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.
The slow and steady mentality is fine, but we see over and over that it isn't what the market wants. A private company or a high risk growth company, those are the two options for a software company.
Either that or they'll be taken over. They're revenue now is just a $2bn, so that "grow grow" mindset from 10 years ago did not work out. In theory, a steady CEO could try to steady at that size with a nice margin. But, actually declaring and pursuing that would mean halving the companies market cap to a "normal" P/E of 20-30X.
At that price (say $20bn) one of the big software companies would just buy them... for their own growth targets.
Moderation has no place in the public markets as a software company. It's remarkable how unstable a stable condition is.
I've seen this happen so many times:
- profitable, down to earth founders generating net profits
- VC approaches said outfit and tries to gather as much info
- VC realizes said outfit is difficult to emulate and break into market
- VC invests and starts demanding they run at a loss to grow quickly
This works well when interest rates are low, and VC is not under pressure to deliver returns. However, when capital suddenly becomes slightly expensive, the whole house of cards start to crumble taking down the good business with it.
Neither strong prudence or optimism helps here. Once you start running at a loss post-VC money, you no longer control the destiny of your own company you started.
Let this cyclical downturn (likely to last for 5 or more years) be a lesson that the previous generation learned. If you are not making growing net profit (Revenue - COGS), you are no making period. Not so while ago people were arguing that debt is an asset and cash is a liability. It's always amusing to me how quickly people denounce gravity are impacted by it.
The good times are over for VC backed SaaS
But, you can't grow forever. At some point you hit things like the maximum market size and there's no longer any way to invest your profits back into growth.
Or, to hit a lot closer to home: As a stockholder, your stock won't appreciate in value forever. Software companies very rarely turn into Microsofts and Googles. You need to sell at some point in order to realize the value of your investment. (Unless you're getting dividends.)
I worked at Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) in SA 2005–2007 and the CEO at the time, Didier Elzinga, did the same.
But what RSP did went even further. Didier and the CFO did a full disclosure presentation about the company's financials quarterly or bi-annually (can't remember).
It was great. Not least to make everyone understand why they couldn't pay rates that VFX professionals who moved to AUS from the East coast or London where used to – at least at that time (it was early years for RSP then).
RSP remains one of the best workplaces I ever had the luck to be employed at.
Afair Didier was also in some role on the board of Atlassian at the time. Maybe not a coincidence.
I believe that's Doug Burgum (now governor of North Dakota).
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.
Seriously, when did it become normal in capitalism that you should not prove that your business can make money? That there a customers willing to pay for your product? That the promise of future maybe profit sells better than actual profit now? This is insane.
The only conclusion to this statement is "When we will stagnate we will then start making profits"
This doesn't sound like a great strategy to me. This is why I'm not investing in "no-profit but growth" except for the stock price increasing in the short term.
If that means profits available to, e.g. pay dividends with then sure. But I think it ought to always be the goal to have a profitable operation then you can plough the profits back into the business to push growth (which will mean reporting 0 profits).
What you're left is a company with 8000 employees and a system to problematic to change.
With the recession incoming, the time for free money is over and tech startups are bound for a correction. I'd sell or get ready to wait 10-20 years.
Even in the wait scenario, you're basically hoping that a huge corporation will transform itself and rediscover their startup roots - which is not likely to happen.
It happened with Mashape (sold their unprofitable marketplace to the RapidAPI people - geez, what a bad deal, it was painful to watch) and they managed to reinvent themselves with Kong.
They literally did a bunch of experiments and went on with what succeeded, ignoring their main, flawed, business model.
That's what companies should do to chase success, they need to act like venture incubator, don't bother their teams with corporate BS and hope one of their teams will succeed. If they behave like mammoth corporations they're doomed to fail.
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
This leaves them very vulnerable to another company taking their market share, as soon as they create something better that is extensible enough to get management signoff. I know a lot of companies have tried and failed here, but someone's going to eventually do it.
Every issue type is configured with its associated issue-create screen and that screen has its fields. When you change the issue type during issue creation you're replacing one set of fields with another which results in the information loss you experienced. This just doesn't affect the description field, but all other system fields and custom fields.
saved my sanity more than once regarding lost jira inputs
What are the equivalents for Jira ?
Is there an openish source piece of similar software ?
Jira cops a lot of hate on HN, but really to paraphrase Churchill on Democracy - "Jira is the worst issue tracking software, except for all the others".
The comparison on Wikipedia has so many of them : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_s...
