Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable • Hacker News Board

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#101

Post by vbezhenar » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:59 AM UTC

gempir wrote: post #52

gaff33 wrote: post #12

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

Jira? Yes! Properly self hosted with skilled SysAdmins which don't allow every employee to install their favorite plugin. Then it runs fast and reliably. The UI is very configurable and has many power user tools, like their search is very good and has so many features. The Language for writing text is bad and sadly not even the same on other Atlassian products. Please just let me write markdown. Confluence is another…

I just checked and self hosted Jira is $42k/year. Not cheap.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#102

Post by calineczka » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:59 AM UTC

the_duke wrote: post #54

> users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost That's just plain nonsense. I dislike using Jira as much as anyone, mainly because it's so excruciatingly slow. But there is no competing product (suite) that offers comparable functionality and provides the same long-term flexibilty. Many companies have built entire workflows (not just development related) around Jira, an…

Jira is slow and Confluence too. I 120% agree. It's the biggest issue for me. The longer the page in Confluence the worse it gets. I use it for weekly meeting notes and every 2 quarters I need to start a new document because editing the current one causes the CPU to go brrrrr.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#103

Post by ejb999 » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:59 AM UTC

the_duke wrote: post #54

> users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost That's just plain nonsense. I dislike using Jira as much as anyone, mainly because it's so excruciatingly slow. But there is no competing product (suite) that offers comparable functionality and provides the same long-term flexibilty. Many companies have built entire workflows (not just development related) around Jira, an…

>>But there is no competing product (suite) that offers comparable functionality.

But not everyone needs 'comparable' functionality - an awful lot of people use just some features and not others - because of the awful UI and terrible user experience, these people are ripe to be picked off by a competitor (existing or future). I agree, if a mega-corp is completely in bed with JIRA, its harder to switch, but for a company not making any money (Atlassian), having their small and medium sized customers peeled off bit-by-bit for better products is going to hurt.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#104

Post by livinglist » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 10:02 AM UTC

iddan wrote: post #90

mr90210 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried YouTrack from JetBrains, and I've found its UX quite bad. I've used Asana, Trello, Microsoft (they had/have a tool for project management), Github Project. None of them seemed to work as well as Jira. (My opinion).

For us Linear ( https://linear.app/ ) was much much better than all the competition

Two startups I’ve worked for uses Linear as well, but is it really scalable though? Like is there any big company (200+) using Linear?

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#105

Post by yunohn » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 10:03 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.

>> with minimal cost (other than the initial hassle of switching to a new system)

The first part does not realistically connect to the second part. Surely the author is aware that switching to new systems is actually quite expensive monetarily and operationally - definitely not “minimal”?

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#106

Post by zeusk » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 10:04 AM UTC

TrackerFF wrote: post #74

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…

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM they said.

How is Oracle doing these days anyway?

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#107

Post by ryanackley » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 10:05 AM UTC

Worked there from 2008-2013. So early-ish employee here. I still have a chunk of shares from the original ESOP program. Saying that for full disclosure because I'm biased and this feels like a hit piece to me.

When I worked there, they disclosed all financials in our internal Confluence site. There was a policy of full transparency with the employees. The owners (Mike and Scott) had impressive business discipline. They were profitable every quarter. They had many many opportunities to get vc money and go wild. When they finally took VC money, It was a modest amount ($60M I think) and the purpose was explained to us as setting up an ESOP program and putting Atlassian on the path to go public.

A year or two later, Doug Berman, the founder of Great Plains software became chairman of the Atlassian board. He gave a presentation to all of the employees at the Sydney office. One thing that stood out was that he said, it's actually bad to be profitable when you're growing. I'm paraphrasing here but he essentially said, you're leaving growth on the table. His thesis was growth is more important than profits.

So whether you agree with that or not, that is obviously the idea they are operating on rather than uncontrolled spending and helicopter dropping stock on employees heads out of desperation.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#108

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 10:05 AM UTC

the_duke wrote: post #54

> users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost That's just plain nonsense. I dislike using Jira as much as anyone, mainly because it's so excruciatingly slow. But there is no competing product (suite) that offers comparable functionality and provides the same long-term flexibilty. Many companies have built entire workflows (not just development related) around Jira, an…

[deleted]

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#109

Post by jokethrowaway » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 10:06 AM UTC

the_duke wrote: post #54

> users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost That's just plain nonsense. I dislike using Jira as much as anyone, mainly because it's so excruciatingly slow. But there is no competing product (suite) that offers comparable functionality and provides the same long-term flexibilty. Many companies have built entire workflows (not just development related) around Jira, an…

You don't need most of those comparable functionality AND you can get decent UX

Simply put, Atlassian sucks at building products because their culture is not good. They got lucky they had the right idea when they were young and didn't have competition.

Nowadays there are just better products out there.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#110

Post by jokethrowaway » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 10:10 AM UTC

ryanackley wrote: post #107

Worked there from 2008-2013. So early-ish employee here. I still have a chunk of shares from the original ESOP program. Saying that for full disclosure because I'm biased and this feels like a hit piece to me. When I worked there, they disclosed all financials in our internal Confluence site. There was a policy of full transparency with the employees. The owners (Mike and Scott) had impressive business discipline. Th…

The article talks about this. The problem is that growth is not there.

What you're left is a company with 8000 employees and a system to problematic to change.

With the recession incoming, the time for free money is over and tech startups are bound for a correction. I'd sell or get ready to wait 10-20 years.

Even in the wait scenario, you're basically hoping that a huge corporation will transform itself and rediscover their startup roots - which is not likely to happen.

It happened with Mashape (sold their unprofitable marketplace to the RapidAPI people - geez, what a bad deal, it was painful to watch) and they managed to reinvent themselves with Kong.

They literally did a bunch of experiments and went on with what succeeded, ignoring their main, flawed, business model.

That's what companies should do to chase success, they need to act like venture incubator, don't bother their teams with corporate BS and hope one of their teams will succeed. If they behave like mammoth corporations they're doomed to fail.