The previous post discussed around how WeChat has made life in China different in terms of eating in restaurants, buying bubble teas and more.
WeChat has also become the primary working station and personal cloud for many people.
One background – email is not that popular or useful in China. Many corporates give employees email accounts, but unlike in the US, email is just not a pervasive thing in China.
In the US, people use Gmail or Outlook and the cloud services provided by Google or Microsoft. In China, the equivalent of cloud storage is not Baidu Cloud, which provides the first 15GB free, but WeChat. People just send files as attachments in emails. And if he/she needs to CC other people, just send it in a group chat. It is a very smooth experience of sending files and discussing in a certain group of people.
The only inefficient part is probably editing files. But it is very common to use WeChat on PC so that files could be downloaded and edited. For most people, WeChat works perfect well to organize work. And it’s free.
So yes, it is just like Slack.
Meanwhile, however, files are not actually stored in or accessed through the cloud. They are local and taking up storage space in phones. So for Tencent, it is not managing an ever-expanding cloud usage and needs to think about charing fees; and for users, there is no limit in storage and they can use it as free forever, as long as they enough room in phone storages. I think it is very common for a person’s WeChat to take over 10G space in the phone.
In addition, it is more efficient to search through the files as they are grouped by groups. You go into a group chat’s history to find files, instead of searching the entire gmail for them.
On a side note, WeChat history has been very useful as a poof for nearly everything. A screenshot of chat history could be as powerful as a signed contract (not legally; but one can post it in moments or Weibo, and it seems more personal or embarrassing; so to avoid this, one usually takes a yes in WeChat seriously)