Are any of them any better?
I've also used Redmine a few years ago. It gets the job done but nowhere near as slick and fun to use.
(This is the same failure mode as many Agile-as-practiced projects have: once the incentive structure is decoupled from results, someone will have a full time job moving tickets around in a way which is considered productive even if the project is foundering.)
I started using Linear recently and I can never go back to Jira. Linear is that good.
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.
Something that gets "close enough", like Mattermost/Rocket.Chat can get to Slack? Probably nothing, given how huge the surface attempt for Jira is.
But for project management and issue tracking in general, there are quite a few alternatives:
- OpenProject: https://www.openproject.org/ mentioning this first, because it's what I use for my personal needs and feels pretty decent (issue tracking, time tracking, references, comments, files, Wiki, cost reports and so on), though is definitely not nearly as popular
- Redmine: https://www.redmine.org/ is probably also a really good alternative to mention, while the original UI is dated a while ago there was a project to create something more modern and most of the times when someone is using an alternative to Jira, I've seen it be Redmine in particular
- Odoo: https://www.odoo.com/ is a more modular system that I haven't really used much personally, but have heard about being talked at the occasional conference in my country, the idea seems nice at least
- Nextcloud: also has some apps, like https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/tasks and https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/deck that, while basic, can be really easy to get started with if you already have Nextcloud
- Kanboard: https://kanboard.org/ is perhaps the best Kanban board that I have personally used, just because of how snappy and lightweight it is (at the expense of the features it has, admittedly)
Oh, I also probably should mention GitLab, which has lots of project management features built right into it nowadays, as well as stuff as release management and whatnot: https://about.gitlab.com/features/?stage=plan
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..
I use Linear these days, and that's great too. But for a small company? I'd recommend Redmine.
I refuse to work on any project using Jira. It’s the first question I ask in interviews.
One equivalent that does everything and is as flexible as jira, I don't know.
There are however a multitude of software that provide some of the functionnalites or can do many things jira does but in a more opinionated way.
It depends if one's company want a tool flexible enough to suit gazillons of different workflows with integration with many other tools or not. If the goal is only to have issues and kanban boards I think there are many alternatives.
Funny thing is jira is such a mess Atlassian introduced jira service desk more focused on tickets while the former can also do that.
One equivalent that does everything and is as flexible as jira, I don't know.
There are however a multitude of software that provide some of the functionnalites or can do many things jira does but in a more opinionated way.
It depends if one's company want a tool flexible enough to suit gazillons of different workflows with integration with many other tools or not. If the goal is only to have tickets and kanban boards I think there are many alternatives.
If the issue in your company is tracking software, your company is probably full of anal PMs and a nightmare to work in.
We used to use zenhub, nowadays we use github projects
My personal preference is ClickUp or Asana as they offer flexibility to bolt on routine task management in a much more flexible way.
Not in my experience, at least not enough of an impact to make me really care. Azure DevOps was far worse in my experience, and many of the ones SW Devs promote can't roll up to the portfolio level which is where the strategic and purchasing decisions are made.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
Lol. At some companies, Jira workflows literally run the whole company. At my prev job, prod deployments were tightly linked to Jira.
Because that is where Jira primarily plays. In enterprise companies where it's rolled out across the organisation with tentacles firmly embedded into almost every process and system.
And whilst people continue to criticise Jira it continues to grow because in reality it competes with products like Rally not Asana. And there really isn't anything out there that can offer the same level of customisability and flexibility.
Is like saying: "people can move overseas with minimal cost (other than shitloads of migration bureaucracy, frequent flying to meet family, put their entire furniture on top of a cargo ship)
MS Word, Facebook, WhatsApp, Visa, they all have network effects: every user you add makes your product more compelling, thus creating a virtuous circle. You need to buy their product because other people have their product.
My experience tells me the complete opposite of this statement. Regardless of the the workflows, automation and whatnot there are tons and tons of IP hidden in tickets and over a long enough period references to them end up scattered all over your tools, commits, documents, wikis, IM, email, etc. etc.
When you move ticketing providers it's very likely you can't correctly migrate all of your existing data into the new system without breaking or losing some of it.
I detest trying to figure out why a certain code change was made, looking at the commit message only to find a reference to link to a dead ticket.
I'm not for or against Jira, but moving ticketing systems does not come at a "minimal cost" in my opinion and needs careful consideration and motivation.
Whilst I LOVE to crap on Jira, it has brought some magnitude of order and civility to the PMO's and at least created a familiar work environment for people.
