27 ms·

Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

579 points by zillionize 4y ago

ronhav3 4y ago
Only 'unprofitable' in GAAP terms.It has a very healthy Free Cash Flow margin. And it still a 7x return from IPO. All-in-all, a great success story. (Whatever one thinks of Jira the product)
- altdataseller 4y ago
  Thats the only measure of real profitability - GAAP. Free cash flow includes stock based compensation. Thats a real expanse and turns negative cashflow to positive. But it dilutes existing shareholders, you would like to see positive cashflow EXCLUDING stock based compensation
  - ronhav3 4y ago
    If GAAP is the only measure, then Amazon and Salesforce have been utter failures for 20+ years, only returning 120,000% and 4000% returns to shareholders. In fact, if an investor went by GAAP, he would have missed the entire massive SaaS boom of the past decade.
    - altdataseller 4y ago
      Did i say these companies were failures? I simply said they were not profitable.
JB_Denton 4y ago
I notice that the share price started to plummet just after the announcement that they would be dropping support for On-Prem customers. That's basically saying goodbye to most Australian Federal Government departments. I know we used tons of on-prem Atlassian stuff at my client and we ended up transitioning everything to ServiceNow.
cavisne 4y ago
> 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). Hilarious. Ticketing systems are very sticky, they are basically the original "no code" system, with years of business processes hacked into them, and users who are accustomed to every pixel of the UI.
raverbashing 4y ago
Atlassian did well in replacing the barren world that consisted of Bugzilla/Trac/etc (yuck) and worse closed-sourced offenders like the "Rational suite" (the worse pile of crap I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with) But yeah, somebody should create a Jira ticket for their lack of profitability
- indoorskier 4y ago
  "As an Atlassian founder, I would like to make money, so that I can sell and never look at a Jira ticket again" tag, estimate, assign, add to epic, put on next sprint
- captaincaveman 4y ago
  Well its not a cheap product, I suspect its just a massive knot of complexity and thus massively expensive to maintain and manage.
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Massive pile of garbage is more like it. As a developer, the only thing slowing me down from getting work done was waiting on JIRA and being told to use the crap they call Confluence to document things.
    - yardstick 4y ago
      What do you recommend instead? JIRA & Confluence seem to be the best of a bad bunch. I do miss the self-hosted option.
      - theteapot 4y ago
        README.md
      - mvonballmo 4y ago
        Honestly, Azure DevOps is a solid replacement. The integration is really good and the "Boards" software really feels like they're eating their own dog food. Their Wiki software is Markdown stored in a Git repo (unlike Confluence's mess). It's fast, permissions are relatively intuitive and fast, etc. It's worth a look if you're evaluating. JetBrains Space is another alternative, but I have no experience with it.
jakub_g 4y ago
> 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.
- zelos 4y ago
  Yes - JIRA is almost a textbook example of lock in. Moving a large company's workflow would mean months of disruption.
  - zeusk 4y ago
    I helped a prior employer move to github and asana through JIRA's own APIs. It's actually not that hard and the entire engineering group was very cheerful of the change.
    - threeseed 4y ago
      Be curious what the size of the engineering team and company was. Asana is great for SMBs but for larger developer teams it lacks a lot of features and integrations.
      - daniel_iversen 4y ago
        (Work at Asana so I might be biased) While Jira may have some unique features for developers, one of Asana’s selling points is how it allows non-homogenous teams (incl whole companies) to work together (and by themselves within individual teams) on a variety of different kinds of work (projects, processes, loose day to day tasks etc). And as for scale we have many customers with thousands of users (one tech customer of ours has 100,000+ users on Asana - most of them I’m sure would be product teams).
    - zelos 4y ago
      Really? Was it easy enough to define mappings between all the various fields/ticket types etc? I guess you could do it per-team across an organisation. It always seems hard enough to get information out of JIRA using JIRA when I watch our PO in planning meetings.
throwaway4good 4y ago
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.
- taurath 4y ago
  JIRA has huge feature creep lockin along the likes of sales force. It costs huge amounts of money on consultants to move off of it. Any new company probably wouldn’t use it though, it’s just overkill.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    Actually new companies do use it. It's very affordable for growing startups and its customisability is really useful.
  - maccard 4y ago
    > JIRA has huge feature creep lockin along the likes of sales force. Sure Jira has lockin, but so does any tool with any features. Git has lockin, but you don't hear of people avoiding branches in case they need to move to perforce. > Any new company probably wouldn’t use it though, it’s just overkill. So what should they use instead? The thing about jira is it does the basics well, far better than any of the competitors we evaluated. Sure it's not perfect, but no tool is.
    - KronisLV 4y ago
      > Git has lockin, but you don't hear of people avoiding branches in case they need to move to perforce. Replace Git with SVN in the comment above. Also replace Perforce with Git in the comment above. Then you have a viable argument and a story of mine that actually is a case of exactly that - back when project management for certain projects was done primarily in SVN, there was the expectation to stick to the popular way of laying out repositories, with folders for trunk, branches and tags, a bit like the example here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2611237/subversion-repository-layout https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2611237/subversion-repos... Of course, you didn't really need to do it that way and certain other projects explored other options, such as having features under the root of the repository, like "/ISSUE123" or something like that. Well, as time passed, it became apparent that SVN just wouldn't cut it (TortoiseSVN was such nice software, though) and that the projects would need to be migrated off of SVN and into Git, to import them into GitLab/GitHub or elsewhere. Those projects all still being in development and having the need to be trace back changes to particular feature requests/issues meant that all of the revision history would also need to be moved over. The problem with most of the migration scripts, however, was that they broke when you had a non-standard layout and as a consequence of that, you simply couldn't finish the import process and were stuck on SVN. Back then I actually resolved it by rewriting the history of those repositories into the standard format, but it was just a massive waste of time and a headache. Alas, a sentence like this would absolutely be false: > SVN has lockin, but you don't hear of people avoiding non-standard repo layouts in case they need to move to Git. So yes, despite there being certain features and the ability to do something, that doesn't immediately mean that you should jump right in and use them! I might also have a few horror stories about Git submodules, or maybe even using Git LFS with synchronized Git repositories across GitHub and GitLab (of course, the LFS contents weren't sent properly, so no binary assets were mirrored), as well as other such problems. If you can, stick to a stable, boring and predictable set of core features in any software package.
Existenceblinks 4y ago
That also ate a lot of small healthy business pie in the market. I have mixed feeling about this. Do you think a company's R&D worth sucking a chuck of opportunity for small companies? I don't believe the niche vs. mass is less overlap. Imagine the market where there were no excel/spreadsheet/word. The customers of the market is spoiled by cheap/free/network-effect-koolaid plans just for sake of growth.
iasay 4y ago
Well their old slogan of “because you’ve got issues” is looking ironic now.
gaff33 4y ago
Does anyone actually like using JIRA? Or Confluence? Or any of the Atlassian products?
- netmare 4y ago
  The only thing I used from them was their Mercurial hosting. That didn't go well...
- iasay 4y ago
  No. I’d rather go land skiing on concrete in my birthday suit.
  - keyle 4y ago
    That is oddly specific and rather appealing.
    - iasay 4y ago
      It comes from sitting in an Atlassian sales pitch meeting where I was thinking of less painful things to do with my time.
- Avalaxy 4y ago
  Yes, I like Trello. Although that was acquired.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    I think for the purposes of this question, your answer's more like 'no, I prefer that competitor'. (Hence the acquisition presumably, probably gained them not just the talent but a lot of mindshare and extant SME/startup business.)
- AmericanChopper 4y ago
  I liked it when I first switched to it from whatever was I was using ~2010 (Intervals, I think…). It still is somewhat better than a lot of task management/workflow software that you commonly find in enterprise. But it’s kinda just become another version of the thing it was supposed to destroy. The huge, complicated, bureaucracy management system.
sien 4y ago
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_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_s... Are any of them any better?
- 015a 4y ago
  Linear & Shortcut are both significantly better. Linear isn't even in the same realm as Jira in quality and productivity; its like comparing Excel to Jira, yeah you can make Excel work but you'd be out of your mind to use it for something like project management. Similarly, with the advent of Linear; you'd be out of your mind to greenfield on Jira. Why not spin up OracleSQL and write your app in C++ while you're at it? Gitlab & Github issues is also pretty solid. Lightweight, but it works for what it does. Asana is another decent competitor, though I don't tend to recommend them for project management. Its there though. I've organized some small software teams using Notion. Its surprisingly functional. The big downside is the lack of universal structure or a decent API to even build your own analytics against; great for the ICs, but not great for managers.
- dinvlad 4y ago
  Tbh, most of big enterprise software UI just plain sucks. I see this as a natural consequence of being too packed with features, to target the widest audience possible. Best software UX is made by smaller teams that dedicate themselves to solving one problem for a very specific niche. And once they grow, it all inevitably turns to sh*t. C'est la vie..
- mr90210 4y ago
  As a programmer, I actually like Jira. It works.
  - mrelliot 4y ago
    Considering the amount of money you pay to have it, "it works" is not even the bare minimum. Lot of things work. The problem with Jira is the total disregard for UX. Very simple tasks like moving tickets out of a story take way too many steps when it should take one click. They don't seem to want to improve it because of legacy customer or reasons....
yobbo 4y ago
> Combined with employing more than 8000 people, this means that Atlassian is unprofitable In 1991, Microsoft had 8000 employees. It was producing DOS, Windows 3*, Office, OS/2, tools and compilers. Windows NT was in development. They did not use Jira. I think the main feature of these tools is to make people, who would otherwise be unproductive, feel and look productive. Maybe those people are managers that should never have managed software development. Idk. (https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/microsoft_company.htm https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/microsoft_company....)
- Aachen 4y ago
  They also built pyramids without excavators but that doesn't mean it's not helpful. Just because old systems could be built without specifically using jira, by itself, is not an argument. You could make the same argument that, clearly, we don't need Java or JavaScript because we also got by fine on Fortran and C in the past. Without doing an actual comparison, it's just as silly an argument as the claim that these tools' main function is to make you feel more productive than you are.
  - yobbo 4y ago
    > They also built pyramids without excavators but that doesn't mean it's not helpful False analogy. The point here is that productivity in old Microsoft was far higher, and that the failing piece in modern development might not be the ticket system.
    - Aachen 4y ago
