Why did atlassian abandon hipchat?

StefanS June 29, 2017

Sooo.. last release of any hipchat client has been in december 2016? Half a year without any real progress usually means that a company has abandoned a product and moved all development ressources somewhere else.

Does anyone know of any statement as to why this happened? Did atlassian give up on trying to compete with slack?

Like I'm still waiting for architectural fixes like using same emaila dress on multiple groups or even a simple fix of allowing to be logged into multiple groups at once on windows client..

2 comments

Keith Deane June 29, 2017

Hi Stefan,

I've been trying to find out what has happened too. The only responses I keep seeing are:

"We're focusing on reliability/stability so most improvements are under the hood.  We'll be sure to announce updates."

Which is the first canned response they are giving and does not explain why it's currently taken 7 months and counting for the entire dev team to make the back-end reliable and stable (if that really is what has been happening).

"We're continuously working on improvements & would love your input to make HipChat better if interested: (link to user research)"

This is the second canned response I have seen. For starters there is no information on what these new improvements are, secondly none of them have actually been completed or they would have been released and finally I have signed up to the user research group twice and both times have received zero communication from Atlassian. The public Jira HCPUB shows no recent desktop issues resolved and I struggle to find any recent interaction by the developers listed there.

 "We have a feature request in progress related to {Feature X}. Check out {link} & please vote/comment!"

This is the Third type of canned response I have seen. A lot of the time the cases referenced have a number of comments complaining that the feature has not been implemented after {n} years even though they are available in competing products. Also since there are no new releases or updates about features I can't see how the request for voting or user research is anything but a delay tactic.

This leads me to think that either their Dev team is totally understaffed (the number of HipChat job postings also hints at this possibility) or they have ventured on another front-end or back-end rewrite (which historically has been a poor choice of software development strategy). It's all made more frustrating by the fact that they can still find the time to post all sorts of non-useful material via twitter, etc every single day - it would be more useful to employ someone to actually make the product better.

I really like the product (despite it's faults) and would like to see it improve and be more successful - but the current stall in releases with little transparency about the reasons why, keeps me looking at the alternatives.

- Keith

Jeff-Mangan July 10, 2017

About to purchase many users, considering slack as an option, this is not helping the case for hipchat... at all.

justindoehling July 19, 2017

Speaking from experience, if money is not the restraint; Slack has a much healthier feature stack. I love Atlassian products, but this one just isn't seeing the love it needs to compete with Slack. 

StefanS July 19, 2017

It's not only that no more nice features are being developed, they also don't fix the obvious bigger design flaws in their product.

Bryan Young July 27, 2017

I see zero benefit to choosing HipChat over Slack.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
July 27, 2017

Best answers I can give (as an Atlassian fan-boy) is that

a) the extensibility of HC is way ahead.  But even with my fan-boy hat on, I can't say that anyone is actually doing much that is useful with it, or that 99.999% of the customer base knows or cares

b) it has better integration with the rest of the Atlassian stack

Um.  That's it.

I understand new clients are on the way, but I've no idea if they might help it compete. 

 

Keith Deane July 27, 2017

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist-where did you hear about new clients? The only thing I have seen another user's screenshot showing an error on the 4.30 web client (which was quickly rolled back to 4.29 to resolve) .  Other than that the latest tweets are saying there is no active client development and the job boards were recently showing recruiting for key hipchat development positons (note: I have no idea how big their team is so maybe they are not as lacking on resources as it appears)

StefanS July 28, 2017

Well, we are a rather traditional german industry company, so we usually still stay away from american-hosted SAAS offerings like Slack. So hipchat definately has the on-premise option as a plus for us.

Integrations that are available for hipchat are fine, I don't consider them as a weak point of hipchat atm.

Clients and architecture are, though.

I'd also be interested in knowing where @Nic Brough -Adaptavist-heard about new client announcements?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
July 28, 2017

I got it from casual conversations at Barcelona summit - I was actually asking about support for multiple accounts on the existing clients (Mac client does it, Linux and Android do not).  The suggestion was to wait a bit as new or re-vamped clients were planned, but I was not able to get any timing out, as usual.

StefanS September 7, 2017

I guess here we go, new client: https://www.stride.com

I don't like this kind of communications politics, but whatever. Lets hope they also fixed the architectural flaws and make it available to work with data center on-premise option soonish.

Esther Strom September 19, 2017

I asked about on-premise at the Stride booth at Summit, and was told that it's not in the product roadmap to make a self-hosted version, but that the cloud-based version of Stride will be able to integrate with your on-prem products.

StefanS September 20, 2017

Yeah, I figured. I'm hoping that the also announced new hipchat (on-premise) clients have at least the same base as the stride client, not just a gloss-over for design.

I also doubt that it will ever achieve feature parity with stride, so I'm considering waiting until stride has matured and then move over to their cloud platform.

Esther Strom September 20, 2017

@StefanS - honestly, I don't know what they announced regarding HipChat. We don't currently use it; we're looking at Stride as a replacement for Skype + Webex.

StefanS September 20, 2017

@Esther Strom They made a blog post about their ongoing commitment to hipchat data center and new clients for that: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/hipchat/hipchat-data-center-performance-at-scale

The images showing the new clients in that blog post look suspiciously like gloss-over only though.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
September 20, 2017

Stride is not a new client for Hipchat, it's a replacement for Hipchat Cloud.  Hipchat Cloud will not see any new effort for new features, and eventually go away when enough people have moved to Stride.

Stride will not be coming to Server, it will be Cloud only.

Hipchat Server and Data Centre are being re-engineered a bit and will continue to have features added, as they'll be the non-Cloud offering for chat in the long run.

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