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Atlassian co-founder wants to buy Australia’s biggest polluter to make it green
- caaqil 5y agohttps://archive.is/j8TAU https://archive.is/j8TAU
- doctor_eval 5y agoI have to say, on the one hand Mike Cannon-Brookes seems like an upstanding guy who cares deeply about the environment. One the other hand, he helped create JIRA.
- ggm 5y agoI also have to use Jira and hate it, but I will continue to use it and forgive him much for this activism.
- rmbyrro 5y agoYeah, he could well purchase a controlling stake at Jira and shut it down ahead of schedule as well...
- smt88 5y agoI realize this is a joke, and that you're jokingly elevating Jira's user-unfriendliness to the "evil" level of active environmental destruction. But given how many genuinely evil SaaS companies there are, I think it bears clarification that Jira does not do anything more evil than being a shitty product that people are forced to use by their bosses. They are not, for example, potentially responsible for the eventual collapse of civilization (which cannot be said of the Facebooks and Googles of the world).
- dzqhz 5y ago
- rmbyrro 5y agoI think the difference is just a matter of opportunity, not merit. If Atlassian had the opportunity to become a Google-like company, threatening humanity's existence, as you suggest, Cannon-Brookes wouldn't have stopped it. He would in fact pursue it, become a trillionaire and then use a good portion of the money to do charity or green stuff to make it up for the evil he's done. It's what our culture tells people to do since Roman Christianity values were imposed mainstream. You don't have to do it right, just regret, donate your wealth and ask for forgiveness. The actors in the story have changed. There's no confessionals anymore, for instance, but the underlying story is the same...
- smt88 5y ago> If Atlassian had the opportunity to become a Google-like company, threatening humanity's existence, as you suggest, Cannon-Brookes wouldn't have stopped it. This is tantamount to saying, "All companies of equal size are equally evil." Or maybe it's: "No one has morals, given enough opportunity to become wealthy." While I think there is some sort of trend there, you have no justification to speculate that Cannon-Brookes is not an outlier. There are lots of people who are more moral than other, less-wealthy people.
- rmbyrro 5y agoWell, let's clarify two things. One is a fact. The other is an opinion. He wouldn't be able to stop it. That's a fact. Diluting himself by taking loads of VC, subjecting himself to a money-driven Board. He just wouldn't be able to stop it. You can argue he would have not pursued it, that he'd step out before his company became sort of an evil Facebook. My opinion is that the moment he accepted the fact above, it tells me he wouldn't step down. He'd profit from it. And later use the money for good causes to "compensate" and look good to society. I accept he could have been an outlier, just don't think it's remotely likely.
- lmm 5y agoHow do you figure that? Jira is absolutely the kind of slow drag that destroys civilisation. Facebook and Google make things that empower people, for good or ill; Jira makes it impossible for anyone to do anything. Personally I believe in the positive side of human agency.
- smt88 5y ago> Jira makes it impossible for anyone to do anything This is like arguing that pencils and paper are evil because Trello (or whatever) exists. Jira is slow, but it's faster than what people did before it. And I have efficiently built and shipped ~10 projects on Jira, so I know it's not that bad. I use ClickUp now, and Jira is maybe 5-30 seconds slower per action than Jira. It adds up to, maybe, 30 min of saved time per day across my whole team.
- lmm 5y ago> Jira is slow, but it's faster than what people did before it. That's not my experience. Most of what people do on Jira is stuff they just didn't do before; there's no benefit, only cost. > And I have efficiently built and shipped ~10 projects on Jira, so I know it's not that bad. Hmm, did you have access to edit workflows or something? It can be "not that bad", but the defaults and the way it nudges people mean it's bad unless you - or rather, all too often, the person above you - is making a serious effort to ensure it's not bad.
- go_prodev 5y agoWe've just switched from Jira to Azure DevOps. We run a global BI team and we're all really liking it. If you haven't seen it, it could be something worth checking out as it includes the board/wall, wiki, estimation, repos, build pipeline and lots of other stuff in one place.
- philliphaydon 5y agoWe went from a working Azure DevOps to Jira, now we have an absolute mess but upper management loves it despite it being less productive and causing more problems than it solves.
- doctor_eval 5y agoYep, JIRA is successful because The Boss Wants It. I’ve seen this repeatedly. No idea how Atlassian pulled that off. It’s not that JIRA is awful. It’s just that it’s not that good, and I don’t understand why it became popular, let alone Unicorn popular. But good luck to them. They got an outcome most of us only get to dream about. And MCB is at least (apparently) doing good with that money, instead of spending his fun time stealing land in Hawaii.
- sam_lowry_ 5y agoI wonder whether making Atlassian tools run some 20% more efficiently would make the world greener than this. IIRC one of the motivations Paul-Henning Kemp said to be having is to optimise software so that the world is greener. While Bitbucket has some good reasons to be a performance hog (better diffs), I can not say the same about JIRA nor Confluence.
- stephen_g 5y agoNo, not by a some orders of magnitude. AGL reported carbon emissions of 42Mtpa in 2019-20. According to [1], the combined carbon emissions attributed to all the datacenters in the US is 31.5Mtpa, so 75% of AGL's emissions. So even if Atlassian tools around the world used as much processing power as all the datacenters in the US (of course in reality it's orders of magnitude less), the carbon saving of a 20% reduction would only be 6.3Mtpa, or 15% of AGL's emissions. 1. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1
- xvilka 5y agoWell, you can't build a Java program that isn't resource hog. It should be ported to something natively compiled instead.
- ggm 5y agoEarly days in a longterm plan. AGL board rejected the takeover. I think shareholders know its a net negative longterm asset and the proposed (by AGL board) dismemberment is an attempt to get stranded assets ring-fenced. An observation I've read online is that MCB can wait 6 months and rebid for less, the future for AGL is very rocky. If the liberal government lose power in the coming federal election their assumptions about price support are toast. Coal powered electricity has been in decline since the 5 minute bidding came into law, and before. It's also horrendously unreliable now.
- Gustomaximus 5y ago> An observation I've read online is that MCB can wait 6 months and rebid for less Problem is then the company may have split (as they are planning), or locked in that process. He doesn't want to buy half of AGL is my understanding, he wants it as a whole. The price has been on the decline for some time though who knows where it goes next: https://www.marketindex.com.au/asx/agl https://www.marketindex.com.au/asx/agl
- dkjaudyeqooe 5y agoThey can take a controlling stake, stop the split, then issue a takeover for the rest, but they're unlikely to need to, the shareholders have already voted with their feet.
- roenxi 5y agoThe coal price [0] is completely out of control. When there is that much money on the table, it is impossible to have any impact by buying a company and shutting down coal fired plants early. AGL is more at risk of shutting their coal plants down because they can't afford the coal than because of any boardroom activism by M C-B. Although I would be buying coal mines if I had that sort of money. Not to shut them down, but to get rich. [0] https://www.barchart.com/futures/quotes/LQ*0/historical-prices?orderBy=contractExpirationDate&orderDir=desc https://www.barchart.com/futures/quotes/LQ*0/historical-pric...
- yakshaving_jgt 5y ago> Although I would be buying coal mines if I had that sort of money. Not to shut them down, but to get rich. …If you're rich enough to be buying coal mines, aren't you already rich?
- 5y ago
- senectus1 5y agoHe's going where the profits are... its a long term view and he's right on the money I suspect.
- MichaelZuo 5y agoControlling stakes in large public companies typically go for at least 25% above the trailing 52 week average. This wasn’t a serious offer, instead they are probably aiming to get media attention and traction for a long boardroom battle ahead.
- stephen_g 5y agoBear in mind though that this is a company whose share price has dropped 66% in value over the last 5 years and is down 21% in the last 12 months. They're trying to re-structure at the moment, so this presented another option to shareholders.
- dkjaudyeqooe 5y agoThey're only worth about $5B AUD, so 25% in USD is $0.9B which is not a lot.
- MichaelZuo 5y agoI know, which is why the offer seems suspiciously low. The bidders easily have access to more than that + original bid in cash.
- zelphirkalt 5y agoYou may call me sceptical, if my face gets wrinkles, when I think of the combination of Atlassian, one of the worst offenders in terms of CPU load when loading any page of their platform, be it Bitbucket, Jira or the Atlassian wiki, and therefore energy waster, is to buy a big polluter, to "make it green". Perhaps Atlassian should focus on actually getting their software in order first, and become greener that way.
- sjaak 5y ago26 MiB to view a Jira ticket. 120+ http requests.
- baud147258 5y agoit must have gotten worse with the more recent versions, it only too 4 MiB and half as many request on jira ver 6.4
- stephen_g 5y agoAGL is responsible for 42Mtpa of carbon emissions (2019-20). That is more by a decent margin than the combined GHG attributed to all the datacenters in the United States (31.5Mtpa according to [1]). 1. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1
- Aeolun 5y agoI think they literally can’t change it now. People depend on all Jira’s and Confluence’s failure modes. Better to build an entirely new product from scratch.
- dav43 5y agoI’d love to see some hard numbers on the “sun cable”. At a high level it seems like the biggest pie in the sky bullshit.
- rswail 5y agoWell, they've got serious investors and serious money at stake. Why is the concept of long distance HVDC cables, large energy storage and reusing flat, sunny land to generate power seem to be "pie in the sky"?
- derriz 5y agoThere were a bunch of projects like this (Xlinks in the UK, a big German one and a few others) based around the idea of generating solar electricity in northern Africa and selling into Europe via HVDC cables under the Mediterranean. What has killed these projects (although Xlinks are seemingly still releasing press releases on a regular basis) is the radical shift in the relative prices of the components. Laying HDVC cables under the sea was and remains expensive while the price of solar PV panels has dropped by nearly 90% in a decade. As a result, the economics don't really add up any more. The capacity factor for a typical solar PV panel in northern Africa is about double that of one sited in northern Europe. But this increased efficiency cannot be exploited. It's now significantly cheaper to simply install twice as many PV panels in the north of Germany than install half the number of panels in the Sahara AND build 1000km of transmission to get the electricity to the markets in northern Europe. There are other disadvantages also; the energy security is much worse - having transmission lines passing through a bunch of other countries - some of which are politically unstable. Also sub-sea interconnectors take years to provision - you might be looking at a decade long project while siting the panels locally means a year or couple of years project at most.
- xvilka 5y agoMatter of the capacity though. You could cover half of the Sahara with panels. You can't cover half of the Europe with panels.
- tomas789 5y agoThis sounds good but probably isn’t. Let me explain. The demand for power in Australia doesn’t get any lower by shutting down a power plant. The only thing that will happen is that the other power plants will ramp up to keep up with the demand. A true solution would be to provide new installed capacity to the grid that would price out the existing assets. And if the new capacity is less CO2 intensive than you lowered the emissions. Question is what is that other source? If generation of the renewables is lower than peak load (times a reasonable factor like 1.5) than you build renewables. Otherwise you focus on bringing power from hours with lots of renewable generation to the rest of the day aka you build energy accumulation. If the accumulation solution is too expensive (either CAPEX or OPEX) than you have to invest in lowering that down. If you lower that down with your money, it will become more favorable for others to build this solution around the world. Others will come and build this solution of yours. This way you effectively lowered way more emission for the same money (assuming you will come up with something reasonable).
- roflc0ptic 5y agoI just somehow doubt that they're bright people throwing billions of dollars around on this plan without having thought of that.
- ageofwant 5y agoThe infrastructure in place at the old - soon to be decommissioned - power stations are to be re-developed for storage of the every increasing supply of renewables. Australia has one of the highest uptake of residential PV and its massive potential in solar and wind generation for the generation of hydrogen and ammonia has triggered a significant investment in renewables. FFI https://ffi.com.au/ https://ffi.com.au/ a subsidiary of Fortescue, Australia's third largest iron miner, is investing billions in renewables in Australia today.
- ryaniscool 5y agoMore in-depth coverage at the Sydney Morning Herald website. Also not behind a paywall. https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/brookfield-cannon-brookes-launch-bid-for-agl-to-accelerate-coal-exit-20220220-p59y25.html https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/brookfield-cannon-... https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/agl-rejects-cannon-brookes-brookfield-s-takeover-bid-20220221-p59y5w.html https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/agl-rejects-cannon...
- sfc32 5y agoAn admirable project, and it's great to see a tech billionaire trying to do something like this. A major barrier can be seen in the infamous "lump of coal in parliament" video. Scott Morrison is Australia's current Prime Minister. https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2017/feb/09/scott-morrison-brings-a-chunk-of-coal-into-parliament-video https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2017/feb/09/scott-m...
- suprjami 5y agoIt would be more admirable if Atlassian weren't a $5B company with a history of paying zero tax. I consider this at best a decent attempt at making amends (assuming tax dollars go towards the greater good, which they largely do in Australia), and at worst just virtue signalling for something which was never going to happen in the first place.
- sfc32 5y ago> It would be more admirable if Atlassian weren't a $5B company with a history of paying zero tax. I couldn't agree more. I've always paid my taxes, not that I had a choice.
- codewithcheese 5y ago$75B according to market cap
- throwaway_4ever 5y agoTaxing revenue is silly. Atlassian has made no annual profit, losing money every year by investing gross profit into the Australian economy. This is Australias chance to have power in the global tech environment and you’d be foolish to gimp them by penalizing their investments into hiring employees. Do you want a dollar now or ten dollars in a decade when you’re taxing their big tech profits? Or you could just tax people buying a used car for 9k, fixing it up, selling for 10k, at 10% of revenue…
- webmobdev 5y agoI am sceptical - I think this is for some crypto mining scheme with web 3 bullshit thrown in.
- tengbretson 5y agoThis is about as laudable as removing someone's cast from their broken arm early just because you "believe in the future."
- sleepingadmin 5y agoWhat a brilliant dude. This is the correct approach.