Yeah, it definitely used to be pretty bad. But to be fair, it’s gotten better over the past few weeks.
52 karma · joined April 5, 2011
The broader trend here is the shift from unbundling to consolidation. Over the past decade, many “features” were created as standalone SaaS products, but that era is winding down. We’re now seeing the pendulum swing back, with more consolidation across the industry.
In my opinion, OpsGenie should have been a built-in feature of Jira Service Management from day one of the acquisition.
It takes a short time to adjust to UI changes, but settings live on forever.
But certainly agree that more competition entered the space in the last couple of years.
Revenue in 2015 was $320M, In 2021 it was $2B. That kind of growth requires growth in Supporting functions and infrastructure teams, not just in product.
Not quite. Service Desk (aka Service Management today) has a number of capabilities that differ quite significantly from Jira Software. The most obvious is the end-user facing help portal. But how users are managed is quite different, it has SLAs, different reporting, a knowledge base, etc. Just like Jira Software is flexible but tailored to software teams with boards, backlogs and sprints, Jira Service Management is tailored to IT teams and requirements specific to that market.
Search has been an area of focus on and off for the most part of the last 15 years. It actually has gotten a lot better and Atlassian has an entire team focused on improving the search experience across their suite of products (they started with Confluence). And from what I hear, they are focusing on all the right things.
To your point, no search system can be a good fit for every possible use-case. Confluence has a number of different use-cases, but let's just pick "documentation" and "intranet" as an example here.
Intranets are, to a large degree, about keeping up with what's new in a company. Therefore recent content is likely more relevant than older content.
When used for documentation, recency doesn't matter at all. If a document was written 2 years ago, but the content is still accurate, it's just as relevant as it was on day one.
That means no single relevance configuration will work well for all use-cases. Leveraging ML is essential. But even a single ML model across an entire Confluence instance is not going to work as different spaces are used for different use-cases. What's really required here is to build different models for different spaces to create a tailored relevancy for each space. It's not an easy problem to solve, but I'm confident they will get there with time.
Seeing the challenges with Search at Atlassian, despite having a large, dedicated team of engineers working on the problem, is what motivated me to join http://sajari.com. We've been doing a lot of work on reinforcement learning and Neural Search. Our focus right now is on public content websites and e-commerce, but eventually we will get around to enable products like Confluence to create a great search experience without the need for an entire team. Search is a hard problem, but there is so much opportunity to improve the experiences that are available today. Exciting times.
Ultimately we’ve decided to build on top of our server platforms and target companies with 1000+ employees from day one. That decision had a huge impact on how we approached performance and what features we prioritised. The hierarchy of projects and permissions associated with them as well as the way we designed Pull Requests are good examples of that.
It was the right decision at the time, even if the product happened to be different in cloud and server, which did lead to some confusion. But Stash customers were really happy with the product.
At sajari.com we have been working on an experiment that uses a 1 cpu machine on cloud run to serve a neural network generated, hash based index of an old BestBuy catalog (25k products). Retrieval uses an approximate nearest neighbour (ANN) look up which typically takes ~1msec. Speed and relevancy are already pretty good.
But we have also learned that there is no one silver bullet and we have seen the best results when combining neural search with traditional keyword search and reinforcement learning.
You can take a look at the demo here: http://neural-hashes.sajari.com
Be gentle, this is an experiment and not a production scale implementation.
It was interesting to see their 30% average conversion rate improvement claim considering they lost a big customer to Sajari after we improved their conversion by 10% (and growing) https://www.sajari.com/use-cases/case-studies/catch-com-au-e...
To be fair, Algolia's marketing is great. They did a great job with the announcement. Looking forward to so how well it actually works and what the pricing is going to be. I don't think OpenAI have announced pricing for the GPT-3 service (which this is based on) yet, but I'm certain it won't be cheap to start with.
They spend a ton of money on Sales & Marketing (293,577k in the last fiscal year). That's what's driving a lot of their growth I assume and it's a lever they can pull back to increase profitability.
But search relevancy is only one part of the equation. Think about a physical store and how the milk is usually in the back and a few high margin items are close to the counter or strategically placed. The same can be true for an ecommerce store. If the search engine has the ability to take business metrics like revenue and margins, or customer data like loyalty programs or brand affinity into account, you can much better optimise for your desired business outcome.
We just recently switched one of the largest ecommerce retailers in Australia over from Algolia to Sajari by doing the above and increasing their conversion rate by 10%.
