Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable • Hacker News Board

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#71

Post by ramraj07 » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:39 AM UTC

mr90210 wrote: post #38

sien wrote: post #28

So with Slack there is Mattermost and Zulip. What are the equivalents for Jira ? Is there an openish source piece of similar software ? Jira cops a lot of hate on HN, but really to paraphrase Churchill on Democracy - "Jira is the worst issue tracking software, except for all the others". The comparison on Wikipedia has so many of them : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_s... Are any of them a…

As a programmer, I actually like Jira. It works.

Yeah. I mean it has enough management options for projects and I really don’t have any complaints. Not sure what everyone’s hating about.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#72

Post by ramraj07 » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:42 AM UTC

yobbo wrote: post #45

> Combined with employing more than 8000 people, this means that Atlassian is unprofitable In 1991, Microsoft had 8000 employees. It was producing DOS, Windows 3*, Office, OS/2, tools and compilers. Windows NT was in development. They did not use Jira. I think the main feature of these tools is to make people, who would otherwise be unproductive, feel and look productive. Maybe those people are managers that should n…

The actual lines of code in an OS has balooned exponentially. Of course we can’t discount the abilities of the average software engineer in the 90s vs now. I’d guess back then you had to be fairly driven and smart to be employed there, which is not necessarily true anymore. If you have a pulse and can barely pass fizz buzz you’re employed with 200k salary, so yeah.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#73

Post by perlgeek » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:43 AM UTC

gaff33 wrote: post #12

Does anyone actually like using JIRA? Or Confluence? Or any of the Atlassian products?

I use Jira at work with a workflow that is highly customized to our development workflow, and I like using it.

There are some annoying aspects, but it's way better for our workflow than anything else I've tried (which includes github issues, gitlab issues, OTRS, RT, trac and a few others I've forgotten by now).

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#74

Post by TrackerFF » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:45 AM UTC

It is very fair to ask oneself - where will Atlassian be in 10-15-20 years? JIRA is slow as molasses, and ripe for disruption. It Atlassian themselves won't do it, others will try.

In the end - if you're an investor that's exposed to Atlassian, these things do matter. And the article is being fair on that point - do you think Atlassian is worth what it's worth, and if so - why? If the answer is "customer lock-in" and "no real competitors yet" well, plenty of companies in the yesteryears were also in that spot.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#75

Post by hoseja » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:46 AM UTC

jakub_g wrote: post #6

> While it is still used by many tech businesses (including the author’s), it has no real network effect — that is, users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost (other than the initial hassle of switching to a new system). Lol. At some companies, Jira workflows literally run the whole company. At my prev job, prod deployments were tightly linked to Jira.

Funny how the network effect is rephrased in terms of cost of switching, instead of the more benign word of mouth etc.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#76

Post by bryanrasmussen » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:46 AM UTC

ArnoVW wrote: post #64

jakub_g wrote: post #6

> While it is still used by many tech businesses (including the author’s), it has no real network effect — that is, users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost (other than the initial hassle of switching to a new system). Lol. At some companies, Jira workflows literally run the whole company. At my prev job, prod deployments were tightly linked to Jira.

While it is true that Jira is "sticky", the statement was that it did not have a network effect. MS Word, Facebook, WhatsApp, Visa, they all have network effects: every user you add makes your product more compelling, thus creating a virtuous circle. You need to buy their product because other people have their product.

The network effect of Jira is obviously at the department level; dept. head A mandates Jira. User B gets moved to new dept. C, we need some sort of project management tool - hey B what did you use when you were working for A, oh A likes using Jira, I didn't like it much but it's ok I guess.

Ok folks, let's use Jira!

Dept. Head A moves to Dept. D, hey everyone we are going to start using Jira.

Dept D. is being merged with Dept. E, Dept and new Dept. Head J is joining. E is using some open source Kanban solution based on CouchDB, hmm, let's go to Jira - other departments are also using it and then we can get rid of the CouchDB thing!

In point of fact where network effects of Jira is concerned, I have put some effort into learning JQL and setting up my own dashboards, so when you give me one of the competitors I get grouchy. I prefer Jira or Trello - also owned by Atlassian iirc?

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#77

Post by vogt » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:47 AM UTC

It's tough for me to square with the JIRA hate. I don't mean to simply be contrarian here, I have limited (<6 months) experience. But the alternative horrors I've been forced to use - like Rally or a couple internal tools that were highly neglected - I can't imagine it's really _that_ bad...

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#78

Post by hoseja » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:47 AM UTC

maccard wrote: post #61

zelos wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - JIRA is almost a textbook example of lock in. Moving a large company's workflow would mean months of disruption.

Any tool has lock in. How much work do you think would be involved in moving from perforce to git, or from Bamboo to CircleCI?

Not if there is an open protocol with multiple conforming implementations.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#79

Post by codeyperson » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:47 AM UTC

ArnoVW wrote: post #64

jakub_g wrote: post #6

> While it is still used by many tech businesses (including the author’s), it has no real network effect — that is, users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost (other than the initial hassle of switching to a new system). Lol. At some companies, Jira workflows literally run the whole company. At my prev job, prod deployments were tightly linked to Jira.

While it is true that Jira is "sticky", the statement was that it did not have a network effect. MS Word, Facebook, WhatsApp, Visa, they all have network effects: every user you add makes your product more compelling, thus creating a virtuous circle. You need to buy their product because other people have their product.

What network effects does MSWord have?

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#80

Post by zeusk » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:49 AM UTC

zelos wrote: post #50

zeusk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I helped a prior employer move to github and asana through JIRA's own APIs. It's actually not that hard and the entire engineering group was very cheerful of the change.

Really? Was it easy enough to define mappings between all the various fields/ticket types etc? I guess you could do it per-team across an organisation. It always seems hard enough to get information out of JIRA using JIRA when I watch our PO in planning meetings.

Yup, there was some mess around inexact mapping so we had our own conflict resolution and definition of what and how to interpret respective fields.

Honestly, JIRA easily has one of the most sluggish and horrid developer experience so the bar wasn't too high to begin with. Visual Studio Online / Azure DevOps is far better than JIRA ecosystem imo.