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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

#231

Post by exyi »

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…

It depends on how you define "better". I'd say that anything else I used (github/gitlab issues, asana, trello, even a spreadsheet) works better *for me* - i.e. it is faster and easier to find things in a small team. I only add things or focus on one issue and then remove it. I still don't understand why mid managers love it, but I guess they have different use cases than me...

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#232

Post by gshulegaard »

muhaaa wrote: post #115

Author writes that Atlassian has no network effects. That is BS. Atlassian has massive network in its ecosystem. There are Jira Consultancies, 3rd party apps and plugins and deep integration into customers processes. If one element grows the whole ecosystem profits. Secondly, Atlassian is not a bad company just because it's stock is overpriced. It might be a bad investment! Over the short and midterm Atlassian is in…

I think you might be confusing upselling and cross selling with network effects. Upsell is when you convince a customer to purchase additional service, like offering different tiers of subscriptions. Cross selling is where you sell adjacent services related to (and that possibly integrate with) the original service.

Network effects are where the direct value of a product grows simply because the number of users increases, causing the network itself to grow. The classic example are social networks. The more people on your social network, the more people are likely to join your network and less likely to join a smaller competitor. I am not sure there is anything in Atlassian’s product offering that quite fits that description, but that isn’t to say there isn’t plenty of upsell and cross sell opportunity as you describe.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#233

Post by sumtechguy »

jnwatson wrote: post #193
square_usual wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of how much human effort is being wasted on Jira !

It is just a ticketing system with a very robust business process engine. Most complaints I’ve heard about Jira boil down to the horrible processes people choose to implement in it.

Thats the rub too. Jira setup in a simple way is what most people need. Yet you get process people in there and suddenly you have 50+ fields to fill out before you can even start working on something. Then another 20+ fields to fill out to close out a ticket. I went from taking 2-3 hours total to plan out a sprint, to it taking 3-4 days and many meetings. And no one can tell me how these fields are used day to day, what are they trying to solve, and how it was better than what we had. If I wanted to do waterfall I would not be having 2 week sprints and this process would be wildly different.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#234

Post by exyi »

zac23or wrote: post #177
nickjj wrote: post #134

Somehow I'm not surprised. A few days ago[0] I was writing a Jira ticket after hitting the "Create" button and I wrote the description (the body of the ticket) for ~30 minutes. I switched the ticket type from A to B (no epics involved) and it wiped out the entire description. All I did was select a different item in a select drop down box provided by the form's UI. There was no warning it would clear the description…

I never write anything in any web interface. I write in notepad and copy and paste. I had many bad surprises ... I can't trust web interfaces. And I use the Windows clipboard manager too.

It had never happened to me except for Confluence and Microsoft Teams. Firefox even preserves the typed text between reloads of the page - so unless the web app hacks the textarea somehow, the text will stay there.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#235

Post by nikau »

consp wrote: post #198
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…

> Confluence is actually fine. Every time there is an update I wonder what feature they removed or is broken. I still cannot properly add images in lists or continue the numbering in a new list to work around this "feature". They also broke markup/down import which is another kind of hell.

Last update we had resulted in markdown only being imported if you paste it into the document using shift-insert, ctrl-v didn't work for some reason, can only assume they want to kill it off.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#236

Post by ickyforce »

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.

I haven't used them for real but (briefly) evaluated with the intention to maybe replace Jira, about a year ago.

Space wasn't there yet. IIRC the main issue was lack of a way to set custom fields via API, or some weird restriction around that. My general impression was that it was promising but too immature at that time.

For any Jira competitors reading this - start with providing 2-way sync between your product and Jira instance. It would make moving away from Jira soooo much easier! The current state is that even importing Jira data is below what I'd expect - e.g. Linear (last time I checked) didn't import comments at all and all issue IDs were changed to new ones. Really, if there's FOO-123 in Jira it's table stakes for it to be also called FOO-123 in the new tool.

I wrote a tool to migrate an issue tracker to Jira which imported everything as expected and updated links in issue descriptions/comments to keep their integrity. It took few days for a one-time migration so I'd expect someone who builds a business in this area to just have that as a baseline. It's sad how bad the "import from Jira" journeys are.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#237

Post by digitalsushi »

gaff33 wrote: post #12

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

Anyone using these products has no choice, so, I would say that these products having any API at all that can cobble together automation is a huge blessing.

We have wrapper functions that allow us to automate all the painful interactions with atlassian software. None of them are clever in any way; they're rote. But without them, we weren't using the services fully, which is sophomoric since we don't have freedom to use other services.

I can't defend the slowness though!

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#238

Post by EvanAnderson »

RHSeeger wrote: post #209
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…

> Confluence is actually fine Confluence is the single, worst Atlassian product, in my opinion. I describe it as a wiki written by someone who has never used a wiki. It seems like everything about it is wrong in some way, and it's painful to use.

I've been recently forced to use Confluence and I'm blown-away at how horrible the editor is. It feels like it's a beta-level product. For what it costs I'd expect it to be on-par with, say, Mediawiki and it's just not.

Footnotes? Ha! https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-68553

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#239

Post by londons_explore »

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…

> Switching would come with a lot of effort.

I think you misunderstand the way some companies work... Some companies, a VP will send an email saying "As of next week, we will use Asana instead of Jira. Jira will be deleted, so copy anything important off it now. NO EXCEPTIONS!"

Sure, there will be mayhem for a couple of weeks, but the migration will be successful. The VP will have one more thing to put on his 'done' checklist.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#240

Post by ickyforce »

asteroidbelt wrote: post #220
zxspectrum1982 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Jira has a search bar which seems ok-ish. Except that I have to wait 10s after I open Jira for the search bar to start working because it's probably the last thing to become interactive after a page load :|
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