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Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

smartcompany.com.au

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Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#141

Post by rob74 »

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…

> ...and have huge knowledge bases in Confluence.

I like to call Confluence a knowledge cemetery - in the huge datasets you have in mind, finding the page you are looking for is more a matter of luck than anything else. And once you found it, you can never be sure if it's still up to date.

> Anyway, they have 8000 employees... they can always drastically downsize and refocus, the company will be around for a while.

I'm actually wondering how they can not make a profit with the huge corporate user base they have?

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#142

Post by raverbashing »

threeseed wrote: post #63
Juliate wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed Jira scales a lot (although being slow) and is well customisable and flexible. Its plugin system is also great (although a better documentation of how to develop/maintain one, and of their APIs would grealy help). But in the meantime, it requires increasing discipline and regular revampings of internal processes across dev, product, market teams, and that's a lot of energy to burn to make it "work" across an o…

Which is why Jira continues to sell so well. You simply can't force one way of working on larger companies even if that way is undisputedly the right way. Because a lot of people will need to sign off on which tool to purchase and each of them are special geniuses with their own special genius way of working.

For real, I don't think it's all about "each special snowflake's way of working" but there are legitimate needs that change

Each team can have a different workflow with Jira

Jira works for non-software-development tasks as well

I've seen it used on companies having 4/5 levels of stories deep (think Initiatives/Epic/Stories/Subtasks/etc. Different companies split this different ways.

The plugins sound inconsequential but they are very useful (almost a must) in several occasions.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#143

Post by matwood »

ramraj07 wrote: post #71
mr90210 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The functionality of JIRA is great. It's the UI that feels slow and clunky.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#144

Post by zelphirkalt »

No wonder, given the "quality" of the software they deliver.

They claimed to support Markdown in Confluence – It does not work as good as any decent Markdown parser you can install in any mainstream programming language and does not understand, that within Markdown there can be HTML, for example for heading link targets and TOC. Same for Bitbucket. What are they doing? Letting interns code incomplete Markdown parsers and deploying them for everyone to haunt them with subpar quality parsing? The thing cannot even render a readme.md file correctly in Bitbucket.

Everything is slow to no end, downloading 20+ megabytes (no joke, no exaggeration!) for displaying a friggin git repo and the files list.

Wiki pages that the search function lists suddenly become unreachable.

WYSIWYG editor on Confluence is still a joke and annoying to no end.

Any technical person, who has ever used any decent alternative will run for the hills, before using that unholy combination of software, that is Atlassian. Jira is probably still the best among the bunch of utterly bad experiences and its UI is just terrible. Cannot find anything easily there.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#145

Post by zac23or »

> That is, CTOs and CPOs loved Atlassian’s revolutionary Jira product so much, it was able to grow virally and organically without the business having to spend millions of dollars on an enterprise sales team.

Here people talk a lot about creating a good product, code quality, etc. It doesn't matter. You don't need to build a great product: you need to find the market and exploit it faster than you can. The quality of your product is not important.

How is Atlassian with so many bad products is valued at $52 billion? Jira is one of the worst products in the eyes of developers. But it does not matter. Managers love Jira because with Jira it's "very easy" to create a workflow and micromanage everything. And managers decide what's good for the company, they have the power to buy Jira.

But Jira is not Vilain. The villain is the school of management through fear, micromanagement, etc. I worked at a company that created an internal JIRA. It's worse than Jira. It was too complex to fill everything, we create a script to do this.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#146

Post by Sebb767 »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #122
ramraj07 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mainly it's slow and the UX makes everything painful.

I'm using Jira, too, and I don't think its slow. It actually works quite well and has loading animations for longer tasks, so it never feels laggy. Sure, it's not vi-levels of navigation speed, but it never bothered me. The UX works for me, too (although it took me a bit to learn it, to be fair).

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#147

Post by SilverBirch »

jansan wrote: post #95

I am by no means an expert in the valuation of companies, but I understand primary school level math. If Atalssian has a revenue (not profit, revenue) of $2.95 billion, how on earth can the stock market capitalization be $162 billion? If that was the profit, there would be a yearly interest rate of 2% on the stock value, which is pretty good in today's financial market conditions, but it is the revenue of a 20 years…

I don't think it's crazy. You're valuing the company as a mature dividend paying company - one that is paying out to share holders the profits it makes, not investing further to grow. But that's not a reasonable way to value Atlassian, they're a growth company.

I think the expectation of the market is pretty simple, Atlassian grow by 30%+ YoY for the foreseeable future, which isn't totally unreasonable, and that their costs aren't going to scale with that growth because they're a software business.

If they grow 30% YoY for the next 5 years they'll be pulling in $10Bn in revenue, and maybe sales scale proportionally so call that 25% of revenue, R&D stays more or less flat at $1Bn - let's double it to $2Bn to be generous, Administrative stays fairly nominal at 500m. Hey presto, you've got a company with a tidy $5Bn annual profit. Discount that back to todays prices and that doesn't sound crazy. And all that is assuming is that Atlassian is fully matured in 5 years and not still growing.

To be clear, this is all just very hand wavey numbers, but it's not totally incredible.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#150

Post by bamboozled »

rob74 wrote: post #141
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…

> ...and have huge knowledge bases in Confluence. I like to call Confluence a knowledge cemetery - in the huge datasets you have in mind, finding the page you are looking for is more a matter of luck than anything else. And once you found it, you can never be sure if it's still up to date. > Anyway, they have 8000 employees... they can always drastically downsize and refocus, the company will be around for a while. I…

I remember loading it today and just cursing about it, it sat there for 5 seconds before anything happened...it's a freaking wiki...
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