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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

#261

Post by blntechie »

century19 wrote: post #100
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 worked for a large department in a large bank that changed from Jira to MS Teams Scrum, as the new licence for Jira was too much. No way that it had as many features as Jira, but it worked fine, maybe was simpler. So it ain't nonsense, users do switch.

We used TFS in 2010 to create issues and stories and development workflows and i remember it worked fine with no major complaints. Especially as a full VS shop ,it even had very good integration for everything which can be done inside the Visual Studio itself. We eventually moved to JIRA though couple of years later.

I believe that TFS product evolved to Azure DevOps now.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#262

Post by hnbad »

> Atlassian’s prospectus noted that in 2015 the business grew by 48%, around double this year’s growth.

If Atlassian is 20 years old now, that means it was over 10 years old (~13) then. Atlassian was an enterprise service company at that point already. What kind of enterprise service company can be expected to maintain a 50% year-over-year growth for nearly a decade? If that's "around double this year's growth" that means they're still growing by 20-25%. That's impressive.

I'm not saying the valuation correction is wrong or that the claims they're unprofitable are unfair, I'm wondering what made anyone think they'd perform better than they have in terms of growth if that growth is already impressive. They sell enterprise services ffs and they're the gold standard outside e.g. Sharepoint.

Maybe the problem isn't their growth rate itself, but attempting to build the business model on an unrealistic growth rate.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#263

Post by stonecharioteer »

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…

A company I worked for before used Redmine. It was easy to use, had a great API and was quite fast. Open source as well, unless you wanted to pay for a custom installation, which went by the name of EasyRedmine.

I use Linear these days, and that's great too. But for a small company? I'd recommend Redmine.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#264

Post by acdha »

mr90210 wrote: post #38
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…

As a programmer, I actually like Jira. It works.

My main annoyances with the Atlassian suite are mostly the bugs: for example, they have 3 different parsers for their wiki markup which aren’t fully compatible, and none of them are as good as Markdown. They’ve had years to do QA but…

The only thing I see in Jira as an actual gap is the inexplicable lack of a standard view for showing all of the tickets in a particular sprint. You can make custom queries, of course, but it’s such a common need which everyone else on the market solved in 1.0.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#265

Post by arcturus17 »

nemo44x wrote: post #215
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?

In a way it isn’t because no revenue at all can excite the imagination infinitely more than underwhelming revenue.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#266

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

sumtechguy wrote: post #233
jnwatson wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, w…

Feudal-like political jockeying for power produces this nonsense. I've been beleaguered with such nonsense for most of my 28-year career, working in 3 Fortune 250's. It certainly doesn't help that JIRA is designed to be flexible enough to be all things to all people for all purposes. And that's why CIO's love to buy it.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#267

Post by blntechie »

Juliate wrote: post #91
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…

> It might be advisable for Atlassian to start fresh with a new ticketing system. That, kind of like Mozilla started fresh with Firefox, would indeed be a killer move (edit: provided they _can_ structurally do so).

They need to go the way of Telegram and build parallel products themselves and let the better one prevail after some time. Basically build your own competitor in-house.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#268

Post by ratww »

steveBK123 wrote: post #255

Jira is an interesting product everyone loves to hate. It has the do-whatever-you-want configurability to fit anyones SDLC. Really its a software product that allows you to mirror your organizational structure. That said, 99% of software projects I have been on could be managed with a simple Kanban board like Trello (which they now own). Unless your firm has staff who are full time Jira jockeys in the form of project…

It's kind of amusing: I've seen a few times developers rebelling and moving to whatever other random tool (Atlassian's own Trello, Pivotal Tracker, Github's thing, stickers on the wall) as soon as a hardline PO/PM left the job. Only for JIRA to return when another PO/PM that "really really needs the reporting features" (but didn't really use them) was hired.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#269

Post by dimgl »

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…

I used Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) for a while. It was a huge breath of fresh air coming from Jira. But I'm not sure how much of that was that I despised Jira more-so than I loved Clubhouse.

I started using Linear recently and I can never go back to Jira. Linear is that good.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#270

Post by wartijn_ »

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.

I also prefer to write my stuff offline and than paste it to a web interface. That works great, until you write markdown and paste in into Confluence. Instead of just accepting markdown and formatting it in the same way it does when you type markdown, Confluence puts it between code tags..

Jira does this better, but is still weird with their text formatting. There are two different kinds of input fields, one of them accepts markdown, the other one some other kind of markup language. Copying some formatted text from one of the inputs to the other doesn't work because of this.

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