Will "PPT" be the next disappearing internet symbol?

Yesterday, Docstoc, founded in 2007, announced that it will officially stop serving on December 1st. If you log in to this website now, it will calmly remind you to back up your online documents locally before November 30th.

Docstoc's competitor was once the world's largest PPT sharing platform Slideshare, but when it decided to accept the acquisition of financial management solution provider Intuit in 2013, today's ending may be It has already been buried - at that time, the founders of Docstoc were worried about the development of the company every day, and then Intuit extended an olive branch, and they were very happy to accept a listed company as the backer. When Docstoc shut down its own business today, it told the media that "Intuit has decided not to continue to support these products."

While Docstoc's demise can be attributed in part to Intuit's actions, it may not be alone. In fact, Slideshare also accepted the acquisition of Linkdin in 2012. In 2014, they announced that all advanced functions are free.

After Evernote encountered doubts, dropbox became the next object of bad news. While these two companies are going downhill, "notes" and "documents" may gradually become two words that are out of the trend. The word closely linked to online document sharing platforms such as Docstoc is "document", and the most representative type of "document" is "PPT" (this is actually found in domestic benchmarking companies, such as Baidu Library, Douding, Daoke Baba are more obvious). In my opinion, the decline of online document sharing platforms also implies to a certain extent that "PPT" will become the next disappearing Internet symbol. Just as the rise of streaming music has made us less and less exposed to symbols such as MP3/WMA/WAV.

Benedict Evans had a similar sentiment. This well-known blogger in Silicon Valley who has always believed that unicorns did not die from direct competitors believes that the end of PPT will be like this:

PPT files will be replaced by web apps that allow two people to collaborate on slideshows. But perhaps it should be replaced by a SaaS-style dashboard with real-time data, alerts on unexpected changes, and a chat channel or Slack integration. PPTs get killed by things that aren't presentations.

In fact, it is difficult to draw a judgmental result by directly discussing PPT. Discussing the mainstream companies and their models behind PPT may help us understand the problems of PPT from the side. In the process of discussing online document sharing platforms, maybe you can feel the trend of PPT symbols gradually disappearing in the future.

For online document sharing platforms, they mainly do one thing: encourage users to upload, exchange, share, and download valuable text documents. When you try to browse or download a certain document on Baidu Wenku or Daoke Baba, your core appeal is actually "knowledge". Abstracting this matter, what the online document sharing platform is actually doing is the dissemination and sharing of knowledge.

Chris Dixon once wrote a similar point of view in a blog: As more and more people have terminal devices connected to the Internet, one of the great entrepreneurial opportunities of this era lies in how to share and preserve users' spiritual creations (such as wisdom) , experience and knowledge). A large part of the reason we surf the Internet every day is to learn valuable information from it, and this part of the information can be identified as knowledge. Because of this part of the appeal, the Internet, which has a strong ability to operate information, has become a "knowledge dealer" that we agree with in our hearts.

The problem arises when online document sharing platforms try to be such a "knowledge dealer".

During the development of the Internet, the more influential models of selling knowledge that have appeared mainly include: encyclopedias (Wikipedia), search engines (Google), question-and-answer sites (Qura, Zhihu), and now large-scale online educate. Among these influential models, online document sharing platforms only play a transitional role.

There was not much knowledge left on the Internet in the early days. The cost of editing and organizing knowledge on Wikipedia was too high, and the content was not rich enough. Search engines required users to spend a lot of time searching for the learning resources they wanted because the knowledge was too fragmented and trivial. In this case, the unique advantages of PPT-like documents are relatively obvious: its knowledge presentation method is mainly a logical framework and system, and users can quickly find the sections they need to know according to the program. In terms of richness, it is a good complement to Wikipedia. For example, DocStoc Store includes academic categories, business categories, legal texts and other very technical high-quality documents that cannot be pieced together by general searches. At this time, the online document sharing platform temporarily found a foothold.

With the development of the mobile Internet, methods such as online document sharing platforms are obviously outdated when it comes to disseminating and sharing knowledge. The information density that PPT can carry in the current environment is still too low-you rarely learn a certain part of detailed knowledge from PPT, and its transmission speed is becoming weaker and weaker. The mobile environment also makes PPT unacceptable, just think about the experience of watching PPT on a smartphone. On the other hand, PPT-like text documents are relatively a type of format that has no threshold in knowledge. On the other hand, Github, which is used for code hosting and sharing, because there are thresholds for code storage, sharing and dissemination, the value that Github can provide is relatively greater.

In fact, PPT has never been a good carrier for knowledge dissemination and sharing. Its strongest ability is the demonstration of knowledge. Otherwise, we don’t need the teacher’s explanation during class, just download a PPT by ourselves. But for a long time, online document sharing platforms have chosen to take out the weak carrying attributes of PPT as the main attack point, and most of the users attracted by the platform are not interested in the core function "demonstration" of PPT. This dislocation of core capabilities and core needs is one of the reasons why online document sharing platforms will decline.

In this case, Q&A sites give another, lighter model. Unfortunately, these patterns are drifting away from seriousness and slowly bridging in the direction of sociality. Today, online education has become the mainstream model. Firstly, with the gradual increase of the Internet’s secondary processing of information, knowledge systems in various segments are constantly being sorted out and summarized by new companies and models. Second, online education has just emerged, and it has caught up with With the latest technological trends, the experience returned to users is better than any model in history.

In addition to being impacted by online education, online document sharing platforms are also being attacked by corporate services. Earlier, both Slideshare and Docstoc may have realized the flaws of PPT as a knowledge carrier, and both sides tried to make some corrections:

• Although Slideshare focuses on document sharing, they position their business value on the traffic and attention gathered by a large number of professional documents, so as to attract enterprises to do document-based marketing.
• Docstoc focuses on business people and launches two sister stations, License123 and Expertcircle, positioning itself as an information service integrator for small and medium-sized enterprises.

But these two shifts will make online document sharing platforms face more professional and meticulous enterprise services. Whether it is online education or enterprise services, you can use high-dimensional and low-dimensional methods to seize the territory of online document sharing platforms, because in essence, what such platforms want to do is only subordinate to a certain part of the two.

In general, the decline of online document sharing platforms will be a case in the process of PPT symbols disappearing. The final course of PPT may be like this: at the beginning, the online document sharing platform declined, and then the major PPT template design and sharing platforms that focused more on core functions, and finally only a small part of internal communication and school classroom teaching remained. Users will use the simple PPT presentation function in the offline state. After that, there may be a new type of PPT that can replace PPT with better presentation and communication functions-at this time, the symbol of PPT will disappear completely.

As for the new type that will replace PPT, maybe it will be the web application that Benedict Evans said, maybe in the end, the dissemination and sharing of knowledge will eventually become the way of streaming media - the Internet turns knowledge into something like tap water. There are resources. Of course, this ideal state requires large-scale sorting and more detailed induction of knowledge and information on the Internet, which will be a huge project.

Original article by Retric