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Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

>Most of them said they won’t leave the Atlassian stack, as long as they don’t lose data. This is because moving is complex and they don’t see a move would mitigate a risk of a cloud provider going down.

I still don't understand the strangehold JIRA has on some clients. I can't quickly think of another SaaS product that could be down for almost 2 weeks and not have most customers leave.

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A lot of companies have integrations to atlassian suite which might not be easy to shift from.

Secondly, there are a lot of individual competitors to Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket but which competitor can offer all three under a single invoice? May be Microsoft, can't think of anyone else.

Also for such an extended downtime the customers are entitled to a discount or a credit note which a lot of CXOs consider in their decision making.

> May be Microsoft,

Is there a Jira replacement/offering in the Microsoft 365 suite?

Never used it, but looks like Microsoft Project would fit that box.

Oh god, no. We moved from Project to Jira and life became immeasurably better!

GitHub / GitHub Enterprise?

visual studio online is what it was called internally, the marketing may have changed. It's okay, and is what was/probably still is used at MS internally to develop windows.

Azure DevOps has boards and tickets and whatnot, so probably that?

Microsoft has Azure Devops Boards that is similar: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/devops/boards/

Azure DevOps is really underrated: https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/platforms/azure-devops

It’s been a self-hosted products for over a decade in the form of Visual SourceSafe and then TFS (wonky TFVC not withstanding; Git support was added a while ago as well), now living on as Azure DevOps Server.

We are in a similar place with Slack. We moved from HipChat to Slack and that was painful enough. Then the company noticed we get Teams for "free" and they tried to push us over to it. But folks have so much automation (because "ChatOps" is that new new) that is pushing things into Slack the company eventually gave up.

At least in that case, Slack is the better option. While using Jira is a worst-case scenario.

>I still don't understand the strangehold JIRA has on some clients.

- Integrations with things like the source code repos, incident management systems, confluence or other wikis, Slack, etc. Moving away from Jira creates a bunch of dead links.

- Internal dependence on complex workflows and state transition rules that are implemented in Jira.

- Various very customized reports that leaders depend on to make decisions, despite the often dubious value and/or accuracy.

Many years worth of source code filled with comments like

    // if we don't toggle bit 7 here 10% of transactions will fail on Thursdays
    // see JIRA issue BIGPROJ-12654 for detailed discussion

When we migrated away from JIRA, we scripted it such that the JIRA issue numbers were recorded in the newly migrated issues exactly because of things like this.

Having migrated bug systems for very large, very old code bases before, it's pretty easy to make the URls and links like this still go to the right place.

This is actually the least difficult thing, i would say ;)

If they don't lose data, two weeks of downtime every few years might be cheaper than the cost of switching. Plus, it's not like you know the thing you switch to will be any better, if it's another SaaS.

Let's say we have an announced release schedule on may 1st. With the tools down, there is no way to meet that date. For a 4 billion dollar company, this can make a huge difference in revenue. For a public company, the stock will definitely drop when it's announced the revenue goals were missed because the tools were down.

For companies of size, the cost of tools being down for 3 weeks can easily be in the multi-millions of dollars.

Again, part of the trouble is it's hard to gain enough certainty that the thing you switch to—self-hosted, or another service—won't be at least as bad. You can look at their past record, but then, when's the last time Atlassian had this happen? (or maybe they've been having similar issues every year or two and I've just not noticed, in which case, yeah, it's probably a safe bet that switching to almost anything else would be an improvement)

Atlassian sells to execs and gives kickbacks. You don't want to burn the company that gave you money and that you pushed through although you knew they sucked.

Even if they don't, I imagine they will have conversations internally to see what's feasible. It's just really difficult for an organization to move away from a product that everyone has learnt how to use. The company I work for is struggling to move away from something as simple as a collaborative editor, when I feel like I find no difference between the two products.

>I still don't understand the strangehold JIRA has on some clients.

But it's got what plant's crave...

I imagine most people used something like Google Sheets during the downtime

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