My strong guess is that it drives much better alignment in and at the two leading independent SaaS companies for developers.
Slack’s #1 competitor today? Microsoft, probably. Who did Microsoft just buy? Github, for $7.5b. Which is the #1 competitor for Atlassian’s Bitbucket. Etcetera, etcetera.
Atlassian is now saying it won’t intrude on Slack’s core turf, and Slack is probably implicitly saying for now, it won’t intrude on Atlassian’s either. And $5 billion+ Slack is probably also implicitly saying it will now prioritize integrations with Atlassian’s products, which it wanted to do already, because the customers wanted it … Atlassian is the #1 overall player in the B2D space, with a $17 billion+ market cap and several dominant products (of which Hipchat no longer was one of). Everyone wants Trello, JIRA, etc. to work even more seamlessly in Slack, etc.
The Hipchat/Stride vector was probably the core disalignment between these two leaders. “Coopetition” is common, so it probably didn’t truly break the loose ties, but it probably also prevented deeper ties.
Now they can much more closely align their strategies, integrations, and roadmaps. And fend off the Microsofts, etc. At least for a few years, their products, integrations and go to market strategies are 100% aligned now.
Atlassian made the decision to win where it could win, and most likely shut down Hipchat/Stride anyway at some point. Why? It just makes much more sense to deploy the 100s of engineers working on it to the core, very lucrative, very successful Atlassian products. So instead of just sunsetting the products or letting them decay, it leveraged that strategic decision to align better with Slack.
Sounds smart to me.
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