domeet webmaster

“Our mission is to make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive. (Our mission is to make people’s work easier and more Happy and more efficient) “

—— From the title page of the Slack prospectus

“Our mission is to make video communications frictionless. (Our mission is to make video communication smoother) ”

—— From the title page of the Zoom Prospectus

Most of my friends should have heard of Zoom and even users. This epidemic made the words “remote work and video conferencing” more household names. We may be more unfamiliar with Slack, and we can appreciate one or two from the above two paragraphs: Zoom’s goal is very direct, making “video communication” accessible , through these four words we can quickly Think of various meeting situations at work and the need for remote communication. Slack ’s goals are more ambiguous. In modern society, we seem to be “working” all the time, and tools that help us improve our work efficiency are constantly emerging. How to understand another new product that makes work both “ “Simple and efficient”, and finally make us “happy”?

First, before starting the discussion below, we need to understand one thing. “Video conferencing” and “online training” are just a small part of daily work. Yes, the latter contains the former . Because of this epidemic, companies have to use conference tools for remote communication for a while, but if they really find the value brought by collaboration tools in their daily work, they will likely continue to use them.

Next, according to public information, I ’m going to zoom this Zoom and SlaThe history and development milestones of ck are summarized as follows:

Comparing the development of the two companies carefully, you will find that compared with Zoom, Slack lacks a heavyweight partner—Microsoft in its cooperation with third-party software companies. When an emerging company loses the opportunity to cooperate with the giants in the field, the probability is that the giant feels threatened, and the situation is so severe that he is going to go to sea in person.

Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, and the first press conference after taking office announced the creation of the first version of Office for iPad for Apple iPad. Think of it as the “biggest change” Microsoft has made in recent years. He believes that “SaaS manufacturers (especially the traditional giants) should do everything possible to increase the reachable market = “Remarks”> (addressable market) , covering all terminals, and should not be confined to its own ecosystem and terminals, which has not been easy for Microsoft. ”

In 2016, Microsoft launched the Teams project to directly benchmark Slack. In addition to the independent free version of the subscription method, the other two premium versions were integrated into the Office 365 suite, and even the free version has more features than Slack for user experience. It can be seen the degree of importance. After adhering to its long-term investment and promotion strategy for cloud services, Microsoft achieved milestone results in April last year, with a market value exceeding 1 trillion.

(Microsoft has never taken it lightly in collaborative work)

Only from the stock price point of view, Slack seems to be severely suppressed by Microsoft after listing and has fallen below the issue price. Zoom and Microsoft may be one of the two most successful software companies in 2019. Regain the courage of the year. But it’s too early to tell if Slack or Zoom is more successful. I’m interested in:

• What caused Microsoft to list Slack as its main competitor to Office in its 2016 annual report to the SEC?

  
  

• Why did Microsoft close Skype’s London headquarters in the same year and announce the suspension of the most popular version of Skype 7.0 in 2018?
  

  Back to the root, what value does Slack, Zoom and Microsoft Teams create for the enterprise?

  Collaboration is the foundation for agile enterprises

  All companies will become more and more agile in the future This has nothing to do with the size of the enterprise.

  To reach consumers more accurately today, companies must shorten their time, space, and even geographic distance from consumers. Secondly, in order to respond more quickly to consumer needs, companies must be more flexible in arranging R & D, production, and delivery. The birth of the Internet and the rapid penetration of the mobile Internet have allowed companies to achieve the former well, but the latter involves communication between various departments within the enterprise, front-office collaboration, and cooperation with external partners. This is an increasingly complex and delicate the process of.

  I just entered the VC industry in 2016. The first roadshow I attended was Tencent Crowdspace in Huilongguan. At the beginning of the event, I invited a person to do early venture capital in Silicon Valley.Of Chinese people do the sharing, the theme is about the shape of future enterprises and the change of labor relations. He believes that the operation of future enterprises should use the task (task) to connect and drive all resources such as people, equipment, and software applications. As a kind of resource, people only need to complete tasks, and do not necessarily need to maintain a constant employment relationship with the enterprise. The same is true of the equipment, and it was later realized that this was the “sharing economy” of the fire soon.

  What impressed me the most was that he believes that eventually this flexible relationship will make a huge change in the organizational structure of the enterprise.

  Following this sentence, if the human resource is dismantled to the finest level, it is “knowledge, skills, and time”. If it is dismantled from the entire resource level, it is “data, IT, and time”. How an enterprise efficiently completes each task is essentially how to efficiently arrange and combine the limited three points in the resources to obtain the optimal solution.

  This sentence in the Slack prospectus suddenly made me understand why it made Microsoft so “friendly” because it tried to use new technologies to create new ways of communication and collaboration between resources, helping companies find the optimal solution. Be Agile:

  Slack is a new layer of the business technology stack that brings together people, applications, and data (Slack is a new layer of business technology stack , Bringing people, apps and data back together) .

