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

Author | Chen Yan

Editor | Gale

Contemporary workers have "three treasures": nails, WeCom and Fei Shu. If you don't have one of the App in the phone, you won't have a sense of ritual at work, and if you have "good" luck, you may have more than one.

With the growing scale of the Internet economy and the increasing demand for online office, the war between collaborative office software is becoming more and more fierce. Mobile office App, led by nail, WeCom and Feishu, as well as Ali, Tencent and byte stand behind them, are engaged in fierce competition for corporate customers.

According to data from research firm QuestMobile, as of November 2022, the number of monthly active users of App collectively reached its peak in nearly two years, with nail monthly active users 250 million, WeCom 110 million and Feishu 9.3 million.

Behind the fierce competition, there is a common commercial problem faced by the three collaborative office software. Up to now, nails, WeCom and Feishu have not yet completed their self-hematopoiesis.

Since last year, nailing, WeCom and Fei Shu have accelerated the pace of "making money." After Fei Shu announced its commercialization, nail and WeCom announced new charging plans one after another.

The competition of collaborative office software came to the second half, and the competition between Nail, WeCom and Feishu on the track and the three Internet bigwigs behind them was still going on silently.

Grab the market, smoke everywhere in the collaborative office market, has now formed a tripartite pattern of nails, WeCom and Feishu, the three applications almost cover most of the domestic mainstream B-end users. Although they play in different ways, there is only one ultimate goal-to be the dominant player in the field of collaborative work.

At the beginning, there were only nails and WeCom on the jianghu, and everyone was waiting to see whether the "To B No.1" of the office track would fall to Ali or Tencent.

In 2015, nail took the lead in the exploration of collaborative office platform for domestic enterprises. At that time, Ali's Chen Hang (no tricks) all in social product "intercourse", as a result, the product did not cause a storm. Then, Chen Hang explored new products, but inadvertently inserted willows and made "nails".

Nail has the characteristics of Ali system, highlighting the team concept of "strong management and efficient implementation", such as Ding, sign-in, conference call and other functions, to solve the management pain points of many enterprises at that time.

At the 2015 Yunqi Conference, Chen Hang demonstrated the function of "calling" everyone in the venue in the same network environment. After the meeting, a start-up was very interested in this function, so it reached a deep cooperation with nail. As China's small and medium-sized enterprises account for a high proportion, and most small and medium-sized enterprises do not have the ability to develop their own enterprise systems, this has become one of the important reasons for the development of nails, and nails also locate the main users as "small and medium-sized enterprises".

Nail open the screen page is not surprising, WeCom was born in the first place, is to nail the standard.

It was also in 2015 that Tencent began to attach importance to the application of Wechat in the work scene, when Tencent executive Huang Tieming was ordered to set up a team in Weixin Group to carry out the research and development of Wechat enterprise version. Huang Tieming said in an interview with the media, "at that time, there was a privately deployed office software called RTX in Tencent, and Ma Huateng asked whether this product could be upgraded to meet the office needs of more users in the mobile era."

So one year after the nailing was launched, in April 2016, WeCom version 1.0 was officially born. As an office software, it is also used for internal communication within the enterprise, including read receipt, one-button dormancy, examination and approval reports and other functions to improve office efficiency.

At that time, Wechat, owned by Tencent, was already a national-level app in the social field, so Tencent used C-end traffic to use WeCom as an extension of Wechat. For example, WeCom got through Wechat's address book, which can achieve the effect of synchronous communication between WeCom and Wechat, fully demonstrating Tencent's "deep pockets" in the social field.

After WeCom's screenshot, the nails and WeCom matched each other and did not give way to each other in grabbing the market.

In order to rapidly increase the number of active users, in addition to small and medium-sized enterprises, nails also focus on the large and stable base of campus users. But WeCom is also unwilling to give up the cake of the campus, trying to grasp both the enterprise and the campus, and has made a lot of efforts to attract campus users, such as launching an educational version and building a home-school group.

According to media reports, a key school in Zhejiang, at first a nail customer, was later "poached" by WeCom, but the nail was not reconciled to it and made great efforts to get the customer back. And this customer, also successively became the nail and WeCom two enterprises benchmark case.

From small and medium-sized enterprises to large enterprises, nails form a product matrix for different customers, whose coverage groups are becoming more and more detailed and extensive, and it seems that all types of customers will be included in the bag. WeCom is also trying to broaden the field, extending from small and medium-sized retail enterprises to large-scale manufacturing industries, and wants to share the dividends brought about by the digital transformation of enterprises.

FAW, Great Wall and other China's top 500 enterprises have become heavy users of nails. Well-known manufacturers such as Zhouming Technology and Jingwang Electronics have applied WeCom in team collaboration and manufacturing scenes.

More and more volume, a good summary of the development of the two.

Fly book break deadlock nail and WeCom are "fight" lively, on the other hand, byte's Fei Shu launched an attack on the market, breaking the situation of the two men fighting for hegemony.

Back then, byte beat internal has used WeCom, nails and other products, but failed to meet its needs, so byte decided to develop their own tool-Flying Book was born.

In 2017, the Flying Book project team, composed of 10 people, officially launched the exploration of office software. At first, Byte Jump only promoted Flying Book internally, and it wasn't until 2019 that Byte decided to open Flying Book to external customers. At this time, Flying Book is still implementing a charging strategy, focusing on large customer markets.

Fei Shu really began to threaten the status of nails and WeCom. It will be announced in 2020 that Fei Shu will be open to all enterprises and organizations in the country free of charge, regardless of scale or duration. Since then, Flying Book has entered a phase of rapid iteration and crazy "facial scanning", held several product launches, updated more than 30 versions a year, and even appeared at Apple's iPad launch.

