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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

#431

Post by WorldMaker »

JamesBarney wrote: post #404
theturtletalks wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamentally, why would someone buy a stock of a company that doesn’t eventually make a profit or offer some sort of dividend? Seems like Atlassian traded profit for staying power, but can they leverage that staying power to bring value to their investors?

The idea is they'll eventually get purchased, or have a profit and dividends. But if you're growing so fast it makes sense to focus on that over profitablity. Most investors would rather have a 1.40, next year than a dollar today.

Directly related to that, if the expert they hired to the board that led them in this direction was from Great Plains it useful to note that Great Plains exited by being bought by Microsoft.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#432

Post by dreadlordbone »

ProAm wrote: post #348
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linear and Asana are far better. I refuse to work on any project using Jira. It’s the first question I ask in interviews.

Asana is hot garbage. As much as I dislike Jira, Asana could be argued as worse.

As someone who's thinking about moving my company from Clubhouse/Shortcut to Asana, can you tell me why it's bad?

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#433

Post by ProAm »

dreadlordbone wrote: post #432
ProAm wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asana is hot garbage. As much as I dislike Jira, Asana could be argued as worse.

As someone who's thinking about moving my company from Clubhouse/Shortcut to Asana, can you tell me why it's bad?

We tried to implement it 3 times and performance was horrid. Bad enough to have us give up and move to a different platform. I have not used Clubhouse or Shortcut.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#434

Post by Ancalagon »

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…

ClickUp

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#435

Post by pm »

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 a confusing mess. It tries to be the centre of your universe without doing anything particularly well. It copies features verbatim from other software and then slams it in as a new "view". The coding doesn't seem to be up to scratch either, e.g., updating a value won't always update it everywhere it's displayed. It's very hit-and-miss.

I had a look at Asana again for non-software project management after dismissing it 8 years ago when trying to use it, and was pleasantly surprised: it's much more opinionated than it used to be, a lot slicker, and it integrates with everything I use.

I also use Linear for software development, and won't ever look back.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#436

Post by wizofaus »

lelandfe wrote: post #216
s-lambert wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anyone know why they called it that though? Much of its key functionality has nothing specifically to do with DevOps, and I somewhat doubt it really supports everything DevOps (in an Azure world) requires...

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#437

Post by ibeckermayer »

dalbasal wrote: post #284
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 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…

Hmm, good analysis.

This phenomenon might to some degree be a function of the board’s veto power over the CEO. A primary reason you typically go public is to grow, so by default at IPO you’re a “growth stock”. But from that point on, its difficult to ever make a transition to a steady, sustainable “dividend stock”, especially as a tech company. If you try to, the stock will tank, all the “growth” investors will get mad and you (the CEO) will probably get fired by the board, and they’ll bring in a new “growth” CEO.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#438

Post by adventured »

mbesto wrote: post #400
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…

> They're revenue now is just a $2bn And has been growing 30% YoY for the last 3~4 years alone. This is unheard of in any other industry/market. Their FCF is also impressive.

> growing 30% YoY for the last 3~4 years alone. This is unheard of in any other industry/market.

It has been common for the leaders in every other market throughout commercial history, as it pertains to corporations of large size. What you're looking at are presently old industries and comparing them to newer, that's where your mistake rests.

Walmart did it. Sears did it. Kmart did it. Best Buy did it. US Steel and its components did it. The various automobile majors did it. Standard Oil and the other oil majors did it. General Electric did it. Caterpillar did it. Pan Am did it. Many of the railroad companies did it during their time. McDonald's, Starbucks and most large chains do it during their expansion->saturation phase. Coca Cola did it.

It's exceedingly rare to find a large corporation that didn't bang out 30% growth years for a decade or more to get as big as they got.

One day, decades from now, "cloud" will look like a big dead industry too, and people will talk about how it never grows fast. Just ask the people that used to make business software you install onto PCs.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#439

Post by wizofaus »

logicchains wrote: post #373
throwamon wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean literally Windows' Notepad? Because that's about the worst app to write on. Not even going to go into how it's almost devoid of useful commands. Make one mistake, you're good. Make two, tough luck, you can only undo once. Accidentally select some (or all) text and type over it then somewhere else? Today's really not your day. It's actually worse than textboxes in this respect. This happened to me more times…

>You mean literally Windows' Notepad? Because that's about the worst app to write on. It's actually one of the best on Windows, because if you leave your computer for a moment and it randomly decides to restart to install a Windows Update, often a notepad with unsaved changes will block it from restarting, whilst unsaved work elsewhere won't.

Vs Notepad++ that simply autosaves in that case? Only problem there is when you realise you have 50 tabs of scratch data you were expecting to have been discarded by now but are all still loaded up next time it starts up...

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#440

Post by Supermancho »

dalbasal wrote: post #417
cptskippy wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> What kind of a 100 year future does Atlassian have?

We're talking about a company that produces products that are widely used. JIRA is not the issue, but the company that produced it. 100 years is stretching it, but I would believe that Atlassian outlasts yahoo.

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