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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

#211

Post by arcturus17 »

zac23or wrote: post #145

> 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…

> That is, CTOs and CPOs loved Atlassian’s revolutionary Jira product so much, it was able to grow virally and organically

> 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 really haven't disproven that CTOs and CPOS loved the product initially, which I believe to be true.

So yes, you do need to build a great product at the beginning. Then at enough scale, your product can become shit in some ways, and you can focus on sales.

But the article's thesis is that Jira did not start as a shit product.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#212

Post by matwood »

codeyperson wrote: post #79
ArnoVW wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Every contract I've received or sent for red-lining uses Word and change tracking. I'm sure exceptions exist, but every lawyer I've dealt with uses Word as the defacto standard for contract negotiations.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#213

Post by astrange »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #110
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 rediscove…

Atlassian isn't a US company, and if the US is going to have a recession (which I think is doubtful), Australia certainly has a good record on avoiding them.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#214

Post by silon42 »

calineczka wrote: post #102
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.

Why not use a page per meeting?

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#215

Post by nemo44x »

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 character Russ Hanneman on the TV show “Silicon Valley” took it a step further stating that having no revenue to speak of makes a company more valuable. It’s satire…but is it?

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#216

Post by lelandfe »

s-lambert wrote: post #179
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).

Microsoft's project management tool is Azure Dev Ops (used to be called Visual Studio Team Services), I found it pretty comparable to JIRA for the most part.

I used Azure Dev Ops at my last job! I thought it was fine – though I think some aspects of it weren't intuitive (maybe an unsolvable problem for a PM tool). Our team standups occasionally included someone discovering a useful Dev Ops feature that was simply hidden too well.

But the tool felt fairly fast and did it's core job pretty well.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#217

Post by zeusk »

threeseed wrote: post #208
zeusk wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM they said. How is Oracle doing these days anyway?

Oracle revenue is up 5% at $11.8 billion and they have a strong and growing presence in the Government Cloud market. So really not doing too badly at all. https://investor.oracle.com/investor-news/news-details/2022/...

That 5% is below annual inflation, so it shrank in real terms.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#218

Post by furry-worry »

williamcotton wrote: post #200
rob74 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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…

Pre-coffee early morning spitballing so be kind… But what about storing documentation as flat files in version control? What about even storing tickets as flat files in version control?

If the entire company was just you and me, that'd be very tedious but otherwise fine. But even software companies have non-software people on their staff, who are less likely to know how Git works, but can spot some problems we developer folks can't see. We'd want them to tell us about it, but if we add too many hurdles they won't.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#219

Post by lmm »

yardstick wrote: post #11
encryptluks2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Massive pile of garbage is more like it. As a developer, the only thing slowing me down from getting work done was waiting on JIRA and being told to use the crap they call Confluence to document things.

What do you recommend instead? JIRA & Confluence seem to be the best of a bad bunch. I do miss the self-hosted option.

Trello was good, although it's quickly being run into the ground.

Mediawiki is a pain to maintain but nothing else comes close.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#220

Post by asteroidbelt »

zxspectrum1982 wrote: post #168
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…

I have never tried the JetBrains' alternatives (Youtrack, Space, etc) but considering everything from JetBrains is usually very good, I'd like to hear from someone who has.

YouTrack search bar compared to Jira endless clicking in filters is day and night.

But I didn’t use Jira for years. I hope I never will. To the degree, I’ll need 20% more pay for comparable job if they use Jira.

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