Original title: Migrant workers abandon the office, Microsoft loses " Office 」
Microsoft growing up with a generation Office , is becoming history.
In October this year, Microsoft announced that it would Office A "brand remodeling" was carried out, and the new brand was named Microsoft 365, which still included office software such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, but Office This word will be swept into the old paper heap.
Since its birth in the 1990s, Office It has always been the 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, Office The three pieces even represent all the needs in the office. Later similar software, whether WPS or Google Docs, has adopted similar functional design.
In recent years, with the transformation of office software towards SaaS (Software as a Service), Microsoft also Office Innovated, not only selling software, but also selling services, launched Office 365 subscription service makes it closer to the cloud.
「 Office The way people work is changing. Slack and other office platforms that focus on "collaboration" have risen, changing the market pattern of office software.
Until the post epidemic era, the speed of change was further accelerated, and people were no longer confined to the "office", which forced Microsoft to make a bit more profound changes.
Microsoft will Office Brand changes to Microsoft 365 | Microsoft
Global productivity tools
For most people, especially the post-90s generation, Office Maybe it was the first "productivity software" they used after they came into contact with computers, and it was also the only choice on the market at that time—— It is even a subject of the National Computer Rank Examination 。
but Office Its birth is not as dramatic as that of many technology giants, such as Apple and Facebook.
In the 1980s, when Microsoft was founded, Its first software is a spreadsheet software called Multiplan 。 Later, Microsoft developed Multi Tool Word, which is the predecessor of Excel and Word 。 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.
It is Windows that has really changed the pattern. With the advent of Windows operating system, especially the success of Windows 3.0 and Windows 95 in the 1990s, Microsoft has established its dominant position in the field of operating system.
Office Take the opportunity to take off.
In 1990, Microsoft first packaged Word 1.1, Excel 2.0 and PowerPoint 2.0 together to form Office Office suite. Later, in the process of Windows sweeping the world and rapidly popularizing, Office It has quickly become the mainstream choice.
Although personal computers are consumer goods and users have the right to make independent decisions, they are still largely influenced by the inertia of organizations and society. From the 1990s to the 2000s, generations of students learned Office After entering the workplace, the company uses Office This inertia has continued and has not completely subsided until today.
For Microsoft, this seems to be the best business model: relying on enterprise procurement, while bringing stable cash flow and profits, while building user habits.
Until the late 2000s, the tide of the Web 2.0 revolution came, introducing new variables to the office software market Office It has brought no small impact.
Office Software that revolves around office logic 。 For example, in Word, the user operates on a "virtual paper". Because in the office, when you edit text on the computer, the final destination is usually printing, so most of the functions of Word are to adjust the layout of text on "paper".
WordPress makes it easy for users to quickly build websites and publish content | iTheme
However, in the era of Web 2.0, the main publishing carrier is no longer "paper", but "web page" 。 When users need to publish text to the web page, they no longer need those complex typesetting functions, but only need to simply annotate 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, web pages themselves have begun to become interactive. Twitter and Facebook only use a simple text box to give users the ability to "write and publish text". The birth of Google Docs is a "simplified version" Office , moved to the website. Users do not need to buy or install software. They can start editing text, processing tables and making slides as long as they enter the web page.
The era of SaaS has begun.
More and more people are starting to use those web-based and cloud based software. Because their needs are very mild, the Web side is obviously simpler and more flexible.
Today, Google's online office suite G Suite has more than 2 billion users 。 Moreover, Google has already set its sights on the classroom and started to cultivate its "next generation of users". Through the low-cost Chromebook, Google has put its own hardware into the classrooms of primary and secondary schools. In 2017, Google's software and hardware accounted for 60% of the American primary and secondary education market.
This means that the next generation of workers will no longer use Office Grow up.
Microsoft's "B-end" fulcrum
In the past decade, SaaS has become popular, Office It no longer has the dominance of the past, but Microsoft has never waited to be killed.
Microsoft's bottom card is still at the "B end". With the "B end" as the fulcrum, Microsoft successfully countered the rise of many competitors and maintained its kingship in the field of office software.
One of the most famous battles is the "blocking" of Slack.
In 2014, Slack was launched, focusing on chat and communication functions in office scenarios. The team has designed a unique information organization framework to increase communication efficiency, and the entire platform is very open, which can expand various functions through third-party interfaces, such as tracking project progress and sharing files with online disks. Various product details are also polished very carefully.
In just one year, Slack's number of users has naturally grown to 1.7 million, becoming a unicorn in the field of office software.
Compared with all the office software in the past, Slack's biggest feature is that it is a typical "C-end software". In the early days, there was no sales team. It was completely spread and grown by word of mouth, just like most SaaS office software.
