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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

#471

Post by leokennis »

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…

Personally I think that, at least for larger/enterprise customers, JIRA is the option that for every major feature is at least not the shittiest.

Other solutions might be better than JIRA in A, but absolutely suck in B. JIRA is “sort of shitty” in everything, but the worst in nothing.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#472

Post by lmm »

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.

> 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?

If you don't go the unsustainable blitzscaling route you'll be outcompeted by those who do, just as Atlassian did to plenty of smaller, more sustainable competitors.

> 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.

That's nice, but that doesn't make it go away. Do you have a plan to make the regulation non-lax?

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#473

Post by smcleod »

subpixel wrote: post #184
smcleod wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I much prefer GitLab with Issues + Kanban, it's super fast, lightweight but has enough features and it gets out of your way.

GitLab’s valuation is pinned on charging enterprise customers for a system that replaces Jira and is more closely aligned with devops. The problem is you can’t much go ala carte - you have to go all-in.

I agree licensing / costs have become less attractive especially at the lower end, VC funding ruins so many software companies - I hope they can overcome it.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#474

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

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…

I've never seen people use software like Jira and similar software correctly.

I mean:

- Actually caring about the difference between task and user story

- Meaningful / accurate card descriptions

- Keeping information up-to-date on TODO lists and comments

- Projects and milestones that make sense

- Task status and workflows that make sense (besides TODO/DOING/DONE)

Nowadays, I would rather have project management software with the minimal amount features that can't be misused.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#475

Post by pertymcpert »

felixnm wrote: post #452
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 can understand your frustration, and there should be some warning, but this is not a bug. Every issue type is configured with its associated issue-create screen and that screen has its fields. When you change the issue type during issue creation you're replacing one set of fields with another which results in the information loss you experienced. This just doesn't affect the description field, but all other system…

It's a UI bug. It should warn you if there are non-trivial amounts of text in fields that would be overwritten by a state change.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#476

Post by ASalazarMX »

RC_ITR wrote: post #412
ASalazarMX wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

While I agree with your statement, I had to look that up because it sounds interesting. In 1999, the year Salesforce was founded, Siebel was the dominant player in the CRM field, holding 45% of the market, so not precisely a small company.

More than a budget war against a deal-with-the-devil startup, what killed Siebel was its inertia. Siebel sold expensive in-your-premises software, while Salesforce sold SAAS, and emphasized a cheaper cloud model. Siebel didn't react until 2003(!), when it released its first cloud version. By tht time, the expertise of cloud solutions of Salesforce made Siebel look like an amateur.

Siebel surpassed 1 billion revenue in 2000, while Salesforce did it until 2009. They had their chance.

I still agree that even if a small company did everything right, another one with more money and no fear of heavy losses would eat their lunch even if their product was inferior.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#477

Post by technion »

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…

> full time Jira jockeys in the form of project managers

I find that a funny description because I've worked with many many different full time project managers who always took the view that putting data in Jira or equivalents and pulling reports before the project meetings were entirely a technician's job.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#478

Post by Ferrotin »

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.

What is wrong with having a small mediocre business:

1. Companies provide useful products to customers.

2. Growth means that you built products that more customers paid more money for, because it was useful.

3. Thus, growth means your company contributed more to human prosperity.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#479

Post by Ferrotin »

time_to_smile wrote: post #468
mbesto wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> And has been growing 30% YoY for the last 3~4 years alone. Growing revenue while still not making a profit is not impressive. If you give me $100 today I can go out a buy $100 a pair of new shoes, and sell it for $70. Give me $200 and I'll go out and by two pairs of shoes and sell them for both $84 (total)! Keep giving me money and you'll continue to see this growth I promise! > This is unheard of in any other indu…

> Growing revenue while still not making a profit is not impressive.

It is when you’re a software company and the marginal cost of the goods is zero.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#480

Post by RC_ITR »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #476
RC_ITR wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Salesforce vs. Siebel being a great example of exactly that. While I agree with your statement, I had to look that up because it sounds interesting. In 1999, the year Salesforce was founded, Siebel was the dominant player in the CRM field, holding 45% of the market, so not precisely a small company. More than a budget war against a deal-with-the-devil startup, what killed Siebel was its inertia. Siebel sold expensi…

I'm not arguing with you, I just like talking about this, because Siebel himself has engaged in a huge disinformation campaign about what happened (he wanted to save his reputation and eventually launch c3.whatever). I've even personally listened to him bitch about HBS/GSB case studies about Siebel.

>In 1999, the year Salesforce was founded, Siebel was the dominant player in the CRM field, holding 45% of the market, so not precisely a small company.

Sure, but CRM was a new market back then (many argue that Siebel invented CRM) and Siebel was roughly equal in revenue scale to Peoplesoft and c. 10% the revenue scale of Microsoft. It would be very hard for anyone to argue that they ran out of space to grow (vs. choosing to slow down growth for profitability, especially in light of the dot-com crash)

>More than a budget war against a deal-with-the-devil startup, what killed Siebel was its inertia. Siebel sold expensive in-your-premises software

One great way to stop being an expensive piece of software and to grow faster is to lower your prices (but then you run the risk of becoming unprofitable).

Also worth noting that in 2000, Siebel spent c. 33% of revenue on Sales and Marketing, while Salesforce chose to spend 500%+ of revenue in the same period.

>while Salesforce sold SAAS, and emphasized a cheaper cloud model. Siebel didn't react until 2003(!), when it released its first cloud version.

Again, Seibel chose to spend 13% of revenue on product development in 2000. Easy to crush competition, but only if you're willing to spend for it.

>Siebel surpassed 1 billion revenue in 2000, while Salesforce did it until 2009. They had their chance.

Exactly, and choosing to harvest profit out of that $1bn of revenue too early is what did them in (though arguably, they are still probably something like $1-2bn of market cap for Oracle).

Seibel is and always will be the perfect example of disruption/the innovator's dilemma, which ultimately boils down to 'if you're comfortable with your current profits and not worried about growing top-line revenue, you will likely lose both.'

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