Take block:
AFAICT, it was just really badly managed. A long time ago it got about as much share of its main market as it was going to get. They took the cash flow from that and hired a bunch more engineers to try to break into adjacent markets, and failed, and failed and failed.
Now they are just retreating to the steady income from their core business
"I Worked for Block. Its A.I. Job Cuts Aren’t What They Seem."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/opinion/block-jack-dorsey...
"Salesforce CEO says Block's cuts shouldn't fuel worries of mass layoffs: 'That company has its own unique issues'" https://www.aol.com/articles/salesforce-ceo-says-blocks-cuts...
one more :-) -
https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-companies-are-ai-washing...
And as they say any new companies can replace the Atlassian products by bespoke vibe coded alternatives in a few days...
Our company has drastically downsized its dependence on Atlassian in the past month, we will be completely free in a few more. With the help of modern AI tools we've been able to replace their products with internal tools that are better tailored to our needs.
That said, if you are a smaller company, you absolutely could kill Jira pretty quick.
Did they ever get around to fixing basic bugs like "Jira and Confluence use different markdown dialects"?
They've had a decade to address those sorts of obvious problems that bite 100% of the end users of their stuff, and apparently employed over 1600 people during that decade. That's 160 centuries of person time. I wonder what it was wasted on, if not making their fairly small core product suite usable.
I think we're going to see more and more incumbent companies with big moats and terrible products get replaced with vibe coded solutions over the next year or two.
Why have every company vibe code their own semi-good bespoke tool when instead one company can handcraft the tool with optimisations much better than AI can ever dream of, and then sell that tool for a reasonable markup. Especially if the tool is open source open core, so companies can PR improvements they think will be broadly applicable.
They take in billions every year but still come away with millions in negative income. I have no idea what their problem is but I'm pretty sure the 1,600 people they just fired weren't it. Throwing away people in yet another round of layoffs to further invest in AI is not a good sign.
You see this with all manner of large enterprise in my experience, where what they continue to do is "good enough" to allow for these inefficiencies and actions because they are, on some spