Atlassian boss says sorry to stranded HipChat and Stride devs, users

Atlassian boss says sorry to stranded HipChat and Stride devs, users

Atlassian apologised to users and partners for nixing its Slack and Stride products today but didn’t provide much more information on what they can expect as the apps are borged into longtime frenemy Slack.

Co-founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes kicked off the firm’s Barcelona beano by saying the firm sometimes had to make tough short term choices to ensure it makes “the right bets for customers in the long term.”

The most recent of these has been July’s surprising dropping of its HipChat and Stride IP into Slack’s lap, coupled with a “symbolic” investment by the Aussie firm into its chat-focused rival.

Cannon-Brookes said the partnership was “very exciting” but accepted “if you’re using HipChat or Stride it’s very disruptive for you…I apologise for that ”.

However, he added, many partners would have been developing both Atlassian and Slack’s platforms, in which case “it’s great news”.

When the firms announced the deal, first fruits of the partnership were promised for this week’s Atlassian Summit in Barcelona. They’ve stuck to that, with Slack integrations for Confluence Cloud and the just-launched Jira Ops product.

However, there’s less hard news for Atlassian customers contemplating shifting their existing chat and collaboration installations to Slack.

Asked about what customers could expect when it comes migrating their data to Slack, Bryant Lee, Atlassian’s head of partnerships and integrations said the companies were in discussions to work out “the best way to do this” over the next few months.

He admitted it was “hard to say” how long it would take for individual customers to make the migration, though he said some had achieved this in a few hours.

Bear Douglas, Slack’s developer advocacy lead, said the firm was open to hearing what HipChat and Stride features hit the spot for developers, but there was “no roadmap” for what it would keep or junk.