Microsoft Office which grew up with a generation is becoming history. In October of this year, Microsoft announced that it would carry out a rebranding of Office. The new brand was named Microsoft 365, which still includes office software such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but the word Office will be swept into the old pile of paper.
Since its birth in the 1990s, Office 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 cannot avoid it. For many people, the three major pieces of Office even represent all the needs in the office. Later similar software, no matter WPS or Google Docs, adopted similar functional designs.
In recent years, with the transformation of office software in the direction of SaaS (Software as a Service), Microsoft has also innovated Office. It no longer only sells software but also begins to sell services. It launched the Office 365 subscription service, making it a Get closer to the cloud.
Office is changing, and so is the way people work. The rise of collaboration office platforms such as Slack has changed the market landscape of office software. Until the post-epidemic era, the speed of change has accelerated further, and people's work locations are no longer limited to offices, which forces Microsoft to make a little more profound change.
Universal productivity tool
For most people, especially those born in the 1990s, Office may be the first productivity software they used after they came into contact with computers, and it was almost the only choice on the market at that time - it was even a subject of the National Computer Rank Examination. But the birth of Office was not as dramatic as many tech giants, such as Apple and Facebook.
In the early 1980s, Microsoft's first software was spreadsheet software called Multiplan. Later, Microsoft developed Multi-Tool Word, both of which are the predecessors of Excel and Word. Word and Excel were not the only office software on the market back then. At that time, the market was small, but there were many competitors, including software from big companies such as IBM Works. What really changed the game was Windows. With the advent of the Windows operating system, especially in the 1990s, with the success of Windows 3.0 and Windows 95, Microsoft established its dominance in the operating system field.
Office also took off. In 1990, Microsoft packaged Word 1.1, Excel 2.0, and PowerPoint 2.0 together for the first time to form the Office office suite. After that, as Windows swept the world and became popular rapidly, Office quickly became the mainstream choice.
Although personal computers are consumer goods and users have the right to make decisions independently, they are still largely affected by the inertia of organizations and society. From the 1990s to the 1900s, generations of students learned Office in school, and after entering the workplace, companies used Office. This inertia has continued and has not completely subsided until today.
For Microsoft, this seems to be the best business model: relying on corporate purchases to generate solid cash flow and profits while building user habits. It wasn't until the late 2000s that the tide of the Web 2.0 revolution came, introducing new variables to the office software market and having a big impact on Office.
Office is software that revolves around the logic of the office. For example, in Word, what the user operates is a piece of virtual paper. Because in the office, you edit text on the computer, and the final destination is usually printing, so most of the functions of Word are to adjust the typesetting of text on paper.
But in the era of Web 2.0, the main publishing medium is no longer "paper", but "web page". When a user needs to publish text to a web page, he no longer needs those complicated typesetting functions, but only needs to simply mark the text and focus on the content itself. In the process, a Web Publishing Standard similar to Markdown was born.
And, in the era of Web 2.0, web pages themselves are becoming 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 moved a "simplified version" of Office to the web. Users do not need to purchase or install software, as long as they enter the webpage, they can start editing text, processing tables, and making slideshows.
The era of SaaS begins. More and more people are starting to use those web-based and cloud-based software. Because their requirements are very light, the web side is obviously simpler and more flexible. Today, Google's online office suite, G Suite, has more than 2 billion users. And Google has already set its sights on classrooms and begun to cultivate its own next-generation users. With inexpensive Chromebooks, Google has put its own hardware into elementary and middle school classrooms. In 2017, Google's hardware and software market share in the US primary and secondary education market reached as high as 60%.
This means that the next generation of professionals will no longer grow up with Office.
Microsoft's "B-side" pivot
In the past decade, SaaS has become popular, and Office is no longer as dominant as it used to be, but Microsoft has never been sitting still. Microsoft's trump card is still on the "B side". Taking the "B-end" as a fulcrum, Microsoft has successfully countered the rise of multiple rivals 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 designed a unique information organization framework to increase communication efficiency, and the entire platform is very open, and various functions can be extended through third-party interfaces, such as tracking project progress and sharing files with online disks. Various product details are also polished very finely.
In just one year, the number of users of Slack has grown to 1.7 million naturally, and it has grown into a unicorn in the field of office software. Compared with all office software in the past, Slack's biggest feature is that it is a typical C-end software. In the early days, it didn't even have a sales team. Same with software.
This kind of communication is often "bottom-up" within the team. It is a small number of grassroots employees who start to use it first, find it easy to use, and pass it on to team leaders, bosses, and then to the entire company.
