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Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

fourlightyears.blogspot.com

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Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#11

Post by catmanjan »

regecks wrote: post #4
andrewstuart wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key point of the blog post is that any tech company that succeeds in Australia does so purely on its own two feet and that governments are at best mildly supportive of technology and at worst actively hostile. Turnbull destroyed the fibre to the home NBN and I can't see high speed ubiquitous Internet access coming any time soon. Imagine if 95% of Australian home - including ones in the country areas - had super h…

I really don't understand the NBN meme. I've worked for small tech companies in Australia my entire (not so long) career, and access to high internet speeds has never ever really been a problem. When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? Yes, regional areas should be upgraded from dialup/slow sattelite to at least 10mbps. What kind of impact will that have wrt the OP…

The benefit of NBN wouldn't be for employees, it would be for potential customers. I've heard so many times from so many people "I'd love to use X but my internet is dodgy/stops working when it rains/is slow between 5 and bed time"

Where X is any number of internet reliant service

Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#12

Post by gelatocar »

regecks wrote: post #4
andrewstuart wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key point of the blog post is that any tech company that succeeds in Australia does so purely on its own two feet and that governments are at best mildly supportive of technology and at worst actively hostile. Turnbull destroyed the fibre to the home NBN and I can't see high speed ubiquitous Internet access coming any time soon. Imagine if 95% of Australian home - including ones in the country areas - had super h…

I really don't understand the NBN meme. I've worked for small tech companies in Australia my entire (not so long) career, and access to high internet speeds has never ever really been a problem. When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? Yes, regional areas should be upgraded from dialup/slow sattelite to at least 10mbps. What kind of impact will that have wrt the OP…

> When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really?

There's a pretty long list actually. If you've got 10 people in a office sharing a 10mbit pipe then the internet is straight up prohibitively slow. On top of that, if your users are on slow internet then they are less likely to interact with whatever you are building, especially if it involves rich media interaction like uploading photos/videos (and upload speeds are even slower here). Then there are workflow collaboration tools like teleconferencing, dispatching of large files over networks that can take hours. It makes it harder to work remotely and adds a fairly large extra cost for small tech businesses to absorb in getting decent internet set up. And this is all going to get worse as the rest of the world speeds past us and starts creating content for gigabit internet while we are sitting here trying to get by on our promised 25megabits.

Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#13

Post by hhandoko »

andrewstuart wrote: post #3
pedalpete wrote: post #2

Disclosure, I work for data61, a major recipient of the gov't new innovation strategy. I'm also Canadian and have worked in technology in SF, LA, NYC, Vancouver and Santiago Chile. I have a very different perspective on this. Australia has had more than just one Atlassian. They've also got Campaign Monitor, BigCommerce, Canva, Where 2 (became Google Maps), Envato. Australia is also growing Freelancer (I don't believe…

The key point of the blog post is that any tech company that succeeds in Australia does so purely on its own two feet and that governments are at best mildly supportive of technology and at worst actively hostile. Turnbull destroyed the fibre to the home NBN and I can't see high speed ubiquitous Internet access coming any time soon. Imagine if 95% of Australian home - including ones in the country areas - had super h…

With the risk of being viewed as a Turnbull apologist, re: NBN I think he's just trying his best to work with the cards he's been dealt (i.e. compromise).

It is unfortunate that the NBN was one of the key points of the campaign, we all know how it's turning out... It will probably ended up costing about the same, yet without the advantages FTTH brings.

I do hope NBN will come to my area soon (within the next 24 months?), I live about 30 mins away from the CBD, but 4G connection is patchy and I only managed to get 2.5 Mbps on `Broadband`.

Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#14

Post by imron »

regecks wrote: post #4
andrewstuart wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key point of the blog post is that any tech company that succeeds in Australia does so purely on its own two feet and that governments are at best mildly supportive of technology and at worst actively hostile. Turnbull destroyed the fibre to the home NBN and I can't see high speed ubiquitous Internet access coming any time soon. Imagine if 95% of Australian home - including ones in the country areas - had super h…

I really don't understand the NBN meme. I've worked for small tech companies in Australia my entire (not so long) career, and access to high internet speeds has never ever really been a problem. When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? Yes, regional areas should be upgraded from dialup/slow sattelite to at least 10mbps. What kind of impact will that have wrt the OP…

> what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really?

From personal experience as an Australian freelance developer who works mostly remotely, the difference is screencasts and video calls where the other party's screen is fuzzy and sometimes unreadable, with frequent call (or at least video) dropouts/stuttering, vs crystal clear clarity and no dropouts/stuttering.

It's also useful if you are dealing with clients that have medium-large datasets (> 1GB) for you to use. It's the difference between a few minutes transfer or a few hours. I've had cases where the client was local and it was faster for me to catch public transport in to the city and back to pick up a USB with the data rather than transfer it online. That's the lucky case when the client was local - good luck if they're based overseas.