God help me If I ever have to go back to word docs and sharepoint to manage project work.
that's doing a lot of work in that sentence!
The first part does not realistically connect to the second part. Surely the author is aware that switching to new systems is actually quite expensive monetarily and operationally - definitely not “minimal”?
1) When the user wants to merge to master, at least one of the commit messages must reference a valid Jira ticket.
2) A Jira plugin was installed such that when tests were run in CI, a jira ticket was created to record the result (pass/fail). This somehow ticks a SOC compliance box
How out of touch can you be with the stickiness of enterprise SaaS, and still write financial commentary?
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.
> 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.
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.
I like to call Confluence a knowledge cemetery - in the huge datasets you have in mind, finding the page you are looking for is more a matter of luck than anything else. And once you found it, you can never be sure if it's still up to date.
> Anyway, they have 8000 employees... they can always drastically downsize and refocus, the company will be around for a while.
I'm actually wondering how they can not make a profit with the huge corporate user base they have?
Exactly. Other products comes with opinionated workflow or are much easier (and simpler) to use. Once you setup Jira way you wanted (good luck with that) and able to maintain this setup for all of your projects you're stuck with Jira forever - you won't be able to export all of your content to another software. The whole process takes ages and its a nightmare of going thought totally different UX pages, unintuitive settings, slow UI, setting up extremely expensive plugins (why till today you need to buy tempo to get basic functionality like time tracking) etc.
It's called vendor lock. Nobody ever got fired for buying Jira
Other products are not for every business, have limited settings - but are quicker, saves you time and are able to be useful since day one.
All of the companies are using Jira differently, even if you're familiar with this, and you have been using Jira in all you provious jobs for years you still need to have onboarding on how does Jira works in current company - as for instance I've worked with Asana in 3 totally different companies and workflow was the same.
But not everyone needs 'comparable' functionality - an awful lot of people use just some features and not others - because of the awful UI and terrible user experience, these people are ripe to be picked off by a competitor (existing or future). I agree, if a mega-corp is completely in bed with JIRA, its harder to switch, but for a company not making any money (Atlassian), having their small and medium sized customers peeled off bit-by-bit for better products is going to hurt.
Most companies don't need "comparable functionality" and most did not built entire workflows around it, and those companies will leave for competitors. The few that locked themselves into Jira will face sharply rising prices in next years, that will make them reconsider their choice.
They have bad products and they are losing 700 million a year, future for Atlassian is bleak.
So it ain't nonsense, users do switch.
My main problem with confluence is that it doesn't know what kind of text editor it wants to be. Sometimes its markdown (or rather its own undocumented flavour of markdown), sometimes its a rich-text editor, sometimes its just plain text, and you kind of figure out on the fly what to do. Also the codes boxes are absolutely massive and a bit of a pain to work with (which, like all of these problems, could be solved with just normal markdown).
In the grand scheme of things though, its a minor annoyance.
And while Jira is clunky, but other enterprise grade solution I've used are worse
Don't get me wrong I'd pick lean alternatives any day of the week, but for what it does there's few replacements
And mercurial too. I do miss mercurial.
Confluence is the single, worst Atlassian product, in my opinion. I describe it as a wiki written by someone who has never used a wiki. It seems like everything about it is wrong in some way, and it's painful to use.
I think you misunderstand the way some companies work... Some companies, a VP will send an email saying "As of next week, we will use Asana instead of Jira. Jira will be deleted, so copy anything important off it now. NO EXCEPTIONS!"
Sure, there will be mayhem for a couple of weeks, but the migration will be successful. The VP will have one more thing to put on his 'done' checklist.
They bought Trello for that
Every time there is an update I wonder what feature they removed or is broken. I still cannot properly add images in lists or continue the numbering in a new list to work around this "feature".
They also broke markup/down import which is another kind of hell.
But there is no competing product (suite) that offers comparable functionality and provides the same long-term flexibilty.
This is maybe true, but the future belongs to more flexible software. Eventually Notion [1] or Fibery [2] will replace Jira. They may do it now for smaller team already (10-500 ppl), it just takes time to enter large companies.
[1] https://notion.so [2] https://fibery.io
If Atlassian wants to be profitable, they need to replace their founding CEO's. Mike and Scott have done well to grow the business, but the required skillset is different from this point on. Mike in particular seems to be very distracted these days.
They want to hire 17000 more people: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-07/atlassian...
It still doesn't have native Markdown editing, does it? Major issue IMO.