At that time, many people believed that this C-end model of spontaneous use by employees and then promotion to the whole company would defeat those B-end models of "selling to the boss by sales, and then pushing it to the employees. In 2015, Microsoft made a sky-high acquisition offer to Slack, which was three times higher than Slack’s valuation at the time but was still rejected by the latter. According to rumors, Bill Gates personally opposed the acquisition at that time, believing that Microsoft needed to make a similar platform by itself and could not rely on acquisitions. After a year of hard work, Microsoft created its own Slack.
In 2016, Teams was launched. It has many similarities with Slack in terms of core functions, but it is obviously a product closer to B-side thinking. Teams focus on security and stability and is bundled with Office. Relying on a strong sales and service team, Microsoft has launched a fierce sales offensive to those old Office customers, providing customized service solutions, and even helping customers bear the cost of platform migration at a loss. This migration cost can sometimes even reach millions of dollars.
But Microsoft finally did it. In 2019, when Slack was listed with 10 million daily active users, Microsoft announced in a high-profile manner that the daily active users of Teams had exceeded 13 million, which gave Slack a big blow and announced the end of this blocking war. Afterward, Slack protested to the European Commission, saying that Microsoft's bundling of Teams and Office was suspected of unfair competition, but it did not achieve any substantive results. With the B-side as a fulcrum, Teams also thwarted another opponent, Zoom.
In the spring of 2020, the new crown epidemic began to spread in the United States, and various companies and schools have adopted measures to work remotely and attend classes. Within a few weeks, relying on its excellent product design, Zoom quickly occupied the top spot in the app store and became the choice of most C-end users.
In April, when Zoom was busy fixing a privacy bug, Microsoft mobilized 50 employees and began an offensive against teachers in the New York education system to help them quickly switch from Zoom to Microsoft Teams. At the same time, Microsoft's engineering team worked closely with the technical support team to quickly develop new classroom-oriented functions such as "raise your hand to speak" in response to the needs of teachers, which won the approval of a large number of teachers.
In just one month, Microsoft has dampened the momentum of Zoom, ensuring that Teams will not be eliminated from this competition. In the past 30 years, Microsoft has proven its ability to do B business time and time again. From Windows to Office to Azure cloud services, it is through the pivot point of the B side that Microsoft has become a leader in providing secure, stable, and customizable services. One of the most evergreen companies in Silicon Valley.
By winning the office, Microsoft has achieved what it is today, but the office is not the future.
The era without office
In the development of Office, Microsoft has not made personal-oriented attempts. For example, Office 365 was originally a reform for individual users. From the buyout system to the subscription system, Microsoft has lowered the price of the product. Users only need to pay a relatively small monthly and annual fee to use a full set of the latest Office products, as well as cross-device cloud synchronization.
It’s just that individual users are far inferior to enterprises in terms of willingness to pay and stability, and cannot bring in huge incomes. A series of startups, including Slack and Zoom, basically follow the rule of the closer you are to the C-end and the farther away from the B-end, the harder it is to make money. By grasping the B-end, you can grasp the current market and income; but only by grasping the C-end, can you grasp the needs of future users and grasp the development direction.
Just the day before announcing the rebranding of Office, Microsoft participated in the Meta Connect conference and announced that the two companies will cooperate in the field of VR, bringing Office, Teams, and even Xbox cloud games to Meta's Quest VR platform.
Microsoft CEO Nadella said at the press conference, we're bringing the Teams immersive meeting experience to the Meta Quest, giving users a new way to connect with each other. We're also bringing Windows 365 to the Quest, so users can personalize in a whole new way. Windows experience.
Obviously, Meta Quest is not a productivity device, and Metaverse is not an office place, but Microsoft still chooses them as their next destination. Because for Microsoft, the key question is not where the office of the future will be, but where the people will be. Relying on Windows bundled sales, the era of selling software after winning the company's purchase is going away. When the boundary between work and life is gradually blurred, Microsoft must focus more on building the service itself. In the past few years, Microsoft has spent a lot of time optimizing the experience of the Office suite on Mac and iPad to achieve this goal.
Of course, for most users, the changes won't come that quickly. For a long time in the future, we will still use Word, Excel, and PPT. In the keynote speech, Nadella explained the long-term goal of the new brand Microsoft 365: Provide a complete, cloud-first experience that helps users save time, save costs, reduce complexity, and provide more innovation and flexibility. sex and resilience.
To put it simply, Microsoft wants to liberate services from the past operating system and software and turn them into a fluid and more flexible thing. This is also the meaning of abandoning the old Office brand: everything in the future is no longer limited to the office.