As a rising star, Fei Shu, in order to gain a foothold in the market as soon as possible, has been strategically misplaced with nails and WeCom from the very beginning. Nail and WeCom pay more attention to small and medium-sized enterprises, Feishu mainly hit the large customer market. The former emphasizes management and connectivity, while the latter highlights user experience and tool attributes.

In winning customers, Feishu also makes every effort to win customers. Xiaopeng car was originally a nail customer, but Feishu said it could meet its customized needs, and then Xiaopeng abandoned nails and switched to flying books. Perfect Diary was once an important client of WeCom, and later switched to Fei Shu. The most famous case is that Byte successfully won Xiaomi's big order after mobilizing a number of executives, frequently going in and out of Xiaomi Science and Technology Park, lobbying Lei Jun, Wang Chuan and more than a dozen people.

Feishu, which attaches importance to algorithm optimization and bet on product power, its application logic naturally adapts to large companies dominated by Internet companies. Feishu is betting that the large-scale collaborative office market will become mainstream in the future, while in the field of arithmetic, bytes have always been the same.

The fight was fierce, and the money was not earned, whether it was nails, WeCom or flying books, for a long time, they all claimed that they did not consider the commercialization of products for a short time, took a long-term route, and should take a long-term view. But if the money burns too much, the funding gap cannot be filled. Looking at the boast can not go on, last year the big three almost tacit understanding one after another announced: charge!

In recent years, nail, WeCom and Feishu have adopted "free use" means to promote user growth in order to seize the market. However, with the advent of the epidemic, things have changed, and the demand for home work has increased dramatically, and this wave of "sky-falling users" has exceeded everyone's expectations.

A more obvious example is that it took nearly three years before the epidemic to achieve more than 100 million users, while at the Tencent conference, which was launched at the end of 2019, the number of registered users reached 300 million by the first quarter of 2022. The number of monthly active users exceeded 100 million.

The extraordinary growth of the number of users, so that the original not ready to charge collaborative office software, to pay a large cost. Take nails, for example, as a result of the sudden increase in downloads during the epidemic, Aliyun continuously expanded its capacity of 100000 servers in a short period of time, which is comparable to the purchase of large enterprises in a year. Videoconferencing, which was vigorously promoted during the epidemic, is sometimes even subsidized by hundreds of millions of dollars a day.

Alibaba said in his financial report that due to the free provision of telecommuting software nails during the epidemic, the innovation plan and other adjusted EBIT profits in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020 resulted in a loss of 3.063 billion yuan.

The same is true of the other two, neither WeCom nor Fei Shu has made a profit. After experiencing the rapid growth of users, how to speed up the realization of commercial realization has become the core proposition of nail, WeCom and Feishu.

Since March last year, on the basis of the free version, Nail has launched professional version (9800 yuan per year), exclusive version (100000 yuan per year) and proprietary version (1 million yuan per year) for small and medium-sized enterprises, large and medium-sized enterprises, and super-large enterprises respectively.

Nail official website screenshot in May of the same year, WeCom adjusted the charging model from "commission" to "head system" to avoid private transactions between buyers and sellers. WeCom also connected to Tencent Conference, Tencent documents and video numbers, in which Tencent Conference charges 30 yuan per month for individual members and launches a commercial version of 4788 yuan per year for corporate users and an enterprise version that requires specific inquiry.

The fee for Flying Book OKR Enterprise Edition is 420 yuan per person per year. But as the relatively smallest of the Big three, Flying Book did not give up its expansion of users when the other two accelerated their commercialization. At present, Flying Book People Standard Edition will be open to small and medium-sized enterprises free of charge, and Flying Book OKR Standard Edition will be provided free of charge for enterprises with less than 100 people to attract some customers to migrate.

Feishu official website screenshot charge, has also become the inevitable choice of the three.

When we meet on a narrow road, it is difficult for the winner to be the winner. How big is the cake in the domestic B-end market? According to data provided by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, by 2021, the number of enterprises in China has reached 48.42 million. According to the 2021 China SaaS Survey report, the payment rate for office software in China is less than 15% in 2021, while that in Europe and the United States has exceeded 70%.

In essence, the domestic To B service has not formed a good payment habit. Many startups take the attitude of "save if you can". When the original free software starts to charge, it will inevitably lead to resistance and think about "is it necessary to use this software? is there any other replacement?" Therefore, in the initial stage of charging, collaborative office software is bound to experience the pain of user loss.

And developing the B-end payment habit is a long-term process. Ye Jun, president of nailing, mentioned in September last year, "now enterprises basically use nails for free, and the amount of real payment may be less than 1%." On the one hand is the cost of continuous burning, and on the other is the uncertain prospect of payment, even if nails, WeCom and Feishu rely on powerful companies, there is not much time left for them.

Nail President Ye Jun in addition, at this stage, collaborative office software has not established a solid moat. Although nailing, WeCom and Feishu each focus on their own positioning, for an enterprise, the main uses of the three apps are common areas such as attendance punching, online meetings and document collaboration, and it is hard to say which software has outstanding advantages.

If collaborative office software goes in the direction of "customization of large enterprises", it is easy to fall into the trap of "becoming a project-based service company". Not to mention the problem of high cost and long cycle, the growth rate and profit margin of the enterprise will be suppressed by the big company of Party A. Collaborative office software must find a balance in this.

At present, the domestic collaborative office market is still in the stage of development, and the application scenarios and service scale are still growing. While grabbing customers, it also skillfully realizes commercialization, which has become the common examination question of nail, WeCom and Fei Shu.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: zinc Finance (ID:xincaijing), author: Chen Yan

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