I feel like there is a subtle pattern of attitudes and behavior that I pick up on from Atlassian. It’s almost as though they don’t get that they need to keep working to innovate and please their customers to stay relevant. Look at what happened to Hipchat, and what I’d argue will eventually happen to JIRA.
It’s almost as though they don’t get that they need to keep working to innovate and please their customers to stay relevant.
Like all enterprise software vendors their customers are the ones who buy it, not the ones who use it. In almost all cases the person signing the cheques will never experience any of the issues themselves.
This happened like 2 years ago at least, every update to Jira makes it slower and less usable, I have given them this feedback many times, and I suspect I am not alone, and they simply do not care. Until they see subscriptions drop, they will do nothing, they are like Rational Software or CA when they hit the big time and started buying up all their competition.
Slack pretty much killed hipchat and drove directly into enterprises - which should have been atlassian sales. Once you have your tentacles in enterprise (and slack are almost there), it’s very easy to sell huge contracts of pretty average software. JIRA is great, but it’s not that complex, and it would not take much to start chipping it away
JIRA is quite complex, but it suffers from a Swiss army knife complex, and at some point you end up "programming in JIRA" instead of using a much simpler purpose-built tool, or even building one.
If your processes are complex, you're likely need flexible tool which allows arbitrary workflows. Of course you might argue that complex processes should bend to match tools, but not everyone who pays for software will agree, so Jira definitely has its market as a flexible tool even if it means that there should be dedicated Jira developers.
I heard from a friend at a fortune 100 company you would all know, that they tried piloting hipchat internally that hipchat simply did not scale well. Their servers choked under the load so frequently they got out of the contract.
Not complex? We have to hire entire teams of people just to handle that confangled mess of options and wierd defaults and strange behavior to not slow down the developers and everyone else.
Jira is complex but no one needs that complexity. Jira is built to sell to executives, not for anyone to actually use. Executives need to know that they'll be tracking their employees time down to the second with Jira.
But then they're never going to look at the UI for Jira either because they're too busy for that.
I'm not gonna defend Jira. I don't like it. But this is the same thing people like to say about Office. It turns out that the 80/20 rule (80% of users only use 20% of features) never guarantees that even 50% use the _same_ 20%. You need to implement a lot more of Jira's complexity than you might think to get a significant part of Jira's market share.
(Slack is another good example. Slack is "just" an IRC client with better emoji/GIF support. But I'll be damned if Microsoft Teams doesn't _really suck_, even with the benefit of knowing how Slack does everything. Good software is hard and takes work.)
> I'm not gonna defend Jira. I don't like it. But this is the same thing people like to say about Office. It turns out that the 80/20 rule (80% of users only use 20% of features) never guarantees that even 50% use the _same_ 20%. You need to implement a lot more of Jira's complexity than you might think to get a significant part of Jira's market share.
Trello was the counterexample: it implemented less than 20% of Jira's features and was all the more useful for it. (thus Atlassian bought it and have started ruining it with bloat).
