In the past, I was an Atlassian fan boy. I regularly recommended Atlassian and, especially, Confluence. Those days are over.
I have been using Confluence for almost twenty years on a variety of projects.
I liked Confluence that I got a Confluence Cloud subscription that I have been using for something like five years.
I depend on the Confluence Cloud software. Over the years I have put a huge amount of information in Confluence. This includes software design notes, but as importantly the information I need to keep track of my business and the rest of my life. This include quarterly tax payments, but also financial information for my personal life. It is easy to get buried in paper - Confluence has been a way to manage this by scanning documents and uploading them to Confluence.
I was a happy Confluence user until the release of the new editor. In the new editor they removed a critical feature: the ability to upload a document and link to the document.
I am not alone in relying on this feature. In the thread discussing this feature, which is missing from the new editor, many people have written that this is critical for their business and their Confluence use.
A number of us have commented that Atlassian has released a new editor that is worse than the old editor.
For a long time there was no response to the complaints about the new editor. This finally started to change because there were so many unhappy users.
It was so difficult to get any response and any commitment to release software that supported the previous functionality that I started tweeting to the Confluence founders about this issue. I also posted to the As the CEO forum. With all this, there was very little response.
I have started to believe that the co-CEOs of Atlassian don't really care much about the company these days now that they are fantastically rich and their investment is diversified.
The last time I looked at the discussion thread, Atlassian had agreed continue to have the old editor available. At some point the old ability to link to documents would be added according to the development road map.
The problem I have is that I am stuck with Confluence. I have so much material in Confluence that it would be very difficult to move to another platform. This had taught that as users we can develop critical dependence on a software vendor. We have to trust them to do the right thing. Unfortunately, Atlassian has not shown that it is a trustworthy partner. Atlassian has released an inferior Confluence editor that does not have the functionality of the previous editor.
Atlassian has started to remind me of Microsoft. And this is not a favorable comparison. Microsoft is famous for NEVER having a working first software release. They are also notorious for developing software without being responsive to their user community.
