Counter-intuitive, yes, but no worse than that so long as there's another symbol you can use for when you do need a double-backslash. But, the thing is, there isn't. When Confluence was first designed, they used up their only escape char with their nonstandard newline symbol. This is, their support staff informed me, a deep-rooted and unchangeable aspect of how Confluence works. It's not a bug, because it will never be changed.
This should give you the gist of what Atlassian is like.
\\ -> new line
\\\\ -> \\\\
\\Foo -> Foo
\\Foo\Bar -> \\Foo\Bar
This company is about 8 years old, profitable since day one, and made 58 million last year in revenue.
I never hear about companies getting such a cash injection at this stage in their lifespan. Perhaps I'm just primed for "things are different now" stories after reading Fred Wilson's recent post on the topic ( http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/07/some-thoughts-on-the-seed-fu... tl;dr : "While many businesses require a lot less capital to start, they don't require less capital to grow.").
But even by a new We Need to Grow yardstick, it seems Atlassian is mature.
What do you folks think?
I can't speak to the financial implications for their company, but as a customer, the move was terrible. Their prices got jacked way up, they dropped all their offerings in favor of what they saw as the product likely to provide the highest return, invested a ton of that money in sales and marketing, and their service and quality plummeted.
They switched to a subscription software licensing model, stopped listing prices on their website, added a "Solutions" tab next to "Products", etc.
I never understood why they took the money, but I understood why those changes came with the money. As a customer, I hope Atlassian doesn't go down the same road, but given the amount of money and the actual scope of the products they work on, I can't help think that it's an inescapable path.
We've grown Atlassian 3x over the last 3 years, all by following our current model of reasonable, transparent pricing, and selling in volume to thousands of customers around the globe.
There are things we want to improve of course (around our products - we're never done with improving them), but we don't plan to change our model.
We spoke at great length with Accel Partner about this. They like us for what we are, not what we could be if we changed.
For those of you who might have missed the reference, Spolsky is referring to Atlassian here, even though he doesn't mention them directly by name (not sure why he didn't - perhaps he was still in the denial phase)
Some points I reflect on after reading both articles are:
- Should the real needs of my customers be met,
or the needs I think they have?
That is, where is my focus: On the customer or on the product? (ref. blog post)
- Can I allow myself to think that my competitor is selling junk,
as mentioned in:
"So that's the development team's mission for 2010:
to eliminate any possible reason that
customers might buy our competitors' junk, . . . ." (ref. inc post)
- Should I build the perfect product and use a salesforce
to push it on customers that does not happen to
know that we have the best product (ref. inc article),
OR should I make sure that we all the time make sure that we
build what the customer needs and wants (ref. blog post)?
The tech and entrepreneurial scene looks pretty good in Sydney with barcamps and hacker spaces, and what seems like plenty of tech jobs. Would anyone be kind enough to get in touch (email in my profile) to help me identify the other good companies and resources?
It looks like Atlassian is planning to use the money on getting more into Europe and Asia; getting some more acquisitions and giving some liquidity to employees.
The story does talk about the founding of the company though
They're also quite generous to a number of causes. They sponsor the Sydney University IT Society and NCSS (which is a summer program in computing for talented high school students) and commonly come and give talks to the local universities on a wide range of topics (technical and entrepreneurial). They also provide free software for open source projects and host the local Java User Groups.
Overall I really do have a fond spot for them, even if they work in Java ;)