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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

#411

Post by bonestamp2 »

slap_shot wrote: post #307
tarsinge wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that choosing to be unprofitable is a strategy that maybe worked (or just was fashionable) the past decade under very specific circumstances (lot of free money chasing higher returns in a context of very low rates), but otherwise obviously makes no sense, it's antithetic to the very idea of a business. It's not to be confused with the sane version that is reinvesting profits for growth instead of distr…

> but otherwise obviously makes no sense, it's antithetic to the very idea of a business. How does it NOT make sense? The purpose of a business like this is not to generate some short term profit. These are winner-take-all markets - they're playing for complete and utter domination of an entire product category. Their Q1 revenue grew 37% YoY - how on earth would you care about profit over what they doing here? They s…

Yep, exactly what UBER is doing and what Tesla has found themselves doing with high spending on their Texas and Berlin Gigafactories. It's a short term pain for domination... expand fast and be the market leader in every country before someone else beats you to it. Then, soak in the profits.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#412

Post by RC_ITR »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #382
dalbasal wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that growth is better than profits was in-built into Atlassian's proposition to shareholders, ultimately. The slow and steady mentality is fine, but we see over and over that it isn't what the market wants. A private company or a high risk growth company, those are the two options for a software company. Either that or they'll be taken over. They're revenue now is just a $2bn, so that "grow grow" mindset fro…

What's wrong with having a small or medium company? Why must a company sell its soul for the chance of becoming a money-printing behemoth in the future? I understand that being small leaves you vulnerable to the predatory tactics of big players, but I see that as a consequence of lax regulation. There are too many mono/duopolies already, and the bigger they get, the harder it will be to split them apart.

Well, it is fine to be a small enterprise, but unless you have a huge moat, you run the risk of a different growth-at-all-costs competitor (not necessarily a giant) coming in and vacuuming up all your customers.

Salesforce vs. Siebel being a great example of exactly that.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#413

Post by dalbasal »

geodel wrote: post #369
dalbasal wrote: post #183

This article's finger is on the right place, but IMO the analysis is off. Netflix, has recently excited the fundamental/rationalist investor camp. The huge valuations hot tech companies enjoy must eventually be justified by a "Thiel Monopoly." That's the only way to earn the 20%-50% margins that Google/Apple/Meta can achieve. Netflix sells a cheap consumer product. One product among several similar options. Consumers…

> The companies who pay them aren't price sensitive, and they are locked in enough. I doubt this is true lately. I have seen even more critical ticketing system like ServiceNow/Cherwell/Remedy getting replaced. We replaced Slack with other chat software because of licensing cost. Big companies are not price sensitive seems like old theory. Because I am seeing in so many large companies increasing license fee is causi…

I didn't mean that lock-in is absolute. I mean that this is not netflix. Customers don't hop around for fun.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#414

Post by wronglyprepaid »

tacitusarc wrote: post #387
new_here wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linear.app is awesome. We switched from Jira and our team's participation on issues went through the roof. It's fast, clean, has keyboard shortcuts and replaces agile terminology with simpler, familiar paradigms. We activated Slack, Sentry and GitLab integrations too. It's a beautiful piece of software to use and part of the reason we chose it was to inspire ourselves to try build something of similar quality in our…

I hate how the elegant simplicity behind the agile development principles was so thoroughly co-opted by scrum, so now when people think “agile” they actually mean scrum but have no idea that’s what’s happening.

I hate how when people say scrum they really mean something which is not well defined and you end up with some weird system that only some "scrum master" understands and that they seem to be making up as they go along.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#415

Post by BoorishBears »

res0nat0r wrote: post #405
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…

There are lots of alternatives out there looking for marksetshare. I've not personally used ClickUp but it looks fantastic just from their screenshots: https://clickup.com/features https://clickup.com/blog/jira-alternatives/

ClickUp is the first piece of software to confuse me before I even used it.

Their intentionally obtuse marketing all over NYC would drive me insane. Then one day I had a natural reason to stumble upon it, it was had literally nothing to do with what the advertising implied, and the interface was so deeply overwhelming that I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

Like an almost anxiety inducing level of overload from the moment I tried to use it.

Maybe it's great if you live in GANTT Chart Burndown Land, but generally you want something that everyone can use, not just your PMs.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#417

Post by dalbasal »

cptskippy wrote: post #397
dalbasal wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that growth is better than profits was in-built into Atlassian's proposition to shareholders, ultimately. The slow and steady mentality is fine, but we see over and over that it isn't what the market wants. A private company or a high risk growth company, those are the two options for a software company. Either that or they'll be taken over. They're revenue now is just a $2bn, so that "grow grow" mindset fro…

> but we see over and over that it isn't what the market wants. What the market wants is short term growth and I firmly believe that is what is destroying our economy and the market. Instead of building pillars and companies that outlive the founders, we have short term cash grabs. We have VC firms buying up our existing pillars, gutting them of any valuable assets, saddling them with debt, and then selling off the c…

Perhaps, but I think on this instance... this short-termist mindset has a basis.

What kind of a 100 year future does Atlassian have? Jira certainly isn't a 100 year product. Software is so fast... IDK. The pox is not just a product of greed and malice and nothing.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#418

Post by marcosdumay »

foobiekr wrote: post #393
marcosdumay wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's actually bad to be profitable when you're growing VCs love risk. They will want to dramatically reduce your chances of a small positive outcome if it means a increase on your (always small) chances of a huge positive outcome.

VCs love _technical_ risk. Outside of the very unusual circumstances of the Zero to One capital-funded-monopoly-theory era, they have considered _business_ risk quite toxic.

Hum... Quickly investing all your money into product development creates what kind of risk? I'm having a hard time separating them.

Anyway, that can quite possibly be perfectly aligned with your company's goals. It's not a bad or good thing. It's just a thing.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#419

Post by BoorishBears »

steveBK123 wrote: post #308
ratww wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My fave thing about Jira is how between the tool & it's plugins, you can roll up all sorts of views for management reporting purposes. Despite this, exactly zero shops I have worked do management believe their managers will understand those views. Therefore at a weekly/monthly/quarterly cadence, "someone" (dev leads) have to spend hours hand updating some horrific excel view of project statuses for big management to…

Absolute worse part of Jira.

Twice now I've worked at places that used Jira, and all it takes is one corner of the company to leverage it for some random oddball purpose to make it painfully slow.

One place started using it for managing thousands of assets, and eventually they were paying contractors tens of thousands to optimize their JIRA instance and untangle the mess.

Same thing is happening at my current company, where even in the last few months it's gotten painfully slower.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#420

Post by steveBK123 »

notjustanymike wrote: post #317
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…

While I miss the ability to create epics, I would say is an Asana otherwise wonderful replacement for Jira.

Jira almost has too many hierarchy options / flexibility. Epics, Milestones, Initiatives.

No two firms, and often within a firm.. no two teams has a similar definition / system in how they are used.

My last manager it was like a sniff test / definition of art thing. Constant arguments about epics being too granular or not granular enough. Bumping tickets up or down the hierarchy was hell and lead to many many hours of wasted efforts.

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