I'm currently in Taiwan and have a 100mbps connection - the difference in doing these things vs doing it in Australia on a 10mbps connection is night and day.

Killing the FTTH NBN was an incredibly short sighted decision.

Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#15

Post by d_t_w »

d_t_w wrote: post #9
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #7

R&D Tax Incentives are pretty much the only thing the Australian Government offers - http://www.business.gov.au/grants-and-assistance/innovation-... Massacring the NBN and generally not giving a shit about technology really highlights how out of touch the Australian Government is with the general population. We are among the highest adoption rates for technology (smartphones etc.) worldwide and give a huge amount of…

Didn't you hear? Coal is the future, get digging.

FYI non-Australians, I give you (former) PM of Australia, Tony Abbott:

July 17, 2015 - "For the foreseeable future coal is the foundation of prosperity"

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/17/for-tony-...

That just about sums up the amount of vision in Australian politics.

Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#16

Post by theandrewbailey »

> In an age where the state of the art broadband to the home in the U.S.A. is 10 gigabits, Australia is currently building (it claims) a National Broadband Network at great expense that promises a blistering 12 to 100 megabits per second at the top end

I know it mentioned "state of the art", but the vast majority of Americans would be lucky to get 100 megabits without breaking the bank every month. Many (most?) don't even have the option of such speeds.

Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#17

Post by throwawayaway »

adamseabrook wrote: post #6

There is always more the government can do but there are two major government assistance programs I was not aware of till I founded a startup here. https://www.austrade.gov.au/Australian/Export/Export-Grants/... will reimburse 50% of your sales and marketing costs. So you can go spend $100k on Google Adwords and get $50k back effectively meaning you can outbid all your competitors for the same keywords. https://www.a…

Am I wrong in thinking there's a fat chance that the US govt. is funneling money to tech startups? I doubt there are grants for this stuff in Silicon Valley.

Maybe some sort of trickle down effect from the money that goes into Amazon, intel, MS & IBM.

Not sure every home in the US is getting the claimed 10gig internet pipes neither.

Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#18

Post by evanriley »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #16

> In an age where the state of the art broadband to the home in the U.S.A. is 10 gigabits, Australia is currently building (it claims) a National Broadband Network at great expense that promises a blistering 12 to 100 megabits per second at the top end I know it mentioned "state of the art", but the vast majority of Americans would be lucky to get 100 megabits without breaking the bank every month. Many (most?) don't…

Yup, I live RIGHT outside of City borders of Durham, NC, where Google Fiber is coming, Frontier is putting up Fiber, and AT&T is putting up fiber. My max available speed? 24mbps DSL for $50 a month. Even though TWC says they are in my area, when they drive to my house they say they can't do anything for me, and I doubt Google, Frontier, or AT&T are going to be able to do anything for me.

Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#19

Post by qzervaas »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #16

> In an age where the state of the art broadband to the home in the U.S.A. is 10 gigabits, Australia is currently building (it claims) a National Broadband Network at great expense that promises a blistering 12 to 100 megabits per second at the top end I know it mentioned "state of the art", but the vast majority of Americans would be lucky to get 100 megabits without breaking the bank every month. Many (most?) don't…

Many (most) of Australians don't even have the option of 10 mbit.

When the new NBN is rolled out, most will have the option for 25 Mbps. This plan is due to be completed by 2020.

Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#20

Post by hartror »

regecks wrote: post #4
andrewstuart wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key point of the blog post is that any tech company that succeeds in Australia does so purely on its own two feet and that governments are at best mildly supportive of technology and at worst actively hostile. Turnbull destroyed the fibre to the home NBN and I can't see high speed ubiquitous Internet access coming any time soon. Imagine if 95% of Australian home - including ones in the country areas - had super h…

I really don't understand the NBN meme. I've worked for small tech companies in Australia my entire (not so long) career, and access to high internet speeds has never ever really been a problem. When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? Yes, regional areas should be upgraded from dialup/slow sattelite to at least 10mbps. What kind of impact will that have wrt the OP…

I've worked in Melbourne in small tech companies for almost 15 years and have setup a few offices in my time. The biggest issue in finding and setting up a new office for a small tech company is the internet connection.

One office the ADSL worked fine for the first week and then dropped out for a week. It did this every time it rained heavily, the Telstra techs informed us that the copper for the whole street was rotten. We had to run local servers to ensure everyone could continue working if the internet dropped out. Telstra never actually properly fixed it in our two years there.

Another office took 3 months to get connected due to the age of the building, we had to pay two office rents for over 4 months. Then once the company grew to fit the office it outgrew the internet connection, but took another couple of months to get dual band in. All the SaaS services everyone relied on to do their jobs were barely usable, even after a `no streaming media` honor policy was put in place.

This is amplified if you rely on your internet connection for VoIP to communicate with teams around Australia and the world. Important meeting with a client? Keep a 4G modem handy guys.

All these things create risk and frustration for everyone, slowing down your and distracting from getting stuff done.

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