Having worked at Atlassian before, I understand how important simple pricing can be. My personal (and probably biased opinion) is that this is a move in the wrong direction. It appears simpler on the surface, but the concept of a unit and understanding all the disclaimers associated with it make the pricing more complicated than before. If I have to read the faq to understand what I'm getting, it's too complicated IMHO. Also, it seems other features, like analytics retention, crawler, have moved into add-ons, which requires you to contact sales to find out how much you'll pay.
More granular pricing does provide more flexibility, but it also reduces predictability, which can be important especially in small to mid-sized businesses. I'm curious to understand how people feel about "usage pricing" vs. "tiered pricing" where you know exactly what you are paying each month? Which ones do you prefer? We are still finalising our own pricing, any feedback would be very much welcome.
You will find that most tools provide document level permissions to some degree by storing user/group IDs on the document and adding filters to the query. However, it generally requires custom implementation work to integrate it into your systems and prevent spoofing of the filters.
Hope you're doing well!
What product do you think Atlassian has bought to stifle it's evolution? Bitbucket specifically was a product with 50k users and Atlassian has grown it to Millions. Buying a competitor just to let the product stagnate and die makes rarely sense in business.
To the earlier comment, we have gotten a lot of feedback in regards to the sign-up to Atlassian Account. The fact is that you always required a license, so you had to sign-up anyway. But we took the license away and streamlined the sign-up into the product (yes, there are issues with people behind firewalls that we will have to address).
Personally, I don't think requiring an account is asking too much for a free product and down the road it will help us to provide a more seamless integration for people who use other Atlassian tools as well.
Cheers, Jens
One of our goals over the past couple of years was to simplify SourceTree and make it easier for developers to get started with Git. Admittedly we did not always hit the right balance, but you can be sure we care and listen.
We didn't remove the negative comments from our blog, we removed all comments from our blog to minimise the number of channels on which people engage in discussions. Sorry if it created a perception that we don't care, it's quite the opposite.
Cheers, Jens
In the future you will see us adding more capabilities to projects, such as permission management [1] or settings on a project level, which already exist in Bitbucket Server.
[1]https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BitbucketServer/Usi...
"Biggest issue I have with Jira is how it's trying to be the everything tool for all processes and procedures"
JIRA didn't try to be a universal tool for all processes and procedures, but it happened to spread from the development team into other parts of organisations due to it's flexibility. Of course that flexibility comes at a cost the experience to the end-user is controlled by the administrators.
What is the alternative? A more opinionated tool could potentially get a specific task done better. The problem is that you will need 2, 3 or more separate, more opinionated tools to cater for the specific use-cases. These tools will have to be maintained and probably won't integrate very well, making collaboration between different departments a lot more difficult. That's exactly what JIRA tries to solve, help your teams collaborate.
Could Atlassian be more opinionated. Absolutely. Being opinionated doesn't necessarily mean that we need to limit the flexibility of JIRA. We can do a much better job at optimising for specific use-cases and guiding people towards best practices, while still allowing customisations where desired. We've started this effort last year by introducing JIRA products aimed at specific use-cases. Take JIRA Software for example, it's aimed at Software teams and has specific features like Scrum, Kanban boards, sprints and releases that are specific to software teams. If you aren't a software team, you can just use JIRA Core and you don't need to worry about what Scrum even means.
There is a lot more we can do to make the simple things simpler, and it's a big focus area for us. We won't enforce limits on the number of fields you can add, but we are looking at giving project administrators a lot more autonomy around how their projects are configured. We can't stop the QA checkbox from appearing if somebody really wants it there, but we can provide the guidance and tools to make the experience better for everyone.
Happy to answer any questions you may have.
We've been working on making it easier for the entire development team to collaborate and give them the right information at the right time. Here is a selection of features that I think you will find useful:
JIRA's Release Hub, to let you know if you're ready to release or not: http://blogs.atlassian.com/2015/04/jira-6-4-release-confiden...
The development panel, to turn every issue into a dashboard for it's development work: http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/03/visualize-development-jir...
Automated issue transitioning, because it's easy to forget to move that issue to "In Review": http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/08/jira-6-3-untangle-develop...
Hope this helps. For a good overview, you can also take a look at the documentation that outlines the above integrations: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BitbucketServer/JIR...
On the other end of the spectrum we have the folks who are getting started with Git. Even using branches is a concept people have to get used to. Our goal with SourceTree is to make Git more approachable while still maintaining the power of the tool... and yes, that's not an easy task.
As the preview shows, SourceTree will see a number of changes over the next few months, and I'm sure we won't get everything right the first time. But we are convinced that, with your help, we can make SourceTree both approachable and powerful at the same time.
Unfortunately we can't talk about those great features at this stage since they don't exist.