"Online Documents" crashes in real time?

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There is a magical phenomenon in this era, which can be summed up in one sentence: "If you can do it online, don't waste time offline."

As for why this phenomenon occurred, everyone understands that it is related to the epidemic.

But having said that, the prosperity and development of online and digitalization has accelerated the promotion of online products, effectively improved work efficiency, and optimized business models. However, it is inevitable that there are some hidden dangers of forcing things to grow too fast.

Because judging from market feedback, some current digital products still have many bugs and limitations and have a long way to go before they can mature. One typical example is "online documents".

01

Real-time crash

It's not a joke

There is no doubt that online documentation is a good tool in its ideal state.

Because in the era of mobile Internet, corporate office work is no longer limited to offices and computers. Online documents meet the remote collaborative office needs of enterprises in various scenarios, such as "multi-person, multi-location, multi-terminal online real-time collaboration", and truly realize "zero distance" office work.

Online document collaborative editing products belong to a sub-area of ​​online office. They are documents created or imported online, can be shared, and have collaborative functions. Through their lightweight usage and low usage threshold, they provide powerful and efficient support for users' collaborative office and use collaboration to change the way of working.

However, an ideal online document is a product that has reached the peak of maturity, but currently online document products are in the early stages, which can cause many problems, the most typical of which is file corruption.

Wang Yu is a short video copywriter. His daily work mainly involves writing scripts and copywriting for the company's contracted influencers to create popular videos. However, good scripts and copywriting are just like creating a painting, an article, or a song. Inspiration is extremely important. When you grasp the inspiration and create, it is not only relaxing and enjoyable, but also the content quality is relatively good.

One day, after having lunch near the company, he happened to have a creative inspiration, so he hurried back to his workstation, opened a collaborative document to start working, spent 1 hour to complete the first draft, and shared it with the reviewer.

After completing the first draft, he thought the matter was 90 percent certain, but things don’t always go as planned. Within half an hour, the reviewer sent the document out and asked what went wrong with the copy.

Wang Yu saw that there wouldn't be any problem, so he quickly clicked the link to open it, but he found that all the contents of the document turned into "question marks", which immediately made him lose his mind.

Wang Yu was still a little angry when he recalled the scene. In his opinion, the bug in the online document caused all the content to be lost, and all his work was ruined. Even if he created it again, it would be difficult to produce good content without the feeling at that time. Secondly, such an unexpected disaster made him lose the motivation to create in the short term.

Because of this accident, Wang Yu has not yet fully accepted online documents. He usually creates works on local documents first and then imports them into online document products.

"Loss, crash, and occasional errors in online documents can make a day's efforts go to waste. If it weren't for my superiors' request, I wouldn't even touch it. Isn't WPS great?" said Liu Zhe, a self-media personality.

In his opinion, online documents can indeed help the team break the island effect in work communication between people and improve work efficiency, but the frequent bugs in the product put inspired creators like him at risk of having their work results wasted at any time.

To be on the safe side, Liu Zhe usually completes his creations on WPS and then imports them into online documents. This not only ensures that the work results are not lost, but also allows collaborative communication to be maintained. The only trouble is that the process is a bit cumbersome.

Liu Zhe is not the only one who adopts the above approach. Many other people, such as media professionals, buyers, advertising designers, and employees of 4A planning companies, also adopt the above approach. The reason is also due to the instability of online document products.

In fact, although the crash of online documents is not a common event, it is not uncommon. After searching the keyword "What to do if an online document crashes" on Baidu, many complaints from related users appeared on the homepage.

Some of the links even had titles such as "How to solve the frequent system crashes of Graphite Document?" and "What to do if Tencent Document crashes and cannot be opened?", which were really surprising.

To summarize the above, it is clear that online documents experience frequent system crashes and the product technology is immature.

02

Too many limitations

There is still a long way to go

No matter how frequently online documents crash, in a sense, they are also individual emergencies. In the eyes of most users, although they are wary, they just need to be more prepared. However, the lack of functionality is the biggest obstacle to the development of online documents.

For example, a heavy Office user once pointed out some limitations of a certain online document product when communicating with "ToB Industry Headlines".

The user said that when preparing a government project application, he chose a highly collaborative online document tool in order to improve efficiency. However, during the operation, he found that some Excel formulas could no longer be used.

In addition, when the materials were completed, many format errors occurred when the exported files were opened with Office, so they spent more time copying and pasting them into the specified format of Office.

He concluded with a wry smile, "Collaborative editing is fun, but adjusting the format is really boring."

Indeed, documents created in the past using local Office usually had more complex content formats and forms. For example, documents had headers, footers and tables of contents, tables had nested formulas and pivot tables, and presentations had rich components and animation effects.

However, many online document products are simple in design and only replicate some of the functions of local Office, which often cannot meet users' editing requirements for standard Office document formats, just like Meitu XiuXiu for Photoshop. This forces users to still download documents, modify them locally, and then upload them to the cloud for storage and sharing.

After uploading to the cloud, the formatting becomes chaotic due to the poor compatibility of current online document products with native Office documents, which may hinder online reading.

Therefore, due to various problems, the workflow after using online documents does not show much superiority compared to the original one.

Recently, on the enterprise service review platform launched by 36Kr, a large number of users expressed that many online document tools are not functionally rich enough and have a clear gap with WPS and Microsoft Office.

Mainly reflected in:

The data transmission efficiency and data consistency of online documents are difficult to guarantee, and some online document systems do not have the ability to prevent the continuous spread of erroneous data;

Online spreadsheet documents often lack support for Excel formulas, functions, and charts, which significantly reduces the level of enterprise data processing;

For system suppliers, online documents cannot provide personalized and scalable collaborative office tools for different business scenarios, ensuring perfect integration with the company's own systems;

Online documents cannot guarantee full compatibility with the original system data structure, such as whether they support lossless import and export of Excel, whether they support cross-platform and multi-terminal devices, etc. (some excellent products on the market can guarantee the realization of some functions)

The storage space currently provided by online documents cannot fully meet the needs of users;

Although online document products have provided some value-added services, their value is not reflected after purchase, and the significance of value-added is not reflected...

The various complaints given by users represent the limitations of current online document products , and there is still a lot of room for improvement in the future.

03

It's not a bad thing to complain

Love is deep, blame is severe

Through the above cases, I believe everyone can understand the shortcomings of online documents. However, it cannot be denied that although online documents have shortcomings, they still have great value.

First, in terms of the market, due to changes in the external environment, people have realized that online office is not just a temporary need, but a more efficient and more conducive to team collaboration. The first step towards increasing efficiency through informatization of enterprises and teams is to upgrade office work.

Online documents are an essential part of office work and carry huge market value.

Take Graphite Documents for example. According to official information, the product currently has nearly 50 million registered users, 700,000 registered companies, and 100 million active devices. In 2021, the number of its paying companies and paying accounts has grown significantly.

Although there are a large number of free users among these user groups, the premise is that Graphite Docs is still a long way from being a mature product. This means, to some extent, that as the product matures and value-added services are optimized, it has huge room for development.

A rough calculation shows that if 5% of the 50 million user base subscribe to membership with an annual fee of 83 yuan, the annual membership revenue will be 207 million yuan. As the product matures and the number of paying users continues to increase, the revenue will continue to grow.

At the same time, Graphite Docs will charge corresponding advertising fees, and in the future, based on this platform, it will form B2B and B2C connection functions, which will bring considerable profits.

In terms of strategic value, whether it is an independent product like Graphite Docs or products from giants such as Tencent Docs and Feishu Docs, in a sense it can be regarded as a tool to connect the enterprise service market and a collaborative office management platform.

They can help partners build their capabilities to tap into the enterprise service market while also forming a "traffic pool". The strategic value of the enterprise service market is huge. That is why, when Tencent Docs was first launched, Ma Huateng, chairman of the board of directors of Tencent, excitedly called it an "unexpected surprise" because he understood the strategic significance of the product.

The simplest example is Office, which has always been Microsoft's star product and has helped it strengthen its monopoly on Windows in the PC era. Its reach has reached the world, including China. Until the advent of the mobile era and the rise of WPS, the role of Office has been significantly weakened.

It has to be said that the potential commercial value of online documents is huge, and the strategic significance they represent is extremely important. Even though the above article has made some complaints about the current domestic products, it is also a criticism of the deep love.

Otherwise, when the international leader Google Docs fully enters China, the new Office era is likely to come again. At that time, there may be no new "WPS" to save it.