

Why Atlassian is to Software as Apple is to Design - prplhaz4
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markfidelman/2012/05/04/why-atlassian-is-to-software-as-apple-is-to-design/

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famousactress
I appreciate Atlassian tools. I'm a long time JIRA user, and I've been a
Confluence and Bamboo user in the past. They're all decent tools. I have no
problem with a nice article about a pretty neat company that makes pretty neat
enterprise tools (an industry riddled with stuff that's mostly worse).

It's really just the article's title that's completely fucking bananas.
Apple's relationship to design is profound. Write a book that covers the last
half century of consumer product design, and Apple deserves a chapter. Do the
same for Software and does Atlassian get a chapter? Probly not. Ironically,
Apple probly does.

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vosper
"It's really just the article's title that's completely fucking bananas"

You could say that a lot about Forbes online content these days.

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Gring
We (25 people company) use Confluence, and we all truly hate it. The design is
attrocious. It's ugly beyond the pinnacle of ugliness. We tried to use some
custom styling to ease the pain, but Confluence uses so many badly designed
elements that we had to capitulate.

If this incredibly crappy product sells itself, then it's only because there
is nothing better. If you don't know what your next company should do - please
consider creating a better corporate wiki. Confluence is truly an abomination.

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cmelbye
Do you think there's demand for a "corporate wiki"? I've been toying with the
idea of that on the side for months, but I'm unsure of the demand for it. It
seems like wikis are something that people don't enjoy using and don't have a
need for. What are your experiences? Where does Confluence fall short?

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Gring
To sell a successful corporate wiki, you need hundreds of plug-ins to handle
all those special cases that each company inevitably has. That would be your
biggest stumbling block, because creating those takes time, and that's where
Confluence trumps all others.

Where it falls short? Basically everywhere else. There is no taste.

If you want our business, create a wiki that puts the content front and
center, and remove everything else by default. Then let us add our 3 extension
wishes, while still staying minimalist. It's not that difficult.

Unfortunately, it seems that either the chief software architect at Confluence
is not up to the task, or that the company values quick crappy changes in
favor of good design.

Good luck with your endeavor!

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officialchicken
The Forbes author has never used JIRA.

I'd say Valve is to software as Apple is to design, but there are probably far
better examples. And I'm not a gamer (but I do use JIRA and SourceTree).

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omgtehlion
You haven’t used Crucible. After using it you’ll love jira...

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laskito
Or fisheye, that is a extremely bad copy of github.

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accountoftheday
Are you suggesting time travel is possible now? Fisheye is a _much_ older
product than github.

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wheaties
The real story should be how they put the Confluence back-ups on the same raid
disk as everything else. Yeah, thankfully we had back-ups when their server
went down. Or maybe how sub-tasks on JIRA can't have sub-tasks. Or that any
other thing I've seen that tries to compete with it looks better/feels
better/gives a better user experience. Or... should I continue?

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timc3
Write a title that includes a reference to Apple, then write some body text
without doing to much research, keep the contributor count low so you don't
have to spend time editing, then post on well known website. profit.

Seriously though there is nothing in that article that makes me think it is
based on any type of truth or real world user feedback.

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joedev
The real title should be: "How many Atlassian PR people have called you to
pitch you a story on their company? You guessed it - more than zero."

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imroot
JIRA (And other Atlassian tools) are notoriously bad at scaling. In a previous
life, I spent a week pulling a 2,000 user JIRA/Confluence/Bamboo stack off to
my then employer's stack -- the site couldn't handle more than 40 concurrent
users, and this was when the software was on a beefy box with tomcat and a
high-perf MySQL Instance. Saying that Atlassian is enterprise is a stretch --
it might be great for small teams (personally, I'm a fan of request tracker
and mediawiki), but, I'd never stick it in the enterprise.

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lackbeard
They recently removed wiki formatting from their wiki in JIRA. If you want to
edit a page you have to use their in-browser rich-text editor.

This (on top of a bunch of other friction I have with JIRA) makes it clear to
me that JIRA is not a product they're building for hackers. It must be for
program managers, or for check writers at enterprise companies.

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youngtaff
I quite like Atlassian's software from a functional level but installing it
and keeping it running is a real ball ache.

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why-el
Anybody can link to me a post about Atlassian's core software architecture?
Like tools they use and their overall design choices?

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chrisbroadfoot
It varies wildly from product to product. When I worked there, every product
was written in Java. From what I hear, these days, it's a little different.

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saturn
This article is shockingly bad, from the very first sentence:

> There are only 3 enterprise-grade technology products I’ve ever seen that
> sell themselves. Two of them are from Apple

Huh? What "enterprise-grade" Apple product? XServe? Apple is nowhere in the
enterprise, and thank god for that.

Here's some enterprise software that sells itself: Exchange. BES (well, used
to). ProCurve. DRAC. Symantec Ghost. Did you see iTunes Group Policy Server
anywhere in that list?

The article starts off stupid and only goes downhill from there. This guy
doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.