Simply put, Atlassian sucks at building products because their culture is not good. They got lucky they had the right idea when they were young and didn't have competition.
Nowadays there are just better products out there.
That, kind of like Mozilla started fresh with Firefox, would indeed be a killer move (edit: provided they _can_ structurally do so).
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..
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.
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.
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.
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!
Yes, (2.04-1.5) / 1.5 = 0.36
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.
How is Oracle doing these days anyway?
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.
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....)
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.
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...
(Scroll to page F-5 about 105 pages in)
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.
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.
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.
Any new company probably wouldn’t use it though, it’s just overkill.
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.
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.
It is not great but the rest is just not any better (as far as I have seen that is!).
Aren't you "prematurely optimising"?
One thing done well is exactly what I want of the software I buy.
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.
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.
FCF:
2019 - $420M
2020 - $538M
2021 - $808M
2021 Numbers:
$1.3B Revenue
$372M S&M Spend
$973M R&D Spend
The author needs a finance course.
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.
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.
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.
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?
JIRA configuration is pain. Unless you are large enough to afford a dedicated JIRA admin, it would likely make sense to just pay for somebody once in a while to implement the stuff you want.
The UI is very configurable and has many power user tools, like their search is very good and has so many features.
The Language for writing text is bad and sadly not even the same on other Atlassian products. Please just let me write markdown.
Confluence is another story. It is one of the better tools for documentation, but it's generally slow no matter who runs it. It has very quirky drawbacks like a page needing to have a unique name in a space even if it is in a completely different tree structure.
The editor itself from confluence hangs so much and has destroyed pages multiple times for me, thankfully the history is decent and you can recover usually.
I might be wrong, but I think those tools are dedicated to something people don't like to do by default (planning, going through bureaucratic processes), so they don't like the tool either.
But for some reason, they convince themselves that they don't like to go through Bureaucratic Processes because of JIRA/Asana/etc... and that if only the tool was better it would be a breeze, when in my experience the process is the real issue, rarely the tooling (even though it surely can be improved)
Work goes faster if you keep it in small teams and let them self-organise.
There are some annoying aspects, but it's way better for our workflow than anything else I've tried (which includes github issues, gitlab issues, OTRS, RT, trac and a few others I've forgotten by now).
Jira and Bitbucket, OTOH, the less said about them the better.
There was little to no discoverability, it was slow as shit and the editing tools weren't that good. The integrations to their other products were at the time pretty much non-existing as well. Always felt like it was really basic which made me wonder how it could be so slow.
Any other wiki software were probably better. Mediawiki is free but people still paid for Confluence.
I don't get why people used it and still use it to this day. I dislike pretty much every of their products though, they all suck in my opinion and I have written several JIRA plugins so I had extensive experience with it.
At work we are using a combination of notion and gitlab wiki and are probably going to move to confluence. Gitlab wiki is especially hard to use and thus stuff is under-documented. eg I'm a little project right now, we could use about 20 pages to document bits of it, this is such a pain in gitlab wiki.
I use Jira, it is okay. I think a lot of people here hate it because they associate it with Enterprise paperwork and rules.
We have wrapper functions that allow us to automate all the painful interactions with atlassian software. None of them are clever in any way; they're rote. But without them, we weren't using the services fully, which is sophomoric since we don't have freedom to use other services.
I can't defend the slowness though!
You could see PRs related to a given ticket, see tickets in wiki, I'm sure it integrates well with CI (Bamboo/Pipelines?), etc. It might seem small, but such integration makes work more pleasant and comfortable.
But the fact is that if that happened, another tool would be used instead, and the same dysfunctional management processes would just re-emerge. Jira makes micromanagy bureaucratic process easy, but does not in itself cause it.
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.
All-in-all, a great success story. (Whatever one thinks of Jira the product)
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
| Unprofitable Companies 2021-2022
| Airbnb | Dropbox | Uber | Lyft
| Zillow | Peloton | Pinterest | Snap
| Cloudflare | MongoDB | Slack | Spotify
| Elastic | Okta | Fastly
Developers "loving" any ticketing system is a bit of a stretch. To me it's more of a "least worst" preference.
But yeah, somebody should create a Jira ticket for their lack of profitability
tag, estimate, assign, add to epic, put on next sprint
- 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.
I think focusing on improving their products would be more prudent. There's only so much marketing can do when users hate your product.
Does anyone like any Atlassian product nowadays?
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.
Forgot that part