  So from the beginning, Slack was going to break the way companies started tasks and organized resources in the past—mail, a tool born in the 1970s. The biggest problem with emails is “splitting”, which is reflected in:

  • The really useful information is either distributed in multiple folders or hidden in the mail string, making query extremely difficult;

    
    

  • When newly added to a project, in addition to being forwarded a series of headless and tailless emails, we are unable to quickly grasp the latest progress of the project and relevant important information;

    
    

  • Finally, emails do not support integration with external software, so teams cannot directly share information and data from external software.
    

    The inconvenience of email points directly to a fundamental problem: In modern work, we can no longer rely on email to integrate all the resources we need, and to analyze and collaborate effectively.

    So, the core of Slack has made two changes. (Encourage everyone to download and experience for yourself) :

    • Replace “Inbox with” channel (channel) “( inbox) ”: integrate, classify, and save data, conversations, files, and applications related to each task through the channel, so that any new and old members can retrieve and call at any time;

      
      

    • Open and integrated external software and applications: Integrate more than 1,500 external applications through Slack App Directory, and let 500,000 registered developers make more than 450,000 custom programs on their development platform.
      

      (The picture above shows the Slack personal interface, and the picture below shows the App Directory category display)

      To share a real case, Splunk is a US listed company that provides intelligent operation and maintenance of enterprise IT resources through big data and machine learning. It currently has a market value of about 25 billion US dollars. Slack provides collaboration services to the company’s more than 4,000 employees, from sales, HR, to engineering and strategy. Splunk takes full advantage of the “Channel” function in various aspects, such as:

      • Learning and growth department (Learning & development) has established a channel for all their training courses, and participants can communicate in it at any time. New Joined students can also easily retrieve previous questions and answers. When they ask new questions, the old students will help answer them together, and everyone will benefit from it;

        
        

      • Global sales technical team (Global sales engineering) has hundreds of members, and they give presentations to customers around the world every day, for this purpose They created a channel called #se, which not only became a constantly updated knowledge base. When one of the members asked questions during the presentation, the other members (not only Is the sales technology department) Can help him in time, but also remind everyone not to interfere with the operation of the demo server at this moment;

        
        

      • At the same time, the sales technical team also independently developed a robot (bot) plugin called Capture, which is connected to Splunk’s CRM system And an internally developed analysis tool, sales managers only need to enter simple instructions to open the sales kanban at any time, query important sales leads and urge the team to follow up, avoiding repeated login to different systems to retrieve the required data, work efficiency Greatly improve.
        

        Splunk believes that the real value of Slack is to start changing the company’s overall communication culture . Similarly, Oracle has been using Slack since 2017, and now more than 100,000 employees throughout the company collaborate and communicate via Slack. The daily peak number of people exceeds 70,000. The platform is connected to more than 1,100 external applications, and the average daily upload file exceeds 18,000 . Recently, it was reported that IBM and Slack signed a contract. Nearly 350,000 employees across IBM will use Slack for internal communications. This is the largest single contract in Slack’s history. Slack’s stock price soared 15% that night.

        Do you think Slack has become an entry point for enterprise resource scheduling? I prefer to compare it to a highway where corporate resources flow. Drivers on the road (employees) Freely establish reasonable traffic rules (Channel) , choose the appropriate vehicle

        If I were a product manager at Microsoft Exchange, I would tremble. Because under the open and flexible collaborative communication model advocated by Slack, companies will gradually re-examine their existing resources, collaboration mechanisms and communication culture, so that they can respond to market needs more quickly externally, while maintaining agile organizational structures internally.

        So do you still think that Slack is just a tool to improve the communication efficiency of “employees”?

        Zoom chose a relatively more popular scene in resource collaboration to improve it—video conferencing. In 2019, Gartner conducted a survey of more than 7,000 employees in Europe, America, and the Asia-Pacific region. They all came from companies with at least 100 employees. The results showed that:

        • By 2022, 40% of formal meetings will be assisted by virtual managers and advanced analysis tools;

          
          

        • By 2024, only 25% of meeting communication will be “face-to-face”, and now it is 60%.
          

          Whether you agree or not, this at least reflects a trend that the conference scene will become more and more complex and flexible, but we only need a sufficiently open platform to accept text, text, phone or Video and other forms of communication and communication . Gartner calls this market (Unified Communication) . (“Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions”) , Zoom has become one of the leaders. The report believes that Zoom has two major advantages:

          • A rich feature set, a rapidly expanding partner community, and integration with third-party applications;

            
            

          • Various subscription and deployment methods provide customers with a high degree of flexibility.
            

            The previous deployment of a conference system was driven by management from top to bottom. It is usually the IT and procurement departments that evaluate whether to adopt this system. It will inevitably tear back and forth during the period. However, the real high-frequency uses are business lines and related external partners. It is not one party to put forward requirements and deployment solutions, nor is it one party to evaluate the effect and decide procurement. Therefore, it is often the case that companies purchase a set of expensive but uninteresting system.

            The emergence of Zoom directly wipes out these problems: first, because it is easy to use, the business line is installed and easy to use; the free strategy allows the product to spread virally within and between enterprises, and almost everyone becomes an experiencer; It can be deployed and can be quickly integrated, and later IT operation and maintenance and expansion can be performed in a background. Finally, flexible subscription methods allow purchasing departments that have already experienced products to make more decisions.

