Exactly. A big concern for enterprise customers (that often drove them to Atlassian over Github) was the fear that Github was "just a startup" and might disappear at any moment and the lack of integration with existing enterprise tools. If MS can put together a comprehensive platform here that doesn't cost an arm and a leg they could dominate this market.

The real story here is that nobody wants to host their own services and nobody wants to spend time/money even integrating various hosted solutions. The success of Atlassian and this acquisition confirms that people want to pay a flat monthly fee and get access to a bunch of highly integrated, quality services. The web continues to drive the creation of highly centralized platforms (Amazon, Facebook, Google) and it doesn't look like IT development market is going to be any different.

The success of Atlassian shows that you can have a great business in development tools without caring much about developer experience.

Enterprise purse strings are controlled by support and checkboxes, with developer experience a distant third.

After all, the people buying the software/service aren't the ones who are going to be using it every day.

It's a culture thing :(

Which partly was great marketing from Atlassian because it isn't like they are that far removed from "just a startup" either.

Have you missed their IPO?

That's a fair point in that I was unaware they had IPOed as many years back as they had (I had thought it more recent). It was partly a joke. But I have worked with people of a Fortune Xty company mindset that didn't consider vendors unless they were also Fortune Xty +/- Y companies, and yet some of them used Atlassian products despite being outside their usual Y margin, which I found fascinating.

Those enterprise customers are probably already using Visual Studio Online, which already gives you the best of both worlds - Git for source control, superb backlog and CI/CD features, and ADFS authentication.

IMO, for private repos, VSO is far superior to GitHub.