Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable • Hacker News Board

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#91

Post by Juliate » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:54 AM UTC

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).

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#92

Post by flurdy » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:54 AM UTC

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…

> Atlassian to start fresh with a new ticketing system

They bought Trello for that

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#93

Post by angrygoat » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:55 AM UTC

codeyperson wrote: post #79

ArnoVW wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What network effects does MSWord have?

Everyone else is using it to write documents, email around drafts, collaboratively edit via OneDrive; sure you can use an alternative, but nobody will want to see a format but .docx, so your alternative is almost guaranteed to be worse than or equivalent to Word. If your alternative stuffs up the document's formatting you become seen as a pain in the neck. So it's just easier to use Word.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#94

Post by yellow_lead » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:55 AM UTC

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.

At my old company, they had two annoying jira workflows management wanted to tie in to the dev process

1) When the user wants to merge to master, at least one of the commit messages must reference a valid Jira ticket.

2) A Jira plugin was installed such that when tests were run in CI, a jira ticket was created to record the result (pass/fail). This somehow ticks a SOC compliance box

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#95

Post by jansan » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:55 AM UTC

I am by no means an expert in the valuation of companies, but I understand primary school level math.

If Atalssian has a revenue (not profit, revenue) of $2.95 billion, how on earth can the stock market capitalization be $162 billion? If that was the profit, there would be a yearly interest rate of 2% on the stock value, which is pretty good in today's financial market conditions, but it is the revenue of a 20 years old company that never had a positive PE. What is the expectation of the market? A new killer product? Total dominantion of the issue tracker market (which btw also includes Github"? I do not get it.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#96

Post by spion » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:55 AM UTC

jpalomaki wrote: post #33

gaff33 wrote: post #12

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

I like both JIRA and Confluence. I think many bad feelings towards JIRA are actually related to bad configuration. Like customizing the issues to add too many mandatory fields or creating a process that does not really match how people are working in practise. JIRA configuration is pain. Unless you are large enough to afford a dedicated JIRA admin, it would likely make sense to just pay for somebody once in a while t…

I was keeping a list at a previous company:

- default text size is too small, text block widths are often not constrained enough getting the "slashdot unreadability effect"

- 0.5s+ lag when clicking any textbox

- 1s+ lag when clicking any dropdown

- 1s+ lag delay when grabbing and trying to drag-and-drop to reorder items in the backlog

- 2s delay when clicking in an issue in the backlog before the loading starts (add about 2s more for the loading itself)

- "Link issue" using a hyperlink icon. The whole idea of using the word "link" to talk about related issues without spending some time to think whether that's really confusing with hyperlinking

- Error messages about what "might" be wrong with things rather than what is actually wrong: "We couldn't save your comment, it might be empty or have invalid formatting". Well which one is it? Did you really have trouble deciding whether my comment is empty or not? Be specific and tell me what exactly is wrong, or do you want me to binary-search / bisect myself?

I think most of the issues can be fixed by completely rewriting the frontend.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#97

Post by xienze » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:55 AM UTC

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…

> Confluence is actually fine, although also not exactly fast...

It still doesn't have native Markdown editing, does it? Major issue IMO.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#98

Post by baud147258 » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:58 AM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #76

ArnoVW wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The network effect of Jira is obviously at the department level; dept. head A mandates Jira. User B gets moved to new dept. C, we need some sort of project management tool - hey B what did you use when you were working for A, oh A likes using Jira, I didn't like it much but it's ok I guess. Ok folks, let's use Jira! Dept. Head A moves to Dept. D, hey everyone we are going to start using Jira. Dept D. is being merged…

another network effect of Jira is that it's usually set up using AD, so once it's installed and configured, anyone in that org can go and look around without having to create an account.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#99

Post by tluyben2 » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:58 AM UTC

We have tried many things and jira is just the most future proof. The others all fall short of with this ‘do one thing and do it well’; that is great but life is dynamic so that one thing doesn’t fit growing companies or small companies (depending on what you use). Like someone said before, you can run small teams with basecamp, but when you go into the 1000s of devs and other skills that all need to be managed on different levels over different skills and departments, it won’t work while in jira it does. Some people will say; use basecamp for the small teams and other solutions for managing; sure but then people have to switch environments or you are making custom stuff on top. Why if jira already does that? And you can also build those custom things on the jira rest api by the way.

It is not great but the rest is just not any better (as far as I have seen that is!).

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#100

Post by century19 » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 9:59 AM UTC

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.