In recent weeks, I have communicated with several executives from DingTalk and Feishu, so I will continue to talk about the inspirations DingTalk, Qiwei, and Feishu have given me.
To sum it up in one sentence, it is:
In high-level competition, advantages are disadvantages, so you can only regard them as your own characteristics, find a unique positioning, and wait for your opponents to make mistakes.
Let’s first look at the comparison of their team sizes (as of October 2021):
Dingding, less than two thousand people;
Qiwei, six to seven hundred people;
Feishu, I have three sources (including Feishu’s internal sources), which say more than 4,000, more than 5,000, and less than 8,000. Maybe the statistical caliber of Feishu is different depending on which departments count, but there is definitely around 5,000 .
Compare QuestMobile data, September 2021:
DingTalk has 196 million monthly active users , followed by “Enterprise WeChat” ( 88.89 million ), ByteDance’s “Feishu” ( 4.6 million ), and Huawei’s “WeLink” ( 1.08 million ).
This is a bit interesting. Let’s not talk about WeLink. The three BAT companies have their own characteristics.
I have talked about related topics before, so you can review these two articles.
DingTalk, Qiwei, and Feishu reflect Dachang’s understanding of organizations and their three views
Let’s look at the differences between DingTalk, Qiwei and Feishu based on App Store ratings
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DingTalk, the key word is “management”.
The advantages and disadvantages all capture the boss's heart.
The advantage is that it started by serving bosses and has strong management and control functions, such as check-in, read, Ding, and attendance machines, etc. It gained a large number of customers in the early stage. However, the brand recognition thus formed will cause many young people, including young bosses, to disagree and think that the concept is not advanced enough. There are many "representatives of advanced productive forces" around me, forming a kind of "political correctness" that pushes away books and steps on nails.
Of course, DingTalk must also be aware of this. After the number of users reached 500-600 million through "please the boss", it has obviously entered a platform of "deepening value" from the period of rapid expansion of "increasing scale". During the development period, for example, with the newly launched three important modules - DingTalk Documents, DingTalk Meetings, and DingTalk Projects, we can clearly feel that DingTalk is working hard to improve collaboration efficiency and give more value to employees (not just bosses). And this is exactly what Feishu occupies in users’ minds.
After a leading product in a field becomes bigger, the functional level can be infinitely close, but the user's mind is another problem and it takes a lot of time to change.
DingTalk deliberately limited the team to 2k people. Obviously, it couldn't do everything by itself, so it forced itself to use a more open platform-based play style and work with a large number of players in the ecosystem to build DingTalk into a success (traditional) The entrance to enterprise digital transformation, such as providing a low-code platform for enterprise secondary development, providing the ability to access vertical SaaS products such as UFIDA and Kingdee, providing customization capabilities for various solutions, and even unilaterally providing direct The ability to send messages on WeChat.
This continues to return to the path that Alibaba is good at. Of course, the support behind Alibaba Cloud is indispensable in order to have "cloud nail integration".
The most significant change in the past year has been from being "overbearing" to being "easy to discuss". This is the feedback given to me by some DingTalk partners.
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Qiwei, the key word is "communication".
The advantages and disadvantages are seamless integration with WeChat.
The advantage lies in its seamless interoperability with WeChat, making it the first choice for positions that require communication with a large number of external customers, such as sales, customer service, home-school interaction and other scenarios. Relying on WeChat, a super app suitable for all ages, Qiwei occupies a huge entrance advantage. When companies want to operate private domains, it is most natural to add WeChat.
The problem is that in the minds of enterprise users, Qiwei will become a marketing service tool, which is relatively thin and difficult to penetrate into the enterprise's business flow. Although Qiwei is temporarily between DingTalk and Feishu in terms of solution depth, there are still many companies that only use it as a communication tool with customers.
At present, it seems that Qiwei has chosen to stick to the communication that Tencent is best at, become a useful tool, and then wait for opportunities. The investment is small, easy to defend but difficult to attack, and the ROI is very high, but judging from the current team size, it seems that the ambition is not very big.
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Feishu, the key word is "collaboration".
The advantages and disadvantages all represent advanced productivity.
The advantage is that the concept is advanced, at least that's the perception caused by external publicity. The "next generation way of working" may be small now, but it has a future.
The product is exquisite and the positioning is clear, but it is destined to only impress a small group of special users first - companies with a high degree of digitalization. Of course, this is a group of people with high productivity, who are internally defined by Feishu as "knowledge workers" . For example, "Wei Xiaoli", a new force in car manufacturing, all use Feishu, and their appeal cannot be underestimated. When a group of friends and I crowdsourced translations, we also chose Feishu. Using Feishu, I felt a sense of honor like “Mom, I represent advanced productivity”:)
Feishu starts from the perspective of individual employees and is more of an efficiency tool that is simple and easy to use, while DingTalk is a management tool - training needs to be organized before use and service must be provided at any time during use.
Judging from the number of people in the team, the ambition is not small. It should be that we plan to build a sophisticated closed loop by ourselves. I will close it first and wait and see when it will be opened. It is a bit like the early iPhone (compared with Android).
Feishu’s biggest problem is that it will encounter huge challenges in growing bigger and breaking out of the circle in the future. Feishu was born in the extremely advanced productivity situation of Byte. However, after breaking out of the circle, for example, in the manufacturing industry, it seems that it will have to be backward compatible and reduce productivity . It is not easy to slow down to match the production relations of traditional enterprises .
As expected, Byte still likes to "make miracles with great force". This feeling of saturation attack was last time when Huawei made up its mind to make a mobile phone. The investment of thousands of people is a challenge for the company's patience, but it is a good thing for the industry, and the results can be seen quickly.
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Many companies will use two or even three at the same time based on business needs, such as using DingTalk's industry solutions, using Qiwei to communicate with customers, and using Feishu documents and OKRs.
It is easy to understand by reviewing the advantages of each.
In corporate organizations, "information is rights." From this perspective, we can also compare the obvious differences between the three in the past: DingTalk - the same desire from top to bottom, WeChat - internal and external interconnection, Feishu - left and right resonance . Behind the scenes, there are even some differences in management and organizational behavior concepts. How will it develop in the future? The exciting games of the new generation of BAT are worthy of long-term attention, and it is already a pleasure to watch them.
A few extra words, if Huawei's WeLink joins the battle, what are its advantages and disadvantages? Can anyone tell me if you know?
I came up with an idea - connect the front and back , combine it with the manufacturing industry that Huawei is familiar with, do something for complex industries with long supply chains, and serve affiliated companies in the entire supply chain. We need to use them together and match the name, We Link. Everyone is connected together.
In this way, "up and down, left and right, inside and outside, front and back" are all available, which can improve industrial efficiency in all aspects, dislocate competition and cooperation, and it is not bad to turn BAT into BATH. Take a...bath?
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The depth-first 2B field will definitely not be dominated by one company like the breadth-first 2C . In addition, combined with various policy directions in the past year, the country does not want one company to dominate, so every leading player will not ignore its opponents. Kill them all, fight, talk, and even cooperate a little. This is my prediction.
Let me end with a sentence from Einstein's book "My World View" -
The joy of observation and understanding is nature’s most beautiful gift.
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Iamsujie, a former Alibaba product manager, has written a total of 4 books in the "Everyone is a Product Manager" series. He now provides services to entrepreneurs, is a founding partner of Liangcang Incubator, and is also an independent consultant for product innovation.
If you need training and consulting services in product manager/product thinking/product innovation related fields, please contact the following WeChat account (i13758212411).