      > The point here is that productivity in old Microsoft was far higher That sounds virtually impossible to prove between unequal situations, and especially "far" makes it seem like an exaggeration / tall order (productivity between people isn't like wealth or popularity: some things change by multiple orders of magnitude, but how hard you can work doesn't, especially when averaged across thousands of employees), but to be fair I didn't read the whole fourteen thousand word source you added so I suppose I can't say for sure.
- 4y ago
the_duke 4y ago
> 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, and have huge knowledge bases in Confluence. Switching would come with a lot of effort. I will say that most of the Atlassian products are ... not great. Bitbucket has completely stagnated and is way worse than Github and Gitlab. They actually had an opportunity there. Once upon a time Bitbucket was the only site to offer free private repos, and it attracted a decent number of users to also publish open source there. A good amount of companies adopted it. But they let it linger and didn't keep up with Github or even Gitlab. Just like Jira it's also slow and awkward to use. (never do large PRs ...). I see a lot of companies switching away from Bitbucket now because developers are not happy with it. Bamboo ... meh Opsgenie ... meh Confluence is actually fine. If only it had better search and wasn't so slow... And Jira is so complex, improving it is probably extremely cumbersome because so many features have to be considered and everything has to keep working. It might be advisable for Atlassian to start fresh with a new ticketing system. Anyway, they have 8000 employees... they can always drastically downsize and refocus, the company will be around for a while.
- pdpi 4y ago
  > Once upon a time Bitbucket was the only site to offer free private repos And mercurial too. I do miss mercurial.
- _the_inflator 4y ago
  I agree. Jira is here to stay. It is like Excel - love it or hate it, but it has its use cases other products do not cover in total, only for certain cases.
- msoad 4y ago
  Maybe if they increase prices to satisfy Wall Street it will be replaceable.
- Juliate 4y ago
dodgerdan 4y ago
Same headline was run about Amazon. Revenue and costs will give you more insights.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
>But as we’ve since discovered, markets often get it badly wrong and the tech sector has rapidly corrected, gee, the markets were wrong but now they're right! Lucky that. - not that I think tech stocks aren't overvalued, just addressing the poor logic.
TrackerFF 4y ago
It is very fair to ask oneself - where will Atlassian be in 10-15-20 years? JIRA is slow as molasses, and ripe for disruption. It Atlassian themselves won't do it, others will try. In the end - if you're an investor that's exposed to Atlassian, these things do matter. And the article is being fair on that point - do you think Atlassian is worth what it's worth, and if so - why? If the answer is "customer lock-in" and "no real competitors yet" well, plenty of companies in the yesteryears were also in that spot.
- zeusk 4y ago
  Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM they said. How is Oracle doing these days anyway?
  - threeseed 4y ago
    Oracle revenue is up 5% at $11.8 billion and they have a strong and growing presence in the Government Cloud market. So really not doing too badly at all. https://investor.oracle.com/investor-news/news-details/2022/Oracle-Announces-Fiscal-2022-Fourth-Quarter-and-Fiscal-Full-Year-Financial-Results/default.aspx https://investor.oracle.com/investor-news/news-details/2022/...
    - zeusk 4y ago
      That 5% is below annual inflation, so it shrank in real terms.
vogt 4y ago
It's tough for me to square with the JIRA hate. I don't mean to simply be contrarian here, I have limited (<6 months) experience. But the alternative horrors I've been forced to use - like Rally or a couple internal tools that were highly neglected - I can't imagine it's really _that_ bad...
- gonzo41 4y ago
  It's not the worst at all, sometimes developers are like the cats that like to sleep in the box the new bed came in.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I just find most stuff works better via GitHub tickets. Let the managers use whatever tool they want and then put actual work on GitHub.
  - vogt 4y ago
    Yes, that would be great. We use gitlab, but the budgeting is so siloed that for the most part only developers ever get credentials
jansan 4y ago
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.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  I don't think it's crazy. You're valuing the company as a mature dividend paying company - one that is paying out to share holders the profits it makes, not investing further to grow. But that's not a reasonable way to value Atlassian, they're a growth company. I think the expectation of the market is pretty simple, Atlassian grow by 30%+ YoY for the foreseeable future, which isn't totally unreasonable, and that their costs aren't going to scale with that growth because they're a software business. If they grow 30% YoY for the next 5 years they'll be pulling in $10Bn in revenue, and maybe sales scale proportionally so call that 25% of revenue, R&D stays more or less flat at $1Bn - let's double it to $2Bn to be generous, Administrative stays fairly nominal at 500m. Hey presto, you've got a company with a tidy $5Bn annual profit. Discount that back to todays prices and that doesn't sound crazy. And all that is assuming is that Atlassian is fully matured in 5 years and not still growing. To be clear, this is all just very hand wavey numbers, but it's not totally incredible.
tluyben2 4y ago
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!).
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  Does your company have 1000s devs? Aren't you "prematurely optimising"? One thing done well is exactly what I want of the software I buy.
ryaniscool 4y ago
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. They were profitable every quarter. They had many many opportunities to get vc money and go wild. When they finally took VC money, It was a modest amount ($60M I think) and the purpose was explained to us as setting up an ESOP program and putting Atlassian on the path to go public. A year or two later, Doug Berman, the founder of Great Plains software became chairman of the Atlassian board. He gave a presentation to all of the employees at the Sydney office. One thing that stood out was that he said, it's actually bad to be profitable when you're growing. I'm paraphrasing here but he essentially said, you're leaving growth on the table. His thesis was growth is more important than profits. So whether you agree with that or not, that is obviously the idea they are operating on rather than uncontrolled spending and helicopter dropping stock on employees heads out of desperation.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > it's actually bad to be profitable when you're growing VCs love risk. They will want to dramatically reduce your chances of a small positive outcome if it means a increase on your (always small) chances of a huge positive outcome.
  - foobiekr 4y ago
    VCs love _technical_ risk. Outside of the very unusual circumstances of the Zero to One capital-funded-monopoly-theory era, they have considered _business_ risk quite toxic.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      Hum... Quickly investing all your money into product development creates what kind of risk? I'm having a hard time separating them. Anyway, that can quite possibly be perfectly aligned with your company's goals. It's not a bad or good thing. It's just a thing.
trasz 4y ago
>CTOs and CPOs loved Atlassian’s revolutionary Jira CTOs and CPOs affection to useless crap designed to impress clueless managers and hated by everyone who actually has to use it is kind of a common pattern.
thorw73m 4y ago
was it atleast profitable to founder. Say working as an employee in a top tech company vs 20 years of unprofitable company.
stack_framer 4y ago
> revenue for the past nine months grew from US$1.5 billion to US$2.04 billion ($2.95 billion) (or around 24%). Forgive my math skills at 4:07 in the morning, but isn't that actually 36% growth? > Atlassian’s legacy Jira product ... is no longer loved by developers. As a developer I prefer Jira over every alternative I've tried (Clubhouse, Trello, GitHub Issues, and Monday.com). > 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). That seems like a pretty big hassle though. My company is way too busy to undertake switching ticketing systems.
- rigelbm 4y ago
  > As a developer I prefer Jira over every alternative I've tried (Clubhouse, Trello, GitHub Issues, and Monday.com). I also prefer JIRA, but that doesn't mean I love it. It just so happens to be the only available product with most of the features I need. That being said, its UX is beyond terrible. The moment something else appears that covers some significant portion of its feature set, I can see a lot of people making the switch. I think one of the biggest problems of competitors is to think that JIRA is bad because it's complex. Therefore they position their offerings as a simpler slim down version of JIRA. Big news: it is complex to manage complex projects. JIRA has, I think, the right level of complexity and flexibility to tackle that. If any competitor reads this message: please, go complex!
- fnord123 4y ago
  > Forgive my math skills at 4:07 in the morning, but isn't that actually 36% growth? Yes, (2.04-1.5) / 1.5 = 0.36
muhaaa 4y ago
Author writes that Atlassian has no network effects. That is BS. Atlassian has massive network in its ecosystem. There are Jira Consultancies, 3rd party apps and plugins and deep integration into customers processes. If one element grows the whole ecosystem profits. Secondly, Atlassian is not a bad company just because it's stock is overpriced. It might be a bad investment! Over the short and midterm Atlassian is in some trouble because it has problems to scale the development while shifting from legacy to cloud. They will solve it. Still i expect some bad news to come. These bad news will beat down the stock and maybe create an opportunity to buy a great company at a great price. PS: The Atlassian invoice of my employer tripled over 1 year. You start cheap and simple and with every plugin and product you add the invoice grows. Thus to value Atlassian you have to look into revenue per customer over its life time, which is far greater than this year's revenue of the customer.
- gshulegaard 4y ago
  I think you might be confusing upselling and cross selling with network effects. Upsell is when you convince a customer to purchase additional service, like offering different tiers of subscriptions. Cross selling is where you sell adjacent services related to (and that possibly integrate with) the original service. Network effects are where the direct value of a product grows simply because the number of users increases, causing the network itself to grow. The classic example are social networks. The more people on your social network, the more people are likely to join your network and less likely to join a smaller competitor. I am not sure there is anything in Atlassian’s product offering that quite fits that description, but that isn’t to say there isn’t plenty of upsell and cross sell opportunity as you describe.
  - muhaaa 4y ago
    I disagree. A network effect does not need to be inherent to the product / service itself. It can originate from other sources. What is the network effect of eBay? As a seller I do not care how many other sellers are there. But I care how many buyers are there. For a buyer it's the reverse. Buyers attract sellers and vice versa. That's a network effect too. For Atlassian it's similar. Jira customer attract Jira consultants and vice versa. Ecosystem is the better word for sure. it's competitive advantage is still a network effect.
yrgulation 4y ago
Am i the only one who finds trello more than enough? Agile is meant to be lean, but instead its become a blob full of nonsense in part thanks to tools such as atlassian’s jira. With basic tools like trello you define a slim scrumban workflow and focus on actual work. There are indeed use cases for stuff like jira but it feels like 99% of the time jira is not necessary.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pikseladam 4y ago
We are using youtrack and we are loving it.
stateableio 4y ago
Jira Data Center is an unbelievably powerful tool. It suffers from unknowledgable administrators. If you have a person who is running Jira Data Center that is familiar with its internal classes, API, Scriptrunner, Automation for Jira, and the enormous 3rd party plug-in environment, there is simply no comparison. It’s not even close. To be fair, that’s a pretty big ask, in terms of technical know-how and cost. Even just base Jira is quite complicated to configure well.
nickjj 4y ago
