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Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

smartcompany.com.au

241–250 of 515 posts

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Atlassian's largest source of income is almost certainly the US.

And even if Australia is unaffected by an American recession, much of Europe, and much of Asia won't be (especially with China's growth slowing down).

Which brings me to my second point, which is the only reason Australia was able to avoid a US recession was selling itself to China, something which it is politically unlikely to do so anymore (although I'm not up to date on the new PM's China policy) and anyways, China may not have the capacity or willingness to support Australia anymore.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#242
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…

> I like to call Confluence a knowledge cemetery [...] Spot on from my experience using it in big orgs. The issue IMHO is that organization of knowledge is not following any system and/or no system that could be followed was ever set in place by the organization when they bought into Confluence. It's kinda like ordering an Airbus because they're a reliable plane. Then you sell tickets and everyone is board of course…

> If organizations using Confluence had at least one full time "Wiki Master" position or the like (with resp. superpowers), this wouldn't have to be like that.

I think part of the challenge is finding and retaining this person. It takes a fairly unique kind of person to want/enjoy a (let's be honest) thankless job like managing and maintaining a huge corporate wiki.

Finding good tech writers or information science professionals has always been a difficult task in any company I've been at.

Documentation and wiki writing ends up being side-of-desk work for someone else, and so of course it never gets maintained.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#243
post #124
post #12

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

I like Confluence. It does the job and is simple to use. I use it at home for general household stuff and projects. At work we are using a combination of notion and gitlab wiki and are probably going to move to confluence. Gitlab wiki is especially hard to use and thus stuff is under-documented. eg I'm a little project right now, we could use about 20 pages to document bits of it, this is such a pain in gitlab wiki.…

Jira is a mirror. You're a corporation with policies. When you look into the mirror you see yourself.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#244
imho Atlassian's problem is that they failed to capture a critical mass of SaaS services for software development. Everyone uses GitHub, which provides a (crappy) bug management system. Everyone uses Google Docs which is arguably better than Confluence for most purposes. Perhaps not coincidentally both these services are owned by companies that make their money from other things so they can afford to dump endless investment in making them better.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#245
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…

Linear is one of the best software products I have used in the last 5 years. I strongly recommend giving it a try instead of jira.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#246
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's a very good point. First time I've used Jira was in a company with 500+ employees, things such as hiring were managed through Jira as well.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#247
post #231
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...

Trello is also an Atlassian product.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Australia recessions are uncorrelated with US due to mining and other raw materials exports being a huge share of their economy... especially selling those materials to China.

I doubt miners are big Jira users. US tech companies who are cratering right now though...

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#249
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…

Pivotal Tracker.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 grew 30% last quarter compared to previous year. https://investors.atlassian.com/news/news-details/2022/Atlas... And their typical customers are the least exposed to recessions i.e. medium to large companies who are making software purchasing decisions for the long term.

Given their recent outage (that was this quarter right?) that is bonkers.
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