imho Atlassian's problem is that they failed to capture a critical mass of SaaS services for software development. Everyone uses GitHub, which provides a (crappy) bug management system. Everyone uses Google Docs which is arguably better than Confluence for most purposes. Perhaps not coincidentally both these services are owned by companies that make their money from other things so they can afford to dump endless investment in making them better.
> so they can afford to dump endless investment in making them better.
Which is so necessary when your product is very reliant on integrations because maintaining that kind of software gets so cumbersome over time. The testing alone can sink a team's productivity.
I work for a Confluence competitor and we've based our go-to-market strategy around executing one problem very well as opposed to trying to build a set of products to sell as a suite and it's worked relatively well so far. Business people love the idea of integrations and some of them do act as a force-multiplier in productivity. But they also create tons of headaches for end users and can be very expensive.