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 and no draft saved. I lost 30 minutes of work. I normally manually copy textareas every few minutes on any Atlassian page because I don't trust their site (to be fair I do this for most sites too) but in the above case I had just copied a link reference which overwrote my clipboard. At the time I also didn't have a multi-clipboard tool installed since it was using a company issued machine that I don't have tricked out yet. [0]: https://twitter.com/nickjanetakis/status/1540353527859466246 https://twitter.com/nickjanetakis/status/1540353527859466246
- LtdJorge 4y ago
  I guess you don't use Windows but in case you do, you should use clipboard history. Just press Win+V and enable it, then press that combination again anytime you want something from the history, and a UI opens up with your last copied things. It supports schreenshots too.
- nashadelic 4y ago
  Sounds like an opportunity to create a chrome add-on that can save any field data. I believe most session managers do that but if the field is wiped out, so is the cache.
- zac23or 4y ago
  I never write anything in any web interface. I write in notepad and copy and paste. I had many bad surprises ... I can't trust web interfaces. And I use the Windows clipboard manager too.
  - exyi 4y ago
    It had never happened to me except for Confluence and Microsoft Teams. Firefox even preserves the typed text between reloads of the page - so unless the web app hacks the textarea somehow, the text will stay there.
zelphirkalt 4y ago
No wonder, given the "quality" of the software they deliver. They claimed to support Markdown in Confluence – It does not work as good as any decent Markdown parser you can install in any mainstream programming language and does not understand, that within Markdown there can be HTML, for example for heading link targets and TOC. Same for Bitbucket. What are they doing? Letting interns code incomplete Markdown parsers and deploying them for everyone to haunt them with subpar quality parsing? The thing cannot even render a readme.md file correctly in Bitbucket. Everything is slow to no end, downloading 20+ megabytes (no joke, no exaggeration!) for displaying a friggin git repo and the files list. Wiki pages that the search function lists suddenly become unreachable. WYSIWYG editor on Confluence is still a joke and annoying to no end. Any technical person, who has ever used any decent alternative will run for the hills, before using that unholy combination of software, that is Atlassian. Jira is probably still the best among the bunch of utterly bad experiences and its UI is just terrible. Cannot find anything easily there.
zac23or 4y ago
> That is, CTOs and CPOs loved Atlassian’s revolutionary Jira product so much, it was able to grow virally and organically without the business having to spend millions of dollars on an enterprise sales team. Here people talk a lot about creating a good product, code quality, etc. It doesn't matter. You don't need to build a great product: you need to find the market and exploit it faster than you can. The quality of your product is not important. How is Atlassian with so many bad products is valued at $52 billion? Jira is one of the worst products in the eyes of developers. But it does not matter. Managers love Jira because with Jira it's "very easy" to create a workflow and micromanage everything. And managers decide what's good for the company, they have the power to buy Jira. But Jira is not Vilain. The villain is the school of management through fear, micromanagement, etc. I worked at a company that created an internal JIRA. It's worse than Jira. It was too complex to fill everything, we create a script to do this.
- arcturus17 4y ago
  > That is, CTOs and CPOs loved Atlassian’s revolutionary Jira product so much, it was able to grow virally and organically > Here people talk a lot about creating a good product, code quality, etc. It doesn't matter. You don't need to build a great product You really haven't disproven that CTOs and CPOS loved the product initially, which I believe to be true. So yes, you do need to build a great product at the beginning. Then at enough scale, your product can become shit in some ways, and you can focus on sales. But the article's thesis is that Jira did not start as a shit product.
  - zac23or 4y ago
    I have no idea what Jira was like in the beginning. But today Jira is a very bad product (in the opinion of developers), but managers still love Jira because Jira has found a market (managers, CTOS, CPOS, etc). Jira being a very slow and buggy application is not important. As an example of a tool that found a market in the area of developers is Docker. I used docker in some companies and my God, Docker is buggy as hell, sometimes I pull new code in git and Docker doesn't see it, I have a lot of network problems, etc. And have no idea what Docker was like in the beginning, but when I used it, it was horrible experience, and developers continue to use it. I'm very happy that my current employee does not use Docker.
fbanon 4y ago
I thought Jira and Confluence were bad, until I started using the Facebook internal wiki and task tools...
- axg11 4y ago
  Same for Amazon.
- nfRfqX5n 4y ago
  yea I actually miss JIRA too
binbag 4y ago
The amount of basic grammar errors in the article forced me to stop reading. Can't take it seriously.
smcleod 4y ago
Not to mention that pretty much everyone universally hates Atlassian products.
robmccoll 4y ago
To me, the problem with many of Atlassian's products is that they aren't tools. They are platforms on which you can build the tool you need. They are way too configurable and flexible and as a result, you spend a lot of time managing the tool or organizing the information and configuration within it. Tools should serve a specific usage, behave predictably, help you use them correctly, then get out of the way.
- jnwatson 4y ago
  Large enterprises need platforms, not tools. It takes a few hours to get a basic process flow going in Jira. It really isn’t hard. And I’m not even a fan of it.
hrdwdmrbl 4y ago
Good riddance to bad software
dalbasal 4y ago
This article's finger is on the right place, but IMO the analysis is off. Netflix, has recently excited the fundamental/rationalist investor camp. The huge valuations hot tech companies enjoy must eventually be justified by a "Thiel Monopoly." That's the only way to earn the 20%-50% margins that Google/Apple/Meta can achieve. Netflix sells a cheap consumer product. One product among several similar options. Consumers are savvy, with many jumping between subscriptions for deals and variety. Content producers have market power, because multiple buyers. In short, textbook microeconomics is afoot. That means competition, efficiency and low margins. That means "startup economics" don't apply. The market is not going to let Netflix sit on massive margins and monopoly market share. Newschool tech investors see this as an abomination. Old schoolers see it as cosmic justice. Anyway.. those who desire market rationality love Netflix and are applying the Netflix analysis to everything. Atlassian is a different story entirely. They actually sell software. Enterprise software, really. There are no content producers squeezing them for a bigger cut. The companies who pay them aren't price sensitive, and they are locked in enough. This is not the "microeconomic normality" monster that bit Netflix. Atlassian's business model is fine. Competition isn't the problem, and neither is consumer bargaining power. Atlassian's problem is that they haven't done good enough. The bar, set by both tech history and the $150bn peak valuation, is that Atlassian becomes a microsoft.. at least a SalesForce, IMB or somesuch. Where's Atlassian's challenge to AWS? When is Atlassian leading the WFH revolution. How will Atlassian become the organisational nervous system of the modern knowledge firm? It just doesn't look likely that Atlassian is going to achieve that kind of big-hairy-goal. The products have a crusty, uninspiring feel. The take over the world vibe is missing. So... Atlassian's valuation is down. I doubt the share price will ever approach "rational." Software companies have value, and the floor is set by opportunistic M&A. If stock markets don't want TEAM @ 10X revenue or more... someone will buy them.
- geodel 4y ago
  > The companies who pay them aren't price sensitive, and they are locked in enough. I doubt this is true lately. I have seen even more critical ticketing system like ServiceNow/Cherwell/Remedy getting replaced. We replaced Slack with other chat software because of licensing cost. Big companies are not price sensitive seems like old theory. Because I am seeing in so many large companies increasing license fee is causing replacement of existing products.
albertopv 4y ago
8000 people and still a 3 years old useful feature like [0] is still in 'gathering interest' status. [0] https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-20097 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-20097
gjvc 4y ago
the sooner this shit heap of a company fails the better
aviramha 4y ago
>instead relying on ‘product-led growth’. That is, CTOs and CPOs loved Atlassian’s revolutionary Jira product so much Does anyone like any Atlassian product nowadays?
BFLpL0QNek 4y ago
> Atlassian has somehow become the Benjamin Button of the tech sector — profitable as a startup and loss making as it has matured. They where profitable, they didn’t need funding the only funding they took was for staff to sell some of the equity. Them now making a loss I think is more a deliberate choice, not a business failure. They could of continued as they where making $$$ but instead choose to go from 700 people at ipo to near 7k today for pretty much the same product suite. Those 7k people have to be working on a lot of stuff behind the scenes, building on existing products and maybe yet to be released products. Atlassian always said they where big on long term investment. I’m sure they could be profitable if they wanted but then would need to massively cut the long term investment. I’m not to worried about Atlassian. Every large org I worked at is run off Jira. I do regret not selling a small parcel of TEAM at the end of last year though when it was over $440usd a share
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  > Them now making a loss I think is more a deliberate choice, not a business failure. They could of continued as they where making $$$ but instead choose to go from 700 people at ipo to near 7k today for pretty much the same product suite. But this is exactly the kind of thing that makes a market analyst yell "FIRE!" during a bear market. Nobody trading stocks is going to look at a 10x headcount increase without meaningful additions to the product offering as a good thing.
  - vasco 4y ago
    Is your understanding of software companies that you add people and magically new good products appear right away?
    - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
      They IPO'd 7 years ago, which looks even worse. They've had all this time and hired all of these people and largely kept the same product offering with no obvious improvements to performance or stability. Again, that's a market analyst's nightmare.
  - 4y ago
itomato 4y ago
They say it’s overvalued - whose fault is that? Now the remote thing could be fantastic. I don’t know what the building on Harrison St. cost, but between what they save on staff relocations and real estate, there should be some offset in two-three years, right? Salesforce is an Apple to Atlassian’s orange. I would guess they make more money from Tableau than Atlassian do from Confluence and Jira Data Center combined. “Tableau Software generated $464 million as part of Salesforce for the quarter, up about 18% from the same quarter a year ago“ What will be the total cost of maintaining a Java app (with deep dependencies) for five years? Will subscription costs increase YoY to match? Add to that the coupling of disparate products and their code and cultures.
residualmind 4y ago
I was unprofitable when I was 20, too.
belter 4y ago
Based on data from 2021 and maybe I make a mistake on one or two...List of unprofitable companies. Unprofitable is the new black.... | Unprofitable Companies 2021-2022 | Airbnb | Dropbox | Uber | Lyft | Zillow | Peloton | Pinterest | Snap | Cloudflare | MongoDB | Slack | Spotify | Elastic | Okta | Fastly
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  Yet all of them have minted millionaires and billionaires. This is the new game. Nobody cares about profits. Money has been made.
aetherspawn 4y ago
I wish they never took away the self-hosted option. That's the only reason we're not using it at the moment.
dboreham 4y ago
