I remember reading a brief comment by Joel Spolsky saying he wasn't too worried about "those blokes from Australia". At lot more people I work with know more about Jira than Fogbugz.
IMO Atlassian do OK tools. But nothing to justify the hype they are always receiving. What am I missing - Price? Features? Implementation pain (or lack thereof)?
It is encouraging to see a bootstrapped company reach IPO, even if it took them a decade to reach their $3B valuation compared to Github's attainment of a $2B valuation in a much shorter time. Atlassian's forward-thinking private investors provided liquidity to employees, which supported their long road to the public market. From a 2014 interview, http://fortune.com/2014/04/10/atlassian-the-3-3-billion-soft...
"The $150 million it recently raised isn’t going into its bank account — instead, its new investors are buying shares from past and present employees in an effort to offer workers some liquidity and retain talent ... 'the Accel Partners round was mostly about founders, and this [T. Rowe Price] one is about employees. Now neither of the founders are selling anything. So this is a little different. We’ve been profitable for 10 years, so we don’t need the cash, we have a lot of cash in the bank. It’s more a case of wanting to get a partner [that knows about public markets] on board..'"
From a 2011 review of Atlassian culture and self-service sales, http://www.managementexchange.com/story/its-culture-stupid-h..., with a talk about internal systems: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mALn4nyi7Qs
"Atlassian CEOs have instilled an information culture throughout the company with the core value of "Open Company, No Bullshit". The result is a bottom-up democracy of information where information sharing is the norm and information hoarding is a foreign concept ... Product pricing is public, including discount policies. Prospective customers can download software and try it free for 30 days. All documentation is public and available for anyone to access. Bug reports and feature requests are public, allowing people to 'vote' on their preferred features."
Good price structure and business model.
As you said, the software is so-so.
But remember, Bitbucket is free for private repos. As many as you want. You can even share them with a few users before you have to pay. With Github, you have to start forking over cash for private repos.
Bitbucket gets you hooked, but then you have a raft of tools that are tightly integrated that aren't even available at Github without going to 3rd parties. Nobody wants to sign up for a dozen different services and try to integrate that.
You get a ton of tools out of the bag that you need and that work. Nobody else offers that right now. Gitlab is trying, but they have a long way to go.