This make perfect sense. Atlassian is cornering the market of "features nobody ask for but make for good sales pitch to clueless managers".
I do love the idea of sharing a screen recording of features though.
So, indeed, a very cool replacement was SSH.
I still don’t know anyone who didn’t leave Dropbox after they jacked up the prices. A USB key is much cheaper (and reliable, at the rate at which Dropbox nukes accounts that they deem not compliant with whatever policy).
Can't remember the last time I saw a USB key in use anymore.
The cloud stuff is convenient, but it quickly became a commoditu Dropbox is still better in some small ways (like delta syncs) but it wasn't enough I guess.
There is always room for a smooth paid service compared to the rough free one. Android and Linux vs twice-more-expensive Apple.
Funny, I don't know anyone who did.
I'd guess that a big part of it is customer acquisition and then raising prices or ramping customers to other Atlassian products.
Lots of ancillary stuff involved. I know a team that went down this route and built a competing tool and the hardest part was working out the streaming upload and storage. Then you layer on things like permissions, lifecycle management, etc.
It's not (yet?) heavily used among engs where I am, but we love it anyway for massively shortening the feedback loop with designers who can drop a 30-second demo of some prototype UI at the head of a Slack thread and asynchronously receive the kind of nuanced feedback that'd usually need to start off with a (necessarily synchronous) huddle.
It's not a full replacement, but it's the one you already have.
Who knows, maybe the counterfactual isn't "wrote a concise doc," but rather "didn't share the information at all," in which case I suppose Loom et al is a positive.
Before that you got an issue saying "There's a bug on the notification list" and you needed to figure out how to reproduce it. Now you get a video showing exactly how to reproduce it.
It's a life changer and the opposite of what you describe.
This hasn't been my experience; if anything, quite the opposite, in that it's enabled my team to contribute much more actively to design. The effort of providing actionable feedback is admittedly slightly higher, but that's not a bad thing; needing to (and having time to!) write up feedback seems to yield more actionable results than doing it verbally in the moment, and for things that do really need talking through we have several sync touchpoints during the week with our embedded designer.
Of course, in contexts where no such touchpoints exist or where design and eng generally don't have a close relationship, I could see Loom being difficult - but I'm not sure I'd blame that first on the tool; if Design and Eng communicate only by throwing things over a transom at one another, I think the tool much more likely exposes problems you already had and didn't know about.
I find the loom extension redundant and glitch prone
Loom does this while the video is being recorded to give you the link as fast as possible.
To play devil's advocate though from a numbers point I think loom has about 20m users so this is $5 per user. But if acq is for a billion then I'd assume their actual revenue is something like 100m. So $5 /user/year. I guess in that sense once a user has paid that low price they are not thinking of moving off for a year so it is plenty of upsell opportunities for atlassian. Ofcourse depending on usage just the video hosting could cost them more than $5/user/ year? Interesting stuff!
I use both loom and cmd opt 5, but my CS and sales team would not be able to effectively use cmd5 (editing, hosting, comments, etc.)
The moat for us is that it just works and is cheap enough that moving off is literally not worth my time.
That's the reason I didn't sign up (I wanted to send the video over Slack directly), but it does functionally add a moat where all your videos are on their servers, like YouTube.
It’s a very well-done feature, but there are increasingly other platforms (Slack, Dropbox) that offer features 80% as good for free.
> also forcing junior engineers to do this for a PR guarantees the feature works/is a form of QA... life saver being able to share a quick video of some code and the bug youre getting
Developers who don't know if what they write works or who can't express a bug in words... they're in trouble. You don't need experience for that. Non-developers / non-pros doing QA is symptomatic of greater problems.
> life saver being able to share a quick video
Who is supposed to be watching these videos? In your honest, no-BS assessment, when you're staring at these Zooms you might be doing professionally with like 9 people and only 1 of them is an engineer, and he's offshore: like isn't that the problem?
I don't recall having the need to use video to express anything that comes to code.
Perhaps user interface stuff, yes. But code? Can't remember...
This may be because I'm a PM now, because I didn't do this type of thing as an engineer, but I have grown a huge appreciation for visual tools because "a picture is worth a thousand words". If I can show somebody the behavior that I am talking about, actually get a record of a bug happening, or build a demo that doesn't feel like a slide deck and is showing actual product experience, it has a deeper visceral impact on customers and engineers, and speeds up resolution time or identifying directionality of design.
Personally I use, and love, CleanShotX but I don’t need to record my face and I’m not even sure if you can draw on the videos you create like you can in Loom. I use it mostly for annotating pictures. And before “macOS has this built in”, yes they do and what they provide is way better than nothing but it doesn’t hold a candle to CleanShotX. It’s way clunkier and hard to make edits once you’ve added something to the screenshot, CleanShotX is a breeze and being able to record video as a gif is awesome for bug tickets or documentation.