imho Atlassian's problem is that they failed to capture a critical mass of SaaS services for software development. Everyone uses GitHub, which provides a (crappy) bug management system. Everyone uses Google Docs which is arguably better than Confluence for most purposes. Perhaps not coincidentally both these services are owned by companies that make their money from other things so they can afford to dump endless investment in making them better.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  > so they can afford to dump endless investment in making them better. Which is so necessary when your product is very reliant on integrations because maintaining that kind of software gets so cumbersome over time. The testing alone can sink a team's productivity. I work for a Confluence competitor and we've based our go-to-market strategy around executing one problem very well as opposed to trying to build a set of products to sell as a suite and it's worked relatively well so far. Business people love the idea of integrations and some of them do act as a force-multiplier in productivity. But they also create tons of headaches for end users and can be very expensive.
bborud 4y ago
Reading through the comments two things stand out: - People disagree on whether it is appropriate to focus on growth or profitability at this stage in Atlassian's lifecycle. - I suspect people project their misgivings with the products onto the company. So I didn't learn much from reading the comments.
steveBK123 4y ago
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 managers, you'll never be able to leverage the more complicated workflows/linkages/planning features.
- leokennis 4y ago
  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.
- hcarvalhoalves 4y ago
  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.
- technion 4y ago
  > 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.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    This stuff blows my mind but tends to occur everywhere What is the value add of an engineer doing project management work in an environment where project managers exist Should the project managers need to do a little coding then? Also the quiet part out loud - project managers tend to be vastly cheaper (often 2:1) than engineers. Any and every task that an engineering team can offload to a project manager is big dollars saved by the firm. I frequently find myself in engineering roles where I am doing most stakeholder comms, requirements gathering, JIRA ticket entry/management, project planning, user documentation, support runbooks, PR reviewing, a bit of dev, occasionally testing, deployments, and sit on the support escalation pager rotation. Any of the above tasks you can offload to a non-engineer saves the firm money.
hnbad 4y ago
> Atlassian’s prospectus noted that in 2015 the business grew by 48%, around double this year’s growth. If Atlassian is 20 years old now, that means it was over 10 years old (~13) then. Atlassian was an enterprise service company at that point already. What kind of enterprise service company can be expected to maintain a 50% year-over-year growth for nearly a decade? If that's "around double this year's growth" that means they're still growing by 20-25%. That's impressive. I'm not saying the valuation correction is wrong or that the claims they're unprofitable are unfair, I'm wondering what made anyone think they'd perform better than they have in terms of growth if that growth is already impressive. They sell enterprise services ffs and they're the gold standard outside e.g. Sharepoint. Maybe the problem isn't their growth rate itself, but attempting to build the business model on an unrealistic growth rate.
EGreg 4y ago
I don’t see why this is a problem for society. Things rise and they fall. That’s markets. The guys who have created it are billionaires, they helped a lot of people. Now it’s time to move on to more modern things. Similarly with decentralized projects like Bitcoin. I have come to appreciate Moxie’s stance on decentralized systems moving more slowly. It’s a trade-off. Can any Bitcoin maxis please tell us why we can’t look to newer projects for solving whatever it is Bitcoin was supposed to do but failed to achieve - be a peer to peer cash system for example? How about other applications like voting… why always and only Bitcoin, a 13-year-old project that barely evolves?
mnkypete 4y ago
I am: a) a dev myself b) head of a small dev/SAAS company/team c) Atlassian Marketplace vendor Jira is fine. Atlassian will be around for quite a bit, imho. They have a somewhat decent ecosystem, which helps a lot with the stickiness. Jira could see a lot of improvement product wise, but at least it has been getting faster in the last year (still slow, though, but not as bad). Their new stuff seems to be a hit or miss, but I especially like their new Jira thing (Jira Product Management), mostly because it comes very opinionated. I think Jira/Atlassian would benefit a lot from actually providing more guidance on how to properly use their product(s) depending on team size (e.g. moving from 5 to 50 to 500 person teams). Most other tools don't do this as well, but I think that would improve the experience for everyone, dev & mgmt alike..
joshenders 4y ago
*and crappy Forgot that part
brycewray 4y ago
Other than the points raised here by others and in TFA’s comments section which point out TFA’s flaws, I would add only that there are worse things than Jira --- as I found out When my final employer converted from Jira to ServiceNow. If you think Jira is bad... jeez.
carlsborg 4y ago
I suspect the following is built into valuations of many software companies with subscription revenue models: they can reduce headcount dramatically and keep a relatively tiny headcount of staff around to sustain the existing recurring revenue and be highly profitable even in a slowing economy. For example how many people would MongoDB, with close to a billion dollars of annual revenue, need to keep the lights on, assuming zero new feature development, sales or marketing? The software is already sold and integral to the enterprise projects that use it, and in the enterprise migration to a new vendor is often a considerable project in itself.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  I think this is not as straightforward as you make it sound. 1. Often the way companies are structured requires specific teams and processes to exist and unwinding that is not easy. 2. It can be very hard to identify which people are actually critical. If you get it wrong it’s a big problem. 3. Additionally, firing a large percentage of employees will create a very negative feeling in the remainder so they might leave as well or their work quality will suffer. 4. Customers may lose faith in the business as a result and switch. Something like Atlassian has many competitors. Are there any specific examples of this being done successfully?
  - stu2b50 4y ago
    AirBNB? They were flailing at the beginning of covid, taking a massive 2 billion loan at 10% APR to maintain cash flow. They laid off a substantial portion of their workforce, hunkered down, and it paid off - they went on to successfully IPO a year later, still in the pandemic.
  - ratww 4y ago
    I've worked (as in actively worked) in a couple restructuring efforts, and it went fine, but it wasn't on tech, it was on education. It went massively well. The universities were financially healthier afterwards, and all the remaining employees had safer (union!) jobs. The trick for this being successful is most of the time by challenging the processes themselves, rather than the employees. Employees aren't useless, but process are. The reason you need 500 people rather than 250 or 100 or 50 to do something might be simply because you said so somewhere or sometime. So, companies should review and change processes BEFORE reducing headcount. But alas, companies don't ever do it, because it requires introspection, egolessness and actual work, the sorta stuff that is rare in upper management.
asimpletune 4y ago
Just a random, semi-related thought, but maybe if there is a recession, then software as an industry will become more connected to business/engineering fundamentals? I see a few people mentioned Jira busy-work here... maybe the market will actually correct for all of that?
vhiremath4 4y ago
> 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). I can tell the reporter has never used or operated something as integral as a ticketing system at scale. These systems are integrated everywhere to automate operations flows. They’re used to continuously enforce compliance. The list goes on. Ripping them out at an enterprise company is very painful. Then on top of all that, you have to re-train everyone on how to use a new system.
dangus 4y ago
This thing reads like an uninformed hit piece. Let me go ahead and flex my MBA knowledge for all the engineers in the building who claim that MBAs don't know anything about business... First, I suggest you read Atlassian's balance sheet and income statement. They're a public company, so it's all publicly available information. [1] Look how fast those revenues are growing. Look at how Cost of revenues is declining against the revenue. In 2019, it was 33%, 2020 it was 28%, 2021 it was 25%. That means that as Atlassian's subscriber count increases, its cost per subscriber is decreasing, a direct contradiction to the claims made in this article. In the statements of cash flows, you'll see that Net cash provided by operating activities increases every year. Financing activities explain losses, not any sort of problem with the fundamentals of the business. And, when you're losing money, you don't pay taxes. Atlassian is doing a standard business/accounting play here: re-invest in the business and use financial activities in order to pay nothing to the Australian equivalent of Uncle Sam. Income tax expense is a negative number on the balance sheet each year. The worst claim in the article is that Atlassian represents a "legacy" product. No, not at all, especially if you've been on their cloud products anytime recently. The cloud products get rapid iterations and improvements, including performance. Atlassian's pricing is extremely competitive, acting as a "bundle" that competitors can't match. Jira in particular has basically no realistic competitor, and OpsGenie does the same thing as PagerDuty at a fraction of the cost. [1] https://s28.q4cdn.com/541786762/files/doc_financials/2021/ar/FY21-Annual-Report-on-Form-20-F.pdf https://s28.q4cdn.com/541786762/files/doc_financials/2021/ar... (Scroll to page F-5 about 105 pages in)
wrongotron 4y ago
It seems clear to me that they are a company that no longer cares about strategic investment. Their forays (acquisitions) into version control have been so amazingly weak. Stash was devoid of even basic features. Now they have Bitbucket: - they still can't get it to perform adequately after years - it lacks syntax highlighting in PR views - it took them years to get side-by-side diffs into PR views - it integrates with third party tools poorly I thought maybe the Github acquisition would spur them into recognizing it as a important product category, but I guess not.
thayne 4y ago
> it now needs to spend a lot of money on marketing to achieve that growth. I think focusing on improving their products would be more prudent. There's only so much marketing can do when users hate your product.
ab_testing 4y ago
The high growth without generating a profit has worked fine for them for the last decade. But it seems that their stock price is in risky territory. They were valued at 113B at their peak and are now close to 48B. But their annual revenue is just around 2B. So that is still 24x revenue with no profits. It looks like they would fall a lot more if that revenue growth slows down due to a recession or companies just cutting back a litte bit.
mbesto 4y ago
Ugh, the "unprofitable" trope in B2B SaaS...here we go again... FCF: 2019 - $420M 2020 - $538M 2021 - $808M 30% CAGR (just for the last 4 years alone) 2021 Numbers: $1.3B Revenue $372M S&M Spend $973M R&D Spend These are all super healthy numbers and if the company stopped growing, then it would easily become profitable. The author needs a finance course.
gw67 4y ago
The author is predicting a -80% crash (37$ as fair value vs 189$ current)
taylorbuley 4y ago
> Atlassian’s legacy Jira product is clunky and has barely evolved in a decade — it’s essentially a ticket-based system which allows developers and product managers to communicate on tasks and is no longer loved by developers Developers "loving" any ticketing system is a bit of a stretch. To me it's more of a "least worst" preference.
dcdc123 4y ago
Their software also gets worse with every update.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
One of the things I've found really interesting is how little development ecosystem there is around Atlassian's tools. They have a pretty rich API for most of their products, but nobody really uses them. There's some very cool CLI tools just starting to evolve for Jira and Confluence, which can completely transform the complaints people have (automating common concerns, eliminating UI slowness). I think Atlassian should have done more to build a community for people to ramp up on their technology.
bitwize 4y ago
If I never have to hear about JIRA and Confluence again, it'll be too soon.
jdlyga 4y ago
Jira is becoming Microsoft Word in terms of just piling on the features. Atlassian needs to learn to say no sometimes.
TheGigaChad 4y ago