This kind of communication is often "bottom-up" within the team. A small number of grass-roots employees started to use it first, found it useful, and transmitted it to team leaders, bosses, and then to the whole company.
At that time, many people believed that the C-end model of "employees use it spontaneously and then promote it to the whole company" would defeat the B-end model of "selling it to the boss and then pushing it to employees".
In 2015, Microsoft proposed a sky high bid for Slack, which was three times the valuation premium of Slack at that time, but was still rejected by Slack. According to legend, At that time, Bill Gates personally objected to the acquisition, believing that Microsoft needs to build a similar platform by itself, and cannot rely on acquisition 。
After a year of hard work, Microsoft built its own Slack.
Microsoft's Teams have resisted attacks from Slack and Zoom | Microsoft
In 2016, Team was launched. It has many similarities with Slack in core functions, but it is obviously a product closer to the B-end idea. Team focuses on safety, stability, and Office Bundle sales.
With a strong sales and service team, Microsoft Office Old customers launched a fierce sales offensive to provide customized service solutions, even at a loss, to help customers bear the cost of platform migration. The cost of this migration can sometimes reach millions of dollars.
But Microsoft finally did, In 2019, when Slack was listed with the result of 10 million daily live, Microsoft announced in a high profile that the number of users of Team Daily Live had exceeded 13 million, giving Slack a slap in the face And also declared the victory of this "resistance war".
After that, Slack protested to the European Commission, saying that Microsoft Office Bundled sales are suspected of unfair competition, but have not achieved any substantive results.
With the B end as the fulcrum, Team also defeated another opponent, Zoom.
In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 epidemic began to spread in the United States. All companies and schools took measures to work remotely and attend classes. Within a few weeks, with its excellent product design, Zoom quickly occupied the top of the App Store ranking list and became the choice of most C-end users.
In April, when Zoom was busy repairing a privacy bug, Microsoft mobilized 50 employees and began to attack 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 quickly develop new functions for classroom scenarios, such as "raising hands to speak", in response to the needs of teachers, which won the recognition of a large number of teachers.
In just one month, Microsoft dampened the momentum of Zoom and ensured that Team would not be out of the competition.
In the past 30 years, Microsoft has proven its ability to do to B business again and again, from Windows to Office , and then to Azure Cloud Services, it is through the B end as a fulcrum to provide secure, stable and customizable services that Microsoft has become one of the most evergreen companies in Silicon Valley.
By winning the "office", Microsoft has made today's achievements, but the "office" is not the future.
The era without "office"
stay Office In the course of its development, Microsoft has not failed to make an attempt to "face individuals".
such as Office 365 was originally a reform for individual users. From the buyout system to the subscription system, Microsoft lowered the price of its products. Users can use the full set of latest Office Products, as well as cross device cloud synchronization.
However, both the willingness to pay and the stability of individual users are far less than those of enterprises, and they cannot bring rich income. A series of start-ups, including Slack and Zoom, basically follow the rule of "the closer to the C end, the farther away from the B end, the harder it is to make money".
Microsoft 365 Software Concept Diagram in Windows 11 | Microsoft
Grasping the B-end can grasp the current market and revenue; But only by grasping the C end can we grasp the needs of future users and grasp the development direction.
Just announced Office The day before the rebranding, Microsoft attended the Meta Connect conference and announced that the two companies would cooperate in the VR field Office , Teams, and even Xbox cloud games are brought to Meta's Quest VR platform.
"We are bringing Team's immersive conference experience to the Meta Quest, providing users with a new way to connect with each other. Later, we will also bring Windows 365 to the Quest, so that users can get personalized Windows experience in a new way." Microsoft CEO Nadra said at the press conference.
obviously, Meta Quest is not a "productivity device", Metauniverse It is not "office space", but Microsoft still chooses them as its next destination.
Because for Microsoft, the key problem It doesn't depend on where the future office is, but on where people are.
The era of bundling Windows to sell software is fading away. When the boundary between work and life is gradually blurred, Microsoft must focus more on creating services themselves. In the past few years, Microsoft has spent a lot of time optimizing Office The experience of the suite on Mac and iPad is also to achieve this goal.
Of course, for most users, changes will not come so quickly. For a long time to come, we will still use Word and Excel to do PPT.
At the keynote speech, Nadella explained the long-term goal of the new brand Microsoft 365: "to provide a complete, cloud first experience, help users save time, save costs, reduce complexity, and provide more innovation, flexibility, and flexibility."
In short, Microsoft needs to liberate services from the past operating system and software into a mobile and more flexible thing.
It's also giving up Office The meaning of the old brand is that everything in the future is no longer limited to the office.