            Have you found that this bottom-up communication process is improving the way of communication between business, procurement and IT departments, and each employee may have a positive impact on the company’s IT construction and even decision-making.

            So you still think that Zoom is just an upgrade to video conferencing?

            Enterprise-level communication and collaboration: far from the end

            Gartner defines this quietly changing market as enterprise-grade social software and collaboration (Social Software & Collaboration) , including communication, conference, file sharing, workflow management and other sub-fields. The global market will reach USD 2.8 billion in 2018 and will reach USD 4.8 billion by 2023, with a five-year CAGR of nearly 15%.

            It is worth noting that the report believes that collaboration services are gradually becoming an “infrastructure service (silos) appear, because each supplier wants to be the end point of the service. ” This sentence caused me to think about two things:

            • This is not a winner-take-all market for (winner-takes-all) , at least not yet;

              
              

            • Is it possible for bundled sales to solve the island problem?
              

              The revenue growth of Zoom and Slack in recent years can prove the first point. In particular, Zoom has not slowed its growth even under the attack of giants such as Cisco’s Webex and Microsoft’s Skype for Business.

              Slack’s positioning from the beginning is destined to be highly vigilant and sanctioned by the giants. The key means are price wars and bundled sales. 2017 3In January, Microsoft opened Teams to Office 365 users. Two years later, in March 2019, at the Teams 2nd Anniversary Conference, Microsoft publicly stated for the first time that more than 500,000 companies in 181 countries and regions around the world are using Teams. September 2018 There are only 320,000 per month. Then in July Microsoft further stated that Teams’ daily life reached 13 million.

              In contrast, Slack’s prospectus shows that as of January 2019, the total number of users has reached 600,000 and the daily life is 10 million. In September last year, it was announced that it had more than 12 million daily life, but this was still lower than Figures released in July. Slack later argued on his blog that, although Rihuo is mentioned most often, what really matters is the duration.

              At present, 600,000 developers are active on Slack every day. Among the more than 100,000 paid users, each person stays online for more than 9 hours per week on average, and the active use time exceeds 90 minutes. Focusing on depth of use is what Slack wants to convey, because compared to Slack’s 1,800 three-party apps and 500,000 active custom programs per week, Teams has just over 200 apps.

              (Slack’s daily growth is not bad)

              However, the capital market does not seem to pay for Slack’s explanation. When Microsoft announced in November that Team’s daily life reached 20 million, Slack’s stock price immediately fell by 10%.

              The advantages of Microsoft’s bundled sales not only pose a huge threat to Slack. At the second anniversary, Teams also announced several important features, including:

              • Online real-time subtitles, this feature has been logged on Skype, and also announced that the online conference function in Teams can accommodate up to 10,000 people at the same time. This feature also integrates Stream, Yammer, etc.He Office 365 tools, and use AI to achieve automatic transcription;

                
                

              • Whiteboard (Whiteboard) , can support additional cameras to shoot content, even using any USB camera, Teams Rooms can use the latest Intelligent capture processing algorithm to capture, focus, adjust and enhance pictures and text on the whiteboard, so remote participants can clearly see the content on the whiteboard in real time.
                

                A series of measures point directly to Zoom. All in all, just like when we buy snacks online, will we go to Tmall or Jingdong Supermarket for one-stop shopping, or will it go to three flagship stores such as three squirrels and good shops? I’m afraid we don’t necessarily know the motivation at that time.

                But I found that an important angle missing from this selection process was the user himself. As a new user who only wants collaboration tools, is Microsoft or Slack more attractive? The same goes for Zoom. Because at this time users will regard Microsoft Teams as a separate product, he does not want a full set of Office 365 services, then the bundled sales strategy may no longer work.

                Ben Thompson drew the following picture in his blog, in order to question whether Teams can still remain attractive when it goes up to grab new users. Compared to user familiar scenes such as video conferencing, it will be easier for Zoom to acquire new users or even old customers from Cisco. Slack intends to advocate a new way of working for users. The challenges are undoubtedly greater, but the challenges mean Opportunity and space.

                Annual recurring income revealed from the Slack prospectusn class = “text-remarks” label = “Remarks”> (below) In terms of income, the amount of revenue contributed by existing customers is increasing significantly every year, which means that customers have used money to express “temporary use of Slack 2. Always use Slack.

                Similarly, as shown in the figure below (Unit: thousand people) , the increase in the total number of cumulative paying users is even brighter than Zoom.

                Netskope is a US unicorn company that provides cloud application monitoring and analysis for enterprises. A research report released in September 2019 showed that an average enterprise is using 1295 cloud services and about 100 different applications. The number of cloud services in 2018 was 1022, compared to only about 900 in 2017.

                This means that on the high-speed development of highways, the “vehicles”, “rules” and “drivers” have become more and more complicated. An independent, open and professional “road construction team” is necessary because Compared with the traditional giants, emerging companies can respond to customer needs faster and solve unexpected problems in a timely manner, and thus continue to be favored by new customers.

                Some people think that from the performance of the secondary market, Microsoft ’s stock price seems to show that he has won. Fortunately, because of my professional relationship, I have the opportunity to observe the primary and secondary markets at the same time.