579 points by zillionize 4y ago

Only 'unprofitable' in GAAP terms.It has a very healthy Free Cash Flow margin. And it still a 7x return from IPO. All-in-all, a great success story. (Whatever one thinks of Jira the product)

altdataseller 4y ago
Thats the only measure of real profitability - GAAP. Free cash flow includes stock based compensation. Thats a real expanse and turns negative cashflow to positive. But it dilutes existing shareholders, you would like to see positive cashflow EXCLUDING stock based compensation
- ronhav3 4y ago
  If GAAP is the only measure, then Amazon and Salesforce have been utter failures for 20+ years, only returning 120,000% and 4000% returns to shareholders. In fact, if an investor went by GAAP, he would have missed the entire massive SaaS boom of the past decade.
  - altdataseller 4y ago
    Did i say these companies were failures? I simply said they were not profitable.

JB_Denton 4y ago

I notice that the share price started to plummet just after the announcement that they would be dropping support for On-Prem customers. That's basically saying goodbye to most Australian Federal Government departments. I know we used tons of on-prem Atlassian stuff at my client and we ended up transitioning everything to ServiceNow.

cavisne 4y ago

> 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). Hilarious. Ticketing systems are very sticky, they are basically the original "no code" system, with years of business processes hacked into them, and users who are accustomed to every pixel of the UI.

raverbashing 4y ago

Atlassian did well in replacing the barren world that consisted of Bugzilla/Trac/etc (yuck) and worse closed-sourced offenders like the "Rational suite" (the worse pile of crap I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with) But yeah, somebody should create a Jira ticket for their lack of profitability

indoorskier 4y ago
"As an Atlassian founder, I would like to make money, so that I can sell and never look at a Jira ticket again" tag, estimate, assign, add to epic, put on next sprint
captaincaveman 4y ago
Well its not a cheap product, I suspect its just a massive knot of complexity and thus massively expensive to maintain and manage.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Massive pile of garbage is more like it. As a developer, the only thing slowing me down from getting work done was waiting on JIRA and being told to use the crap they call Confluence to document things.
  - yardstick 4y ago
    What do you recommend instead? JIRA & Confluence seem to be the best of a bad bunch. I do miss the self-hosted option.
    - theteapot 4y ago
      README.md
    - mvonballmo 4y ago
      Honestly, Azure DevOps is a solid replacement. The integration is really good and the "Boards" software really feels like they're eating their own dog food. Their Wiki software is Markdown stored in a Git repo (unlike Confluence's mess). It's fast, permissions are relatively intuitive and fast, etc. It's worth a look if you're evaluating. JetBrains Space is another alternative, but I have no experience with it.

jakub_g 4y ago

> 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.

zelos 4y ago
Yes - JIRA is almost a textbook example of lock in. Moving a large company's workflow would mean months of disruption.
- zeusk 4y ago
  I helped a prior employer move to github and asana through JIRA's own APIs. It's actually not that hard and the entire engineering group was very cheerful of the change.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    Be curious what the size of the engineering team and company was. Asana is great for SMBs but for larger developer teams it lacks a lot of features and integrations.
    - daniel_iversen 4y ago
      (Work at Asana so I might be biased) While Jira may have some unique features for developers, one of Asana’s selling points is how it allows non-homogenous teams (incl whole companies) to work together (and by themselves within individual teams) on a variety of different kinds of work (projects, processes, loose day to day tasks etc). And as for scale we have many customers with thousands of users (one tech customer of ours has 100,000+ users on Asana - most of them I’m sure would be product teams).
  - zelos 4y ago
    Really? Was it easy enough to define mappings between all the various fields/ticket types etc? I guess you could do it per-team across an organisation. It always seems hard enough to get information out of JIRA using JIRA when I watch our PO in planning meetings.

throwaway4good 4y ago

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.

taurath 4y ago
JIRA has huge feature creep lockin along the likes of sales force. It costs huge amounts of money on consultants to move off of it. Any new company probably wouldn’t use it though, it’s just overkill.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Actually new companies do use it. It's very affordable for growing startups and its customisability is really useful.
- maccard 4y ago
  > JIRA has huge feature creep lockin along the likes of sales force. Sure Jira has lockin, but so does any tool with any features. Git has lockin, but you don't hear of people avoiding branches in case they need to move to perforce. > Any new company probably wouldn’t use it though, it’s just overkill. So what should they use instead? The thing about jira is it does the basics well, far better than any of the competitors we evaluated. Sure it's not perfect, but no tool is.
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    > Git has lockin, but you don't hear of people avoiding branches in case they need to move to perforce. Replace Git with SVN in the comment above. Also replace Perforce with Git in the comment above. Then you have a viable argument and a story of mine that actually is a case of exactly that - back when project management for certain projects was done primarily in SVN, there was the expectation to stick to the popular way of laying out repositories, with folders for trunk, branches and tags, a bit like the example here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2611237/subversion-repository-layout https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2611237/subversion-repos... Of course, you didn't really need to do it that way and certain other projects explored other options, such as having features under the root of the repository, like "/ISSUE123" or something like that. Well, as time passed, it became apparent that SVN just wouldn't cut it (TortoiseSVN was such nice software, though) and that the projects would need to be migrated off of SVN and into Git, to import them into GitLab/GitHub or elsewhere. Those projects all still being in development and having the need to be trace back changes to particular feature requests/issues meant that all of the revision history would also need to be moved over. The problem with most of the migration scripts, however, was that they broke when you had a non-standard layout and as a consequence of that, you simply couldn't finish the import process and were stuck on SVN. Back then I actually resolved it by rewriting the history of those repositories into the standard format, but it was just a massive waste of time and a headache. Alas, a sentence like this would absolutely be false: > SVN has lockin, but you don't hear of people avoiding non-standard repo layouts in case they need to move to Git. So yes, despite there being certain features and the ability to do something, that doesn't immediately mean that you should jump right in and use them! I might also have a few horror stories about Git submodules, or maybe even using Git LFS with synchronized Git repositories across GitHub and GitLab (of course, the LFS contents weren't sent properly, so no binary assets were mirrored), as well as other such problems. If you can, stick to a stable, boring and predictable set of core features in any software package.

Existenceblinks 4y ago

That also ate a lot of small healthy business pie in the market. I have mixed feeling about this. Do you think a company's R&D worth sucking a chuck of opportunity for small companies? I don't believe the niche vs. mass is less overlap. Imagine the market where there were no excel/spreadsheet/word. The customers of the market is spoiled by cheap/free/network-effect-koolaid plans just for sake of growth.

iasay 4y ago

Well their old slogan of “because you’ve got issues” is looking ironic now.

gaff33 4y ago

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

netmare 4y ago
The only thing I used from them was their Mercurial hosting. That didn't go well...
iasay 4y ago
No. I’d rather go land skiing on concrete in my birthday suit.
- keyle 4y ago
  That is oddly specific and rather appealing.
  - iasay 4y ago
    It comes from sitting in an Atlassian sales pitch meeting where I was thinking of less painful things to do with my time.
Avalaxy 4y ago
Yes, I like Trello. Although that was acquired.
- OJFord 4y ago
  I think for the purposes of this question, your answer's more like 'no, I prefer that competitor'. (Hence the acquisition presumably, probably gained them not just the talent but a lot of mindshare and extant SME/startup business.)
AmericanChopper 4y ago
I liked it when I first switched to it from whatever was I was using ~2010 (Intervals, I think…). It still is somewhat better than a lot of task management/workflow software that you commonly find in enterprise. But it’s kinda just become another version of the thing it was supposed to destroy. The huge, complicated, bureaucracy management system.

sien 4y ago

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_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_s... Are any of them any better?

015a 4y ago
Linear & Shortcut are both significantly better. Linear isn't even in the same realm as Jira in quality and productivity; its like comparing Excel to Jira, yeah you can make Excel work but you'd be out of your mind to use it for something like project management. Similarly, with the advent of Linear; you'd be out of your mind to greenfield on Jira. Why not spin up OracleSQL and write your app in C++ while you're at it? Gitlab & Github issues is also pretty solid. Lightweight, but it works for what it does. Asana is another decent competitor, though I don't tend to recommend them for project management. Its there though. I've organized some small software teams using Notion. Its surprisingly functional. The big downside is the lack of universal structure or a decent API to even build your own analytics against; great for the ICs, but not great for managers.
dinvlad 4y ago
Tbh, most of big enterprise software UI just plain sucks. I see this as a natural consequence of being too packed with features, to target the widest audience possible. Best software UX is made by smaller teams that dedicate themselves to solving one problem for a very specific niche. And once they grow, it all inevitably turns to sh*t. C'est la vie..
mr90210 4y ago
As a programmer, I actually like Jira. It works.
- mrelliot 4y ago
  Considering the amount of money you pay to have it, "it works" is not even the bare minimum. Lot of things work. The problem with Jira is the total disregard for UX. Very simple tasks like moving tickets out of a story take way too many steps when it should take one click. They don't seem to want to improve it because of legacy customer or reasons....

yobbo 4y ago

> Combined with employing more than 8000 people, this means that Atlassian is unprofitable In 1991, Microsoft had 8000 employees. It was producing DOS, Windows 3*, Office, OS/2, tools and compilers. Windows NT was in development. They did not use Jira. I think the main feature of these tools is to make people, who would otherwise be unproductive, feel and look productive. Maybe those people are managers that should never have managed software development. Idk. (https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/microsoft_company.htm https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/microsoft_company....)

Aachen 4y ago
They also built pyramids without excavators but that doesn't mean it's not helpful. Just because old systems could be built without specifically using jira, by itself, is not an argument. You could make the same argument that, clearly, we don't need Java or JavaScript because we also got by fine on Fortran and C in the past. Without doing an actual comparison, it's just as silly an argument as the claim that these tools' main function is to make you feel more productive than you are.
- yobbo 4y ago
  > They also built pyramids without excavators but that doesn't mean it's not helpful False analogy. The point here is that productivity in old Microsoft was far higher, and that the failing piece in modern development might not be the ticket system.
  - Aachen 4y ago
    > The point here is that productivity in old Microsoft was far higher That sounds virtually impossible to prove between unequal situations, and especially "far" makes it seem like an exaggeration / tall order (productivity between people isn't like wealth or popularity: some things change by multiple orders of magnitude, but how hard you can work doesn't, especially when averaged across thousands of employees), but to be fair I didn't read the whole fourteen thousand word source you added so I suppose I can't say for sure.
4y ago

the_duke 4y ago

> 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, and have huge knowledge bases in Confluence. Switching would come with a lot of effort. I will say that most of the Atlassian products are ... not great. Bitbucket has completely stagnated and is way worse than Github and Gitlab. They actually had an opportunity there. Once upon a time Bitbucket was the only site to offer free private repos, and it attracted a decent number of users to also publish open source there. A good amount of companies adopted it. But they let it linger and didn't keep up with Github or even Gitlab. Just like Jira it's also slow and awkward to use. (never do large PRs ...). I see a lot of companies switching away from Bitbucket now because developers are not happy with it. Bamboo ... meh Opsgenie ... meh Confluence is actually fine. If only it had better search and wasn't so slow... And Jira is so complex, improving it is probably extremely cumbersome because so many features have to be considered and everything has to keep working. It might be advisable for Atlassian to start fresh with a new ticketing system. Anyway, they have 8000 employees... they can always drastically downsize and refocus, the company will be around for a while.

pdpi 4y ago
> Once upon a time Bitbucket was the only site to offer free private repos And mercurial too. I do miss mercurial.
_the_inflator 4y ago
I agree. Jira is here to stay. It is like Excel - love it or hate it, but it has its use cases other products do not cover in total, only for certain cases.
msoad 4y ago
Maybe if they increase prices to satisfy Wall Street it will be replaceable.
Juliate 4y ago

dodgerdan 4y ago

Same headline was run about Amazon. Revenue and costs will give you more insights.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

>But as we’ve since discovered, markets often get it badly wrong and the tech sector has rapidly corrected, gee, the markets were wrong but now they're right! Lucky that. - not that I think tech stocks aren't overvalued, just addressing the poor logic.

TrackerFF 4y ago

It is very fair to ask oneself - where will Atlassian be in 10-15-20 years? JIRA is slow as molasses, and ripe for disruption. It Atlassian themselves won't do it, others will try. In the end - if you're an investor that's exposed to Atlassian, these things do matter. And the article is being fair on that point - do you think Atlassian is worth what it's worth, and if so - why? If the answer is "customer lock-in" and "no real competitors yet" well, plenty of companies in the yesteryears were also in that spot.

zeusk 4y ago
Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM they said. How is Oracle doing these days anyway?
- threeseed 4y ago
  Oracle revenue is up 5% at $11.8 billion and they have a strong and growing presence in the Government Cloud market. So really not doing too badly at all. https://investor.oracle.com/investor-news/news-details/2022/Oracle-Announces-Fiscal-2022-Fourth-Quarter-and-Fiscal-Full-Year-Financial-Results/default.aspx https://investor.oracle.com/investor-news/news-details/2022/...
  - zeusk 4y ago
    That 5% is below annual inflation, so it shrank in real terms.

vogt 4y ago

It's tough for me to square with the JIRA hate. I don't mean to simply be contrarian here, I have limited (<6 months) experience. But the alternative horrors I've been forced to use - like Rally or a couple internal tools that were highly neglected - I can't imagine it's really _that_ bad...

gonzo41 4y ago
It's not the worst at all, sometimes developers are like the cats that like to sleep in the box the new bed came in.
Gigachad 4y ago
I just find most stuff works better via GitHub tickets. Let the managers use whatever tool they want and then put actual work on GitHub.
- vogt 4y ago
  Yes, that would be great. We use gitlab, but the budgeting is so siloed that for the most part only developers ever get credentials

jansan 4y ago

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.

SilverBirch 4y ago
I don't think it's crazy. You're valuing the company as a mature dividend paying company - one that is paying out to share holders the profits it makes, not investing further to grow. But that's not a reasonable way to value Atlassian, they're a growth company. I think the expectation of the market is pretty simple, Atlassian grow by 30%+ YoY for the foreseeable future, which isn't totally unreasonable, and that their costs aren't going to scale with that growth because they're a software business. If they grow 30% YoY for the next 5 years they'll be pulling in $10Bn in revenue, and maybe sales scale proportionally so call that 25% of revenue, R&D stays more or less flat at $1Bn - let's double it to $2Bn to be generous, Administrative stays fairly nominal at 500m. Hey presto, you've got a company with a tidy $5Bn annual profit. Discount that back to todays prices and that doesn't sound crazy. And all that is assuming is that Atlassian is fully matured in 5 years and not still growing. To be clear, this is all just very hand wavey numbers, but it's not totally incredible.

tluyben2 4y ago

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!).

jokethrowaway 4y ago
Does your company have 1000s devs? Aren't you "prematurely optimising"? One thing done well is exactly what I want of the software I buy.

ryaniscool 4y ago

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. They were profitable every quarter. They had many many opportunities to get vc money and go wild. When they finally took VC money, It was a modest amount ($60M I think) and the purpose was explained to us as setting up an ESOP program and putting Atlassian on the path to go public. A year or two later, Doug Berman, the founder of Great Plains software became chairman of the Atlassian board. He gave a presentation to all of the employees at the Sydney office. One thing that stood out was that he said, it's actually bad to be profitable when you're growing. I'm paraphrasing here but he essentially said, you're leaving growth on the table. His thesis was growth is more important than profits. So whether you agree with that or not, that is obviously the idea they are operating on rather than uncontrolled spending and helicopter dropping stock on employees heads out of desperation.

marcosdumay 4y ago
> it's actually bad to be profitable when you're growing VCs love risk. They will want to dramatically reduce your chances of a small positive outcome if it means a increase on your (always small) chances of a huge positive outcome.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  VCs love _technical_ risk. Outside of the very unusual circumstances of the Zero to One capital-funded-monopoly-theory era, they have considered _business_ risk quite toxic.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Hum... Quickly investing all your money into product development creates what kind of risk? I'm having a hard time separating them. Anyway, that can quite possibly be perfectly aligned with your company's goals. It's not a bad or good thing. It's just a thing.

trasz 4y ago

>CTOs and CPOs loved Atlassian’s revolutionary Jira CTOs and CPOs affection to useless crap designed to impress clueless managers and hated by everyone who actually has to use it is kind of a common pattern.

thorw73m 4y ago

was it atleast profitable to founder. Say working as an employee in a top tech company vs 20 years of unprofitable company.

stack_framer 4y ago

> revenue for the past nine months grew from US$1.5 billion to US$2.04 billion ($2.95 billion) (or around 24%). Forgive my math skills at 4:07 in the morning, but isn't that actually 36% growth? > Atlassian’s legacy Jira product ... is no longer loved by developers. As a developer I prefer Jira over every alternative I've tried (Clubhouse, Trello, GitHub Issues, and Monday.com). > 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). That seems like a pretty big hassle though. My company is way too busy to undertake switching ticketing systems.

rigelbm 4y ago
> As a developer I prefer Jira over every alternative I've tried (Clubhouse, Trello, GitHub Issues, and Monday.com). I also prefer JIRA, but that doesn't mean I love it. It just so happens to be the only available product with most of the features I need. That being said, its UX is beyond terrible. The moment something else appears that covers some significant portion of its feature set, I can see a lot of people making the switch. I think one of the biggest problems of competitors is to think that JIRA is bad because it's complex. Therefore they position their offerings as a simpler slim down version of JIRA. Big news: it is complex to manage complex projects. JIRA has, I think, the right level of complexity and flexibility to tackle that. If any competitor reads this message: please, go complex!
fnord123 4y ago
> Forgive my math skills at 4:07 in the morning, but isn't that actually 36% growth? Yes, (2.04-1.5) / 1.5 = 0.36

muhaaa 4y ago

Author writes that Atlassian has no network effects. That is BS. Atlassian has massive network in its ecosystem. There are Jira Consultancies, 3rd party apps and plugins and deep integration into customers processes. If one element grows the whole ecosystem profits. Secondly, Atlassian is not a bad company just because it's stock is overpriced. It might be a bad investment! Over the short and midterm Atlassian is in some trouble because it has problems to scale the development while shifting from legacy to cloud. They will solve it. Still i expect some bad news to come. These bad news will beat down the stock and maybe create an opportunity to buy a great company at a great price. PS: The Atlassian invoice of my employer tripled over 1 year. You start cheap and simple and with every plugin and product you add the invoice grows. Thus to value Atlassian you have to look into revenue per customer over its life time, which is far greater than this year's revenue of the customer.

gshulegaard 4y ago
I think you might be confusing upselling and cross selling with network effects. Upsell is when you convince a customer to purchase additional service, like offering different tiers of subscriptions. Cross selling is where you sell adjacent services related to (and that possibly integrate with) the original service. Network effects are where the direct value of a product grows simply because the number of users increases, causing the network itself to grow. The classic example are social networks. The more people on your social network, the more people are likely to join your network and less likely to join a smaller competitor. I am not sure there is anything in Atlassian’s product offering that quite fits that description, but that isn’t to say there isn’t plenty of upsell and cross sell opportunity as you describe.
- muhaaa 4y ago
  I disagree. A network effect does not need to be inherent to the product / service itself. It can originate from other sources. What is the network effect of eBay? As a seller I do not care how many other sellers are there. But I care how many buyers are there. For a buyer it's the reverse. Buyers attract sellers and vice versa. That's a network effect too. For Atlassian it's similar. Jira customer attract Jira consultants and vice versa. Ecosystem is the better word for sure. it's competitive advantage is still a network effect.

yrgulation 4y ago

Am i the only one who finds trello more than enough? Agile is meant to be lean, but instead its become a blob full of nonsense in part thanks to tools such as atlassian’s jira. With basic tools like trello you define a slim scrumban workflow and focus on actual work. There are indeed use cases for stuff like jira but it feels like 99% of the time jira is not necessary.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

pikseladam 4y ago

We are using youtrack and we are loving it.

stateableio 4y ago

Jira Data Center is an unbelievably powerful tool. It suffers from unknowledgable administrators. If you have a person who is running Jira Data Center that is familiar with its internal classes, API, Scriptrunner, Automation for Jira, and the enormous 3rd party plug-in environment, there is simply no comparison. It’s not even close. To be fair, that’s a pretty big ask, in terms of technical know-how and cost. Even just base Jira is quite complicated to configure well.

