薅薅 free wool for online office
Our reporter She Ying
There is one more option for online office at no cost. On December 23, Baidu released the intelligent work platform "Ruliu", which embeds artificial intelligence in addition to basic collaborative office, text editing, online meetings and other functions. For example, various languages input by the user can be translated into multiple texts in real time, as well as smart code assistance functions.
When "Ruliu" entered the market, the online office market had already made consumers picky: Ali Dingding, Tencent Conference, Toutiao Feishu, Kingsoft WPS, Graphite Document, etc. These products have their own advantages, but only one thing is the same. That is free for individual consumers.
This is very strange. The development and maintenance of a cloud office system is expensive. The investment in cloud storage alone is astronomical, not to mention the continuous upgrade and development of various new functions. Bandwidth, manpower, and operation are all costs.
Why do the giants look at this business with no cash flow?
Consumers do not spend money, who will pay?
The point is, can the free wool be kept?
On the one hand, consumers can rest assured that according to the current business model, online office software will be free for individuals for a long time.
However, the giants will not make a loss-making business, they are after the huge traffic brought by online office.
During the epidemic, the demand for people to work and study at home stimulated the growth of the online office market.
Relevant data shows that after the 2020 Spring Festival holiday, due to increased demand for remote office and online learning, the number of daily active users of efficient office has increased by 40 million.
One particularity of online office is that the distinction between corporate consumers and individual consumers is not so obvious. The office accounts installed by the company for employees must also be used after they go home.
Ms. Li, who works in a company in Beijing, told reporters that during the epidemic, she used Kingsoft WPS to make a shared document for her daughter’s head teacher. It took a long time for the parents of more than 40 classmates to check in and report their body temperature. Replaced by professional Solitaire software.
In other words, mastering a user is likely to be converted into several times the flow entrance.
For the Internet, there are unlimited possibilities when there is traffic, and how to realize it can be discussed later.
Therefore, with the increase in the number of users in the online office market, this industry is favored by capital.
At the end of February, Graphite Document completed tens of millions of U.S. dollars in Series B+ financing. In November 2019, Jinshan Document's parent company, Jinshan Office, which landed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, saw its stock price rise sharply after the epidemic.
Although individual consumers do not directly contribute to their income, capital has already paid a higher premium for everyone.
On the other hand, there is another market for online office that has not yet been fully explored, and that is enterprise applications.
Since the beginning of this year, due to the special period, the demand for online video conferencing by large and small enterprises has continued to increase.
For business users on the B side, it is of course a good thing to be free, but compared to free, business users value the stability of online office products, the security of the platform, and the integration with their own businesses.
If the network crashes at every turn during the video conference, or there are jams, or loss of voice, let alone free, it means that the online office products are inverted, and the company dare not use it.
Especially for some giant companies, such as Country Garden with 200,000 employees and China Resources with 400,000 employees, once they have a meeting, thousands of people will participate at the same time, and the types of meetings involve training, interviews, bidding, etc. For this scenario, various preliminary preparations such as meeting room reservations and participant notifications must be completed. The free version is simply not enough.
It is understood that companies such as Country Garden and China Resources have adopted highly customized online office products that cost a lot of money.
They are the "cash cows" of online office companies.
Baidu Ruliu is no exception. As soon as it debuted, it signed an order from Shanghai Pudong Development Bank to customize its digital work platform "Xin CALL Pu".
With the development of the digital economy, more companies will need to purchase digital work platforms, and the number of B-end users who work online will only increase unabated.
If they pay the bill, the online office industry will continue to develop, so consumers can rest assured that they can continue to buy online office software.
Our reporter She Ying