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Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

> Atlassian seems to make a lot of money, so I guess they're optimising for something that matters to someone

My personal theory about Atlassian: they have realized (like SAP did before) that once you convinced management to use your product you no longer need to worry about what the users think.

You don't like that the ticket form has 50 fields you don't need? No problem! All you need to do is to convince your manager to contact support and tell them to track less data about your progress. I bet your manager will love that.

And once they got the foot on the door, who is going to convince the company to migrate away from them?

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>My personal theory about Atlassian: they have realized (like SAP did before) that once you convinced management to use your product you no longer need to worry about what the users think.

That's all enterprise software in a nutshell. And a huge reason why things like Slack and Trello became so popular. They targeted users first without having to get the enterprise to buy it up front.

I think trello is fine. Its so simple and fast and not trying to overachieve. Or did Atlassian already screw it up?

Not really, but they did recently migrate the login to Atlassian so what was once a quick one-step process becomes a multi-page, multi-redirect mess.

I honestly wish it was that simple for us but convincing management is a fairly sales-driven approach and our marketing model is heavily self-serve. We do have a product called Jira Align that's targeted closer to what you're describing. I'd attribute more of the spread to the concept of "Jira is the defacto" fwiw.

Chuckled at convincing managers to track less data. Internally we subscribe to a "less is more" approach and try to limit required fields as much as possible. I bet we feel more willing to contact Jira admins to make changes, though, since we own the product itself.

Concur that migrating away from Jira is tough and probably helps keep people in the ecosystem. I haven't met anyone at Atlassian, though, who ever wanted that to be the reason why people stay. I think Jira can be awesome when it's set up well but some stakeholders can get a bit, uh, heavy-handed when deciding on "the process".

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