nickjj 4y ago

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 and no draft saved. I lost 30 minutes of work. I normally manually copy textareas every few minutes on any Atlassian page because I don't trust their site (to be fair I do this for most sites too) but in the above case I had just copied a link reference which overwrote my clipboard. At the time I also didn't have a multi-clipboard tool installed since it was using a company issued machine that I don't have tricked out yet. [0]: https://twitter.com/nickjanetakis/status/1540353527859466246 https://twitter.com/nickjanetakis/status/1540353527859466246

LtdJorge 4y ago
I guess you don't use Windows but in case you do, you should use clipboard history. Just press Win+V and enable it, then press that combination again anytime you want something from the history, and a UI opens up with your last copied things. It supports schreenshots too.
nashadelic 4y ago
Sounds like an opportunity to create a chrome add-on that can save any field data. I believe most session managers do that but if the field is wiped out, so is the cache.
zac23or 4y ago
I never write anything in any web interface. I write in notepad and copy and paste. I had many bad surprises ... I can't trust web interfaces. And I use the Windows clipboard manager too.
- exyi 4y ago
  It had never happened to me except for Confluence and Microsoft Teams. Firefox even preserves the typed text between reloads of the page - so unless the web app hacks the textarea somehow, the text will stay there.

zelphirkalt 4y ago

No wonder, given the "quality" of the software they deliver. They claimed to support Markdown in Confluence – It does not work as good as any decent Markdown parser you can install in any mainstream programming language and does not understand, that within Markdown there can be HTML, for example for heading link targets and TOC. Same for Bitbucket. What are they doing? Letting interns code incomplete Markdown parsers and deploying them for everyone to haunt them with subpar quality parsing? The thing cannot even render a readme.md file correctly in Bitbucket. Everything is slow to no end, downloading 20+ megabytes (no joke, no exaggeration!) for displaying a friggin git repo and the files list. Wiki pages that the search function lists suddenly become unreachable. WYSIWYG editor on Confluence is still a joke and annoying to no end. Any technical person, who has ever used any decent alternative will run for the hills, before using that unholy combination of software, that is Atlassian. Jira is probably still the best among the bunch of utterly bad experiences and its UI is just terrible. Cannot find anything easily there.

zac23or 4y ago

> That is, CTOs and CPOs loved Atlassian’s revolutionary Jira product so much, it was able to grow virally and organically without the business having to spend millions of dollars on an enterprise sales team. Here people talk a lot about creating a good product, code quality, etc. It doesn't matter. You don't need to build a great product: you need to find the market and exploit it faster than you can. The quality of your product is not important. How is Atlassian with so many bad products is valued at $52 billion? Jira is one of the worst products in the eyes of developers. But it does not matter. Managers love Jira because with Jira it's "very easy" to create a workflow and micromanage everything. And managers decide what's good for the company, they have the power to buy Jira. But Jira is not Vilain. The villain is the school of management through fear, micromanagement, etc. I worked at a company that created an internal JIRA. It's worse than Jira. It was too complex to fill everything, we create a script to do this.

arcturus17 4y ago
> That is, CTOs and CPOs loved Atlassian’s revolutionary Jira product so much, it was able to grow virally and organically > Here people talk a lot about creating a good product, code quality, etc. It doesn't matter. You don't need to build a great product You really haven't disproven that CTOs and CPOS loved the product initially, which I believe to be true. So yes, you do need to build a great product at the beginning. Then at enough scale, your product can become shit in some ways, and you can focus on sales. But the article's thesis is that Jira did not start as a shit product.
- zac23or 4y ago
  I have no idea what Jira was like in the beginning. But today Jira is a very bad product (in the opinion of developers), but managers still love Jira because Jira has found a market (managers, CTOS, CPOS, etc). Jira being a very slow and buggy application is not important. As an example of a tool that found a market in the area of developers is Docker. I used docker in some companies and my God, Docker is buggy as hell, sometimes I pull new code in git and Docker doesn't see it, I have a lot of network problems, etc. And have no idea what Docker was like in the beginning, but when I used it, it was horrible experience, and developers continue to use it. I'm very happy that my current employee does not use Docker.

fbanon 4y ago

I thought Jira and Confluence were bad, until I started using the Facebook internal wiki and task tools...

axg11 4y ago
Same for Amazon.
nfRfqX5n 4y ago
yea I actually miss JIRA too

binbag 4y ago

The amount of basic grammar errors in the article forced me to stop reading. Can't take it seriously.

smcleod 4y ago

Not to mention that pretty much everyone universally hates Atlassian products.

robmccoll 4y ago

To me, the problem with many of Atlassian's products is that they aren't tools. They are platforms on which you can build the tool you need. They are way too configurable and flexible and as a result, you spend a lot of time managing the tool or organizing the information and configuration within it. Tools should serve a specific usage, behave predictably, help you use them correctly, then get out of the way.

jnwatson 4y ago
Large enterprises need platforms, not tools. It takes a few hours to get a basic process flow going in Jira. It really isn’t hard. And I’m not even a fan of it.

hrdwdmrbl 4y ago

Good riddance to bad software

dalbasal 4y ago

This article's finger is on the right place, but IMO the analysis is off. Netflix, has recently excited the fundamental/rationalist investor camp. The huge valuations hot tech companies enjoy must eventually be justified by a "Thiel Monopoly." That's the only way to earn the 20%-50% margins that Google/Apple/Meta can achieve. Netflix sells a cheap consumer product. One product among several similar options. Consumers are savvy, with many jumping between subscriptions for deals and variety. Content producers have market power, because multiple buyers. In short, textbook microeconomics is afoot. That means competition, efficiency and low margins. That means "startup economics" don't apply. The market is not going to let Netflix sit on massive margins and monopoly market share. Newschool tech investors see this as an abomination. Old schoolers see it as cosmic justice. Anyway.. those who desire market rationality love Netflix and are applying the Netflix analysis to everything. Atlassian is a different story entirely. They actually sell software. Enterprise software, really. There are no content producers squeezing them for a bigger cut. The companies who pay them aren't price sensitive, and they are locked in enough. This is not the "microeconomic normality" monster that bit Netflix. Atlassian's business model is fine. Competition isn't the problem, and neither is consumer bargaining power. Atlassian's problem is that they haven't done good enough. The bar, set by both tech history and the $150bn peak valuation, is that Atlassian becomes a microsoft.. at least a SalesForce, IMB or somesuch. Where's Atlassian's challenge to AWS? When is Atlassian leading the WFH revolution. How will Atlassian become the organisational nervous system of the modern knowledge firm? It just doesn't look likely that Atlassian is going to achieve that kind of big-hairy-goal. The products have a crusty, uninspiring feel. The take over the world vibe is missing. So... Atlassian's valuation is down. I doubt the share price will ever approach "rational." Software companies have value, and the floor is set by opportunistic M&A. If stock markets don't want TEAM @ 10X revenue or more... someone will buy them.

geodel 4y ago
> The companies who pay them aren't price sensitive, and they are locked in enough. I doubt this is true lately. I have seen even more critical ticketing system like ServiceNow/Cherwell/Remedy getting replaced. We replaced Slack with other chat software because of licensing cost. Big companies are not price sensitive seems like old theory. Because I am seeing in so many large companies increasing license fee is causing replacement of existing products.

albertopv 4y ago

8000 people and still a 3 years old useful feature like [0] is still in 'gathering interest' status. [0] https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-20097 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-20097

gjvc 4y ago

the sooner this shit heap of a company fails the better

aviramha 4y ago

>instead relying on ‘product-led growth’. That is, CTOs and CPOs loved Atlassian’s revolutionary Jira product so much Does anyone like any Atlassian product nowadays?

BFLpL0QNek 4y ago

> Atlassian has somehow become the Benjamin Button of the tech sector — profitable as a startup and loss making as it has matured. They where profitable, they didn’t need funding the only funding they took was for staff to sell some of the equity. Them now making a loss I think is more a deliberate choice, not a business failure. They could of continued as they where making $$$ but instead choose to go from 700 people at ipo to near 7k today for pretty much the same product suite. Those 7k people have to be working on a lot of stuff behind the scenes, building on existing products and maybe yet to be released products. Atlassian always said they where big on long term investment. I’m sure they could be profitable if they wanted but then would need to massively cut the long term investment. I’m not to worried about Atlassian. Every large org I worked at is run off Jira. I do regret not selling a small parcel of TEAM at the end of last year though when it was over $440usd a share

thr0wawayf00 4y ago
> Them now making a loss I think is more a deliberate choice, not a business failure. They could of continued as they where making $$$ but instead choose to go from 700 people at ipo to near 7k today for pretty much the same product suite. But this is exactly the kind of thing that makes a market analyst yell "FIRE!" during a bear market. Nobody trading stocks is going to look at a 10x headcount increase without meaningful additions to the product offering as a good thing.
- vasco 4y ago
  Is your understanding of software companies that you add people and magically new good products appear right away?
  - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
    They IPO'd 7 years ago, which looks even worse. They've had all this time and hired all of these people and largely kept the same product offering with no obvious improvements to performance or stability. Again, that's a market analyst's nightmare.
- 4y ago

itomato 4y ago

They say it’s overvalued - whose fault is that? Now the remote thing could be fantastic. I don’t know what the building on Harrison St. cost, but between what they save on staff relocations and real estate, there should be some offset in two-three years, right? Salesforce is an Apple to Atlassian’s orange. I would guess they make more money from Tableau than Atlassian do from Confluence and Jira Data Center combined. “Tableau Software generated $464 million as part of Salesforce for the quarter, up about 18% from the same quarter a year ago“ What will be the total cost of maintaining a Java app (with deep dependencies) for five years? Will subscription costs increase YoY to match? Add to that the coupling of disparate products and their code and cultures.

residualmind 4y ago

I was unprofitable when I was 20, too.

belter 4y ago

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
Yet all of them have minted millionaires and billionaires. This is the new game. Nobody cares about profits. Money has been made.

aetherspawn 4y ago

I wish they never took away the self-hosted option. That's the only reason we're not using it at the moment.

