Hacker News Reader

Comment by jappgar | Hacker News Reader

The truth is that most software companies don't have any secrets worth hiding.

The saas industry is all about sales and deals. The market runs on access, not intelligence.

IMHO, this is not the point. The core problem is that they're building systems that will remove competition altogether. You may still get your current systems to market ahead of your competition, but future "competitors" will be built off of your data and Atlassian will be one more company in the list of companies profiting from everybody else building systems using their data, probably destined to fail because everybody else can do it just as easily, but the money required to fund Atlassian's systems that built it for them, however large or small, will have already been sent. Those systems that Atlassian will profit from will be built from the data of "customers", who also paid Atlassian will giving up their own data.

With almost zero control over whether or not this happens (politically or individually), the only reasonable action to take is "take advantage while there's an advantage to be had".

every company is removing competition altogether. Some succeed, like Google, but most don't.

Knowing that our competitor is trying to poach one of our clients away by promising a new feature could be very useful to us. Likewise, knowing that a competitor is at risk of losing a customer because they won't implement a feature that we're willing to implement (or already have) is a qualified sales lead.

All of this would be illegal if discovered in this way, presumably, but it's not entirely accurate to say that information is not power.

I struggle to see the tech/data being used in that way. At a much higher level, the data is more likely anonymized (where possible) and/or not directly exposed to anybody. Think of the initial github copilot that used source code across all of the repos and how it was able to take instructions for what you wanted to build and give you essentially a consensus built piece of code that fit what you asked for, be it by auto-completion, comments, or direct requests.

"I want to build a business that does X using Y. Give me revenue predictions, spend over time, and customer demand predictions." etc

Usually customers are open about this kind of thing though. They play you off your competitors and vice versa.

I don't totally disagree, I just think the real secrets have nothing to do with features or dev. The secret is A is about to go bankrupt or B is facing legal trouble. These kinds of things aren't in JIRA.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com