loss increases with the increase of scale, what about income? In the Internet industry, everyone attaches great importance to DAU and MAU data, but users are not customers, and collaborative work can not replicate the commercial logic of To C. Relying on the free pursuit of scale makes income and loss extremely uneven.

The shift of nails is one of the portrayals of the industry trying to get out of the trap. While promoting commercialization, the nail changes the core index from DAU to the number of revenue and active "enterprises", which represents the company's business thinking from To C to To B. Tencent conference online charging model is also widely seen as an inflection point for the industry, shifting from focusing on scale to focusing on income.

But developing the B-end payment habit is a long-term project, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. A "perfect" SaaS model should use standardized products to achieve scale and reduce the marginal cost of expansion. However, the domestic situation is that small and medium-sized enterprises have a high acceptance of standardized products, but the ability to pay is weak. Ye Jun, president of nailing, mentioned in September last year, "now enterprises basically use nails for free, and the number of people who really pay may be less than 1%."

It is the big customers who can really contribute considerable income, but the business and structure of large enterprises are complex, and the demand for customization is more. Manufacturers can easily fall into another big trap: the balance between standardization and customization.

This is a pair of inexplicable contradictions: if you blindly follow the needs of big customers, the enterprise can easily transform into a "project-based" enterprise service company, the growth rate and profit margins will be suppressed; if it is not customized, the company may miss out on big customers.

An oft-cited case is that Fei Shu snatched Xiaopeng from the nail. Before that, Xiaopeng abandoned nails and switched to flying books, one of the main reasons was that nails could not meet Xiaopeng's customized needs. This has become one of the opportunities for nailing to shift to a major customer strategy. On the other hand, serving big customers requires more R & D personnel and larger customer success team, high cost, long cycle and greater profit pressure.

Collaborative office manufacturers must strive to maintain a balance: to rely on large customers to generate revenue, while ensuring that the development model is sustainable.

In order to shift to the key customer strategy, nailing enhances the customized service capacity, but tries to control the size of personnel and undertake customized needs with platform and ecology. Feishu has continued to expand its major customers in recent years, and there has been a marked increase in the number of well-known enterprises on the "customer Logo wall", but it is accompanied by a personnel scale higher than that of nails and WeCom.

The same problem: profit optimism, everyone has waded out of their own path. Platform, ecology, connectivity, C2B, "advanced", these logics may lead to a local and sustainable collaborative office growth path. But what is worrying is that no matter which plan, there is still a long way to go from the common other side, "profit".

Ye Jun told Caijing in November last year that the nails are still in the "investment period" and hope to break even soon. At the 2022 Q3 earnings call, Tencent executives mentioned that the enterprise services business "will take longer to see the real revenue contribution". According to the interface report, as the domestic business can not be profitable in a short period of time, the focus of Flying Book's business will shift to overseas markets.

How to make a profit after horse racing and enclosure? Even in overseas markets where the ToB market is more mature, the continued growth and profitability of collaborative office products is not a simple problem.

Take the most frequently mentioned Slack and Zoom as an example, the former was once the darling of Silicon Valley, but did not solve the loss problem until it was acquired by Salesforce, while facing competitive pressure from Microsoft Teams. Zoom was highly sought after and profitable during the epidemic, but is under pressure from slowing demand for videoconferencing in the post-epidemic era. How to retain customers and open up new business is the biggest challenge for Zoom right now.

For Ali, Tencent and byte, collaborative office products are important chess pieces in the industrial digital era. Ali is trying to turn nails into a super portal for B-end, Tencent is trying to get through the C2B logic, and the future of the group's business (such as the commercialization of Wechat, advertising business, etc.) is closely related to the success of WeCom. Byte jump also needs to find a strong growth engine in addition to Douyin, and the B-end market should not be missed.

As far as the current situation is concerned, the three big companies will still be patient with the collaborative office track. But today's Internet industry is no longer the state it used to be able to pay for imagination. In RobinLi's words, it is OK to say "loss is due to rapid growth" in the short term, but not in the long run.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:deep-echo.

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