dboreham 4y ago

imho Atlassian's problem is that they failed to capture a critical mass of SaaS services for software development. Everyone uses GitHub, which provides a (crappy) bug management system. Everyone uses Google Docs which is arguably better than Confluence for most purposes. Perhaps not coincidentally both these services are owned by companies that make their money from other things so they can afford to dump endless investment in making them better.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago
> so they can afford to dump endless investment in making them better. Which is so necessary when your product is very reliant on integrations because maintaining that kind of software gets so cumbersome over time. The testing alone can sink a team's productivity. I work for a Confluence competitor and we've based our go-to-market strategy around executing one problem very well as opposed to trying to build a set of products to sell as a suite and it's worked relatively well so far. Business people love the idea of integrations and some of them do act as a force-multiplier in productivity. But they also create tons of headaches for end users and can be very expensive.

bborud 4y ago

Reading through the comments two things stand out: - People disagree on whether it is appropriate to focus on growth or profitability at this stage in Atlassian's lifecycle. - I suspect people project their misgivings with the products onto the company. So I didn't learn much from reading the comments.

steveBK123 4y ago

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 managers, you'll never be able to leverage the more complicated workflows/linkages/planning features.

leokennis 4y ago
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.
hcarvalhoalves 4y ago
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.
technion 4y ago
> 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.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  This stuff blows my mind but tends to occur everywhere What is the value add of an engineer doing project management work in an environment where project managers exist Should the project managers need to do a little coding then? Also the quiet part out loud - project managers tend to be vastly cheaper (often 2:1) than engineers. Any and every task that an engineering team can offload to a project manager is big dollars saved by the firm. I frequently find myself in engineering roles where I am doing most stakeholder comms, requirements gathering, JIRA ticket entry/management, project planning, user documentation, support runbooks, PR reviewing, a bit of dev, occasionally testing, deployments, and sit on the support escalation pager rotation. Any of the above tasks you can offload to a non-engineer saves the firm money.

hnbad 4y ago

> Atlassian’s prospectus noted that in 2015 the business grew by 48%, around double this year’s growth. If Atlassian is 20 years old now, that means it was over 10 years old (~13) then. Atlassian was an enterprise service company at that point already. What kind of enterprise service company can be expected to maintain a 50% year-over-year growth for nearly a decade? If that's "around double this year's growth" that means they're still growing by 20-25%. That's impressive. I'm not saying the valuation correction is wrong or that the claims they're unprofitable are unfair, I'm wondering what made anyone think they'd perform better than they have in terms of growth if that growth is already impressive. They sell enterprise services ffs and they're the gold standard outside e.g. Sharepoint. Maybe the problem isn't their growth rate itself, but attempting to build the business model on an unrealistic growth rate.

EGreg 4y ago

I don’t see why this is a problem for society. Things rise and they fall. That’s markets. The guys who have created it are billionaires, they helped a lot of people. Now it’s time to move on to more modern things. Similarly with decentralized projects like Bitcoin. I have come to appreciate Moxie’s stance on decentralized systems moving more slowly. It’s a trade-off. Can any Bitcoin maxis please tell us why we can’t look to newer projects for solving whatever it is Bitcoin was supposed to do but failed to achieve - be a peer to peer cash system for example? How about other applications like voting… why always and only Bitcoin, a 13-year-old project that barely evolves?

mnkypete 4y ago

I am: a) a dev myself b) head of a small dev/SAAS company/team c) Atlassian Marketplace vendor Jira is fine. Atlassian will be around for quite a bit, imho. They have a somewhat decent ecosystem, which helps a lot with the stickiness. Jira could see a lot of improvement product wise, but at least it has been getting faster in the last year (still slow, though, but not as bad). Their new stuff seems to be a hit or miss, but I especially like their new Jira thing (Jira Product Management), mostly because it comes very opinionated. I think Jira/Atlassian would benefit a lot from actually providing more guidance on how to properly use their product(s) depending on team size (e.g. moving from 5 to 50 to 500 person teams). Most other tools don't do this as well, but I think that would improve the experience for everyone, dev & mgmt alike..

joshenders 4y ago

*and crappy Forgot that part

brycewray 4y ago

Other than the points raised here by others and in TFA’s comments section which point out TFA’s flaws, I would add only that there are worse things than Jira --- as I found out When my final employer converted from Jira to ServiceNow. If you think Jira is bad... jeez.

carlsborg 4y ago

I suspect the following is built into valuations of many software companies with subscription revenue models: they can reduce headcount dramatically and keep a relatively tiny headcount of staff around to sustain the existing recurring revenue and be highly profitable even in a slowing economy. For example how many people would MongoDB, with close to a billion dollars of annual revenue, need to keep the lights on, assuming zero new feature development, sales or marketing? The software is already sold and integral to the enterprise projects that use it, and in the enterprise migration to a new vendor is often a considerable project in itself.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
I think this is not as straightforward as you make it sound. 1. Often the way companies are structured requires specific teams and processes to exist and unwinding that is not easy. 2. It can be very hard to identify which people are actually critical. If you get it wrong it’s a big problem. 3. Additionally, firing a large percentage of employees will create a very negative feeling in the remainder so they might leave as well or their work quality will suffer. 4. Customers may lose faith in the business as a result and switch. Something like Atlassian has many competitors. Are there any specific examples of this being done successfully?
- stu2b50 4y ago
  AirBNB? They were flailing at the beginning of covid, taking a massive 2 billion loan at 10% APR to maintain cash flow. They laid off a substantial portion of their workforce, hunkered down, and it paid off - they went on to successfully IPO a year later, still in the pandemic.
- ratww 4y ago
  I've worked (as in actively worked) in a couple restructuring efforts, and it went fine, but it wasn't on tech, it was on education. It went massively well. The universities were financially healthier afterwards, and all the remaining employees had safer (union!) jobs. The trick for this being successful is most of the time by challenging the processes themselves, rather than the employees. Employees aren't useless, but process are. The reason you need 500 people rather than 250 or 100 or 50 to do something might be simply because you said so somewhere or sometime. So, companies should review and change processes BEFORE reducing headcount. But alas, companies don't ever do it, because it requires introspection, egolessness and actual work, the sorta stuff that is rare in upper management.

asimpletune 4y ago

Just a random, semi-related thought, but maybe if there is a recession, then software as an industry will become more connected to business/engineering fundamentals? I see a few people mentioned Jira busy-work here... maybe the market will actually correct for all of that?

vhiremath4 4y ago

> 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). I can tell the reporter has never used or operated something as integral as a ticketing system at scale. These systems are integrated everywhere to automate operations flows. They’re used to continuously enforce compliance. The list goes on. Ripping them out at an enterprise company is very painful. Then on top of all that, you have to re-train everyone on how to use a new system.

dangus 4y ago

This thing reads like an uninformed hit piece. Let me go ahead and flex my MBA knowledge for all the engineers in the building who claim that MBAs don't know anything about business... First, I suggest you read Atlassian's balance sheet and income statement. They're a public company, so it's all publicly available information. [1] Look how fast those revenues are growing. Look at how Cost of revenues is declining against the revenue. In 2019, it was 33%, 2020 it was 28%, 2021 it was 25%. That means that as Atlassian's subscriber count increases, its cost per subscriber is decreasing, a direct contradiction to the claims made in this article. In the statements of cash flows, you'll see that Net cash provided by operating activities increases every year. Financing activities explain losses, not any sort of problem with the fundamentals of the business. And, when you're losing money, you don't pay taxes. Atlassian is doing a standard business/accounting play here: re-invest in the business and use financial activities in order to pay nothing to the Australian equivalent of Uncle Sam. Income tax expense is a negative number on the balance sheet each year. The worst claim in the article is that Atlassian represents a "legacy" product. No, not at all, especially if you've been on their cloud products anytime recently. The cloud products get rapid iterations and improvements, including performance. Atlassian's pricing is extremely competitive, acting as a "bundle" that competitors can't match. Jira in particular has basically no realistic competitor, and OpsGenie does the same thing as PagerDuty at a fraction of the cost. [1] https://s28.q4cdn.com/541786762/files/doc_financials/2021/ar/FY21-Annual-Report-on-Form-20-F.pdf https://s28.q4cdn.com/541786762/files/doc_financials/2021/ar... (Scroll to page F-5 about 105 pages in)

wrongotron 4y ago

It seems clear to me that they are a company that no longer cares about strategic investment. Their forays (acquisitions) into version control have been so amazingly weak. Stash was devoid of even basic features. Now they have Bitbucket: - they still can't get it to perform adequately after years - it lacks syntax highlighting in PR views - it took them years to get side-by-side diffs into PR views - it integrates with third party tools poorly I thought maybe the Github acquisition would spur them into recognizing it as a important product category, but I guess not.

thayne 4y ago

> it now needs to spend a lot of money on marketing to achieve that growth. I think focusing on improving their products would be more prudent. There's only so much marketing can do when users hate your product.

ab_testing 4y ago

The high growth without generating a profit has worked fine for them for the last decade. But it seems that their stock price is in risky territory. They were valued at 113B at their peak and are now close to 48B. But their annual revenue is just around 2B. So that is still 24x revenue with no profits. It looks like they would fall a lot more if that revenue growth slows down due to a recession or companies just cutting back a litte bit.

mbesto 4y ago

Ugh, the "unprofitable" trope in B2B SaaS...here we go again... FCF: 2019 - $420M 2020 - $538M 2021 - $808M 30% CAGR (just for the last 4 years alone) 2021 Numbers: $1.3B Revenue $372M S&M Spend $973M R&D Spend These are all super healthy numbers and if the company stopped growing, then it would easily become profitable. The author needs a finance course.

gw67 4y ago

The author is predicting a -80% crash (37$ as fair value vs 189$ current)

taylorbuley 4y ago

> Atlassian’s legacy Jira product is clunky and has barely evolved in a decade — it’s essentially a ticket-based system which allows developers and product managers to communicate on tasks and is no longer loved by developers Developers "loving" any ticketing system is a bit of a stretch. To me it's more of a "least worst" preference.

dcdc123 4y ago

Their software also gets worse with every update.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

One of the things I've found really interesting is how little development ecosystem there is around Atlassian's tools. They have a pretty rich API for most of their products, but nobody really uses them. There's some very cool CLI tools just starting to evolve for Jira and Confluence, which can completely transform the complaints people have (automating common concerns, eliminating UI slowness). I think Atlassian should have done more to build a community for people to ramp up on their technology.

bitwize 4y ago

If I never have to hear about JIRA and Confluence again, it'll be too soon.

jdlyga 4y ago

Jira is becoming Microsoft Word in terms of just piling on the features. Atlassian needs to learn to say no sometimes.

TheGigaChad 4y ago