rebelutionary / 2.0

Mike about... everything (aka clearing my browser tabs) / 2007 Jan 04

I have to say, I dislike Firefox 2.0. It's too damn stable and the automatic "session management" is just too damn useful. With it, your tabs become like cockroaches in nuclear winter; they just survive. If your browser crashes or your computer restarts it doesn't matter. The tab is alive.

Why is this a problem? Well, I've developed a nasty habit of keeping hundreds of tabs open for months at a time where each tab is a to do item. Inevitably the purpose is "I have something to say here, I should blog about this".

So this post is going to be a mental cleansing. I'm going to slowly close all the tabs I have open, and comment very briefly about each one. I think that means the entirety of the post won't be useful to any readers, so congratulations to anyone who gets to the end! You have my permission to stop reading at any time ;)

Oh, and you might want to grab a coffee - this is going to be a long one folks.

2007: The Year of Enterprise 2.0?

4. Confluence will most likely emerge as one of the big winners in the Wiki Space. We will probably see Ross Mayfield lash out in frustration, most of us will recognize that he is frustrated but is condemned to being the guy who put the most work into opening this space, only to have the much younger, but much more business savvy Atlassian take more market share.

Most of Jevon's predictions are pretty much spot on, but this one grated a bit. Not because I don't think Confluence will emerge as one of the big winners in the enterprise wiki space - I'd contend it already is, being the largest commercial enterprise wiki - but because of the implication we're some "young upstart" of a company. To clear the record, Atlassian is older than SocialText and I believe Confluence and the ST product would be in the same year at school.

Somehow we seem to be getting slighted here for having a better product, for being more "business savvy", for winning. That that doesn't seem fair to me.

Enterprise 2.0: Ten Predictions for 2007

It seems predictions for 2007 were hot a few weeks ago, at least in my surfing.

A number of Enterprise 2.0 projects will see lower than expected returns due to excessive structure and low social interaction. Most enterprise wiki products offer ways to structure and control the user interaction process when capturing and retrieving information contributed by users in an organization; see Atlassian's front page claim that it offers "powerful tools for structuring" wikis. But excessive, upfront structure is exactly what Enterprise 2.0 is attempting to avoid.

(emphasis is Dion's)

OK, we offer powerful structuring tools because that's exactly what enterprises want in their wikis. Wikis are fantastic at being an organic content source, but at some point you need tools for organising this content. Pruning, gardening and shaping tools. This is what we provide.

The implication that these tools somehow introduce upfront structure is again not right and deceptive. These tools are almost always used after the fact, when you have content to organise. The "enter title, enter content, save" meme of a wiki is certainly something we fight hard to maintain.

Atlassian Love

Now I've got two "whinges" off my chest, let's lighten up the mood with a few tabs that made me happier. Warning, you might need a tissue for this next bit.

Stefan really seemed to dig our German user group meeting which is fabulous. He was initially sceptical about Bamboo but in the end he was "convinced". My favourite quote however is:

After the talks, Scott and Mike took some time sit down with the users in two working groups to discuss requirements and wrote down some feature requests. That's what I like about Atlassian's culture - open and down-to-earth. :-)

To be fair, all 5 Atlassian's present did this - but it is really nice that customers recognise the effort we go to to understand their needs (and in the end flying to Germany is a long way, but their beer more than makes up for the pain of long haul international travel).

On the Bamboo topic for a second, Tim wrote a great little piece called Bamboo: Atlassian 3, Open Source 0. While this sounds a little pugilistic, it was full of gems like "I’d never met a wiki I could like, until I met Confluence." and "The first thing that struck me is that Atlassian’s alpha software is still leaps and bounds better than Cruise Control!"... but the best quote is the first line:

It looks to me like Atlassian has a winner of their hands with Bamboo, their new continuous build server. Atlassian strikes me as the little company that could.

What a wonderful thing to write - thank you Tim. We'll keep trying to "could".

On my last little European jaunt (London, Belgium, Germany, Czech Republic, London, Sydney in about 12 days) I spoke at one of my favourite conferences, Javapolis in Belgium. Stéphane wrote some nice things on his blog about my talk.

And then for utter indulgence, you can read Atlassian: A company I hold in high esteem (too many nice quotes to mention), and Atlass(t)ian! Why I luv’em. which includes the quote:

They're the first real example of an Enterprise 2.0 company succeeding in every way– financially (profitable, with no backing); widespread user adoption; a simple, but effective business model; steady growth, and a unique corporate culture to boot. In addition, they’re NOT from Silicon Valley, they’re Australian.

Atlassian FUD

Now Susan's blog post is lovely, but let me ruin the mood for a second. It contains a reference to the typical FUD-spreading that seems to emerge from various people (I'll be polite and not mention any names) about Atlassian.

The rap on Atlassian surrounds the issue of whether or not the're candid about their revenues and customers, whether they're truly Enterprise 2.0 (as their solutions are not on-demand, but rather the old school model of download, install, and maintain), and that they have a network of relationships with resellers and systems integrators for service.

