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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

#61

Post by maccard »

zelos wrote: post #20
jakub_g wrote: post #6

> While it is still used by many tech businesses (including the author’s), it has no real network effect — that is, users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost (other than the initial hassle of switching to a new system). Lol. At some companies, Jira workflows literally run the whole company. At my prev job, prod deployments were tightly linked to Jira.

Yes - JIRA is almost a textbook example of lock in. Moving a large company's workflow would mean months of disruption.

Any tool has lock in. How much work do you think would be involved in moving from perforce to git, or from Bamboo to CircleCI?

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#63

Post by threeseed »

Juliate wrote: post #47
threeseed wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thought of running a 10,000+ development team using Basecamp is hilarious in its insanity. Because that is where Jira primarily plays. In enterprise companies where it's rolled out across the organisation with tentacles firmly embedded into almost every process and system. And whilst people continue to criticise Jira it continues to grow because in reality it competes with products like Rally not Asana. And there…

Indeed Jira scales a lot (although being slow) and is well customisable and flexible. Its plugin system is also great (although a better documentation of how to develop/maintain one, and of their APIs would grealy help). But in the meantime, it requires increasing discipline and regular revampings of internal processes across dev, product, market teams, and that's a lot of energy to burn to make it "work" across an o…

Which is why Jira continues to sell so well.

You simply can't force one way of working on larger companies even if that way is undisputedly the right way. Because a lot of people will need to sign off on which tool to purchase and each of them are special geniuses with their own special genius way of working.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#64

Post by ArnoVW »

jakub_g wrote: post #6

> While it is still used by many tech businesses (including the author’s), it has no real network effect — that is, users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost (other than the initial hassle of switching to a new system). Lol. At some companies, Jira workflows literally run the whole company. At my prev job, prod deployments were tightly linked to Jira.

While it is true that Jira is "sticky", the statement was that it did not have a network effect.

MS Word, Facebook, WhatsApp, Visa, they all have network effects: every user you add makes your product more compelling, thus creating a virtuous circle. You need to buy their product because other people have their product.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#65

Post by sebmellen »

zozbot234 wrote: post #53
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…

Phabricator is quite great, many FLOSS projects rely on it.

Unfortunately Phabricator is no longer actively maintained.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#66

Post by Aachen »

dvh wrote: post #26
throwaway4good wrote: post #7

I didn't realize that they were unprofitable; not good. I don't think they should be valued as a pre-profit/pre-revenue growth stock - as the article says - the product doesn't really have network effects or strong lock-in.

Isn't "unprofitable" just a newspeak for "managed to carefully adjust financials to not pay any taxes"

This is what I'm reading the comment thread for. Unprofitable on paper, or unprofitable as in a shareholder is footing the bill personally for no apparent reason all these years?

Because at this size and age company, that seems unlikely, you'd have to be very rich already to be able to fund such a thing for so long, and have very strong belief ("any day now!") to not cut your losses all this time.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#68

Post by madeofpalk »

gaff33 wrote: post #12

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

I don't mind Jira. We're using Github Projects (because for OSS project where people report issues to the repo) and while new Projects has gotten significantly better, I do still miss some of the planning views that Jira gives you.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#69

Post by pmontra »

mr90210 wrote: post #46
mr90210 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've tried YouTrack from JetBrains, and I've found its UX quite bad. I've used Asana, Trello, Microsoft (they had/have a tool for project management), Github Project. None of them seemed to work as well as Jira. (My opinion).

I remember that Jira had a kanban board or something like that. It was almost 10 years ago. If it still exists and you're using it, give a try to Kanbanize. It's something that I almost really liked to use. The team bootstrap was done by a guy that really knew it well and kept managing and coaching for months. No idea what it would look like to start using it from scratch.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#70

Post by j45 »

gaff33 wrote: post #12

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

I have learned a lot of the hate towards jira including my own is the difference between a well setup config vs a bad one or where many people are, using it out of the bud.
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