Revenue was $1.6 billion in 2020, up 33% from $1.2 billion for 2019.

Growing at that rate at this point in your company's lifecycle is pretty extraordinary. So not sure why you would consider them to be a cautionary tale.

As for what has happened to them. They have been on an acquisition binge the last few years e.g. Trello, StatusPage, OpsGenie, Mindville etc. And as mentioned above they have been rewriting their UI in a new React framework called Atlaskit.

I also used to think Atlassian was a pretty poorly run company but then you look into it and actually the opposite is true. Although they did let Github, Gitlab, Slack dominate them.

Next few years will be interesting as Gitlab is moving very fast into their space.

Sales and Revenue do not always equate to quality and user experience. All these companies when they get to this size start to lean on M&A vs build it yourself. Look at the history of Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and you'll see the same pattern.

Slack is the new Sharepoint, everyone uses it but no one really wants to and it doesn't really fit the bill but everyone else is doing it so companies adopt it.

Slack's value is in selling the idea of async chat to managers and making it mainstream. I don't feel as nauseous using it as Sharepoint, but it does seem to be buggy and crashy in places.

For me slack is a very simple deal:

Microsoft Teams Chat UI is garbage. It uses a lot of space, i can't just have a list of channels, no i need groups etc.

It even doesn't matter to me if its slack or hipchat or matrix or whatever. I don't know why we migrated to slack.

I don't get why Teams doesn't provide a lightweight chat typical UI. I would just switch to Teams. After all video calls are much better on Teams and more stable.

But then Slack integrated Teams and Zoom. They clearly don't want to compete in this area and i also don't get why.

Gitlab is not in any way a Jira competitor.

And yes, Atlassian did drop the ball. We'll see the fallout in five years, I don't see how they can save the company now.

My observation as a user is that it's still good if you are starting a new account from scratch. But if you have been using it for a decade and made lots of customizations and added plugins over the years, they get more clunky as they continue to update their product.

This is it.

I don't even think Jira is specifically bad. If someone was only using it for basic project managment and ticketing, it'd be acceptable.

However, occupies the same niche as SAP or Oracle businessware.

First, Take a service that must be ergonomic because people rely on it all day to do their job. Next, make the primary requirement the ability for managment and finance to run reports. Then, outsource it to a company that wants to add custom web frameworks on top of a decades old project. Finally, graft on decades of customizations done by different generations of contractors.

Agreed. Jira makes it easy to add a new field, plugin, or workflow step for a particular use case, but it is much more difficult to determine if an existing field/plugin/workflow step can be safely removed. As a result, everyone is afraid to touch it, projects accumulate cruft over the years, and it degrades the entire workflow. The problem is especially bad if there is shared ownership of JIRA, and therefore everyone feels empowered to add, but nobody feels responsible for the dirty work to clean up the mess from time to time.

My company had resisted the urge to bolt on additions more than most. We recently migrated from Cloud to on-prem Server as a result of being acquired, and it is amazing how much zippier our project is compared to some of the peer projects that have accumulated cruft.

Yep, agreed.

If you can admin your own Jira instance and keep the fields and plugins to exactly what you need, it's pretty nice. I keep going back to it for the customizable workflows and fine-grained access control.

Unfortunately, every corporate Jira instance I've ever worked with has been overrun with every possible field possible, an unnecessary and constantly shifting mishmash of plugins and horribly slow access. You're paying the price for all of that cruft that you don't need and which can't be removed because "maybe someone wants it."

> every corporate Jira instance I've ever worked with has been overrun with every possible field possible

I've seen multiple different fields for the same value, each of them created for their specific team. The instance is slow AF most of the time due to the bloat and often I can't even assign a sprint to a JIRA because the field doesn't load anymore.

Cruising along. One issue though is that the integrated knowledge workflow is complex.