In my mind, there's nothing worse than people speaking badly of you behind your back. I'm a very open, upfront, no bullshit guy. So let me try to debunk a few of those now if there's anyone out there that still believes them:

• Myth #1 - we get a lot of revenue from services - complete bullshit, it's less than 1% of revenue this year. We sell software, lots of it.
• Myth #2 - we're not candid about revenue of customers - again, utter trollop. Our customer base is now over 5,000 organisations (those are paying companies) in over 65 countries. Our revenue has been confirmed by various main stream magazines and publications that publish it regularly.
• Myth #3 - partners sell all our software - wrong again, sorry. We value our partners very deeply, but well over 90% of our software is sold direct to the customer.
• Myth #4 - we're not Enterprise 2.0 because we're Distribution 1.0 - I have to say the first time someone mentioned this to me I laughed. Distribution 1.0? Are we scribbling 1s and 0s on stone tablets here? Apparently only SaaS dominated companies can be Enterprise 2.0? Ridiculous. I didn't read this anywhere in the SLATES definition that you couldn't sell actual software to be Enterprise 2.0.

At the end of the day - we sell software and I make no apologies for that. If people didn't want it, they wouldn't buy it. Deal with it.

Oop - rant over - where was I? Oh, those damned open browser tabs. Right.

Releases! Everyone loves releases!

Ack - all sorts of tabs concerning "Atlassian releases I was meant to blog".

Our third little baby, Crowd, is now public pending a 1.0 release very shortly. I'll blog more about why we chose this as a third application in the future (probably around 1.0 time as it pops on my radar again), but for now this is a place holder for anyone interested while (and it lets me close another tab).

Confluence gets it's first commercial plugin in the Gliffy plugin which I absolutely love. It allows you to have dynamic diagrams within any wiki pages, with a built in flash editor. No more describing concepts in words, you can now do it with flow charts, diagrams etc. I could rant on, but it's easier just to show you the quick movie of it's usage. I promise you won't be disappointed:

Can your wiki do that?

Bamboo is very close to a public release (well, it has available in beta for months and is being used by customers, but is not on our website yet so there's no shiny marketing material - that will be up in the next few days). For now, the best thing to do is check out the release notes to get some insight into how quickly it's evolving.

Big Wiki Customers

While the 451 group seems insistent in their analysis that IBM is going to buy Atlassian (see report - login required), Ben Edwards from IBM came out and said some really nice things about us at Online Information 2006.

They have a number of wikis internally running on Confluence, and some even publicly (eg their developerWorks wikis are completely powered by Confluence).

The key statistic though is that they announced that their largest internal Confluence instance has just passed 50,000 users. Yes, you read that right - 50,000. See Jeffrey's post for more detail.

This is a pearler of a quote too:

On the other hand, these fears are real and unless we really grasp them, we will fail in spreading the power of social software. Linda Stoddart from the United Nations told me you cold not bring any of this stuff to the Secretary General and be credible. Yet the next day, Linda presented and said the wiki word. Huzzah. I must email Linda and let her know the United Nations is already using Confluence :)

Oh, and if you're a fan of big Confluence customers (Accenture is another with over 10k users), take a look at SAP's SDN wiki. I'll give you a hint, it has a hell of a lot more than 50k users connected.

Who said wikis weren't for the enterprise?

Aussie Battlers

There's been a raft of other good Aussie companies emerging recently, so as I clear all their tabs away let me aggregate them here:

• Nik and crew at Omnidrive finally launched at Web 2.0 - well done! (that Web 2.0 was 2 months ago shows you how long my tabs stay around)
• Dave and Ben at Freshview won the NSW Young Exporter of the Year for CampaignMonitor and MailBuild. Well done guys, superb and well deserved award. You know until they won, I had no idea they were even Aussie!
• Marty, Mick et al over at Tangler haven't quite launched yet (next year guys?) but they are getting some rave reviews on their private beta which is great to see.

Oh, and for all the Aussies reading, we made our own beer for Movember which is fantastic. Brewtopia is thoroughly recommended and the beer's not bad either!

Random Grab Bag

We're slowly getting through the tabs - quite a few by now are so out of date I've decided not to post them, but here's a few last ones.

• Will Price wrote a good piece on what it costs to get software right. Examine this data there's a lot of useful nuggets to be found.
• CarbonPlanet love us and we love them, which is a little like it's the sixties again.
• For the XP fans, here's a fascinating article about how the NetFlix website is developed iteratively.
• For the bored, this little game measures your speed typing the alphabet. I got beaten soundly at work with my 4.3 seconds. I am shamed.
• If you're into technology strategy, read Rich's brilliantly thoughtful analysis of why Google is the third age of computing. You owe it to yourself. Need a hook? "Yahoo could add an extra $1.5B to their revenue overnight by conceding monetization to Google and becoming a distribution partner for Adwords, as Ask Jeeves did."

Well if you're still with me - I'm impressed. Thank you. My guilt is now assuaged and my tabs are looking a lot healthier. Until next time...

(Oh, and in random news for those following along at home - using only my own brain, I finished the SMH crossword for the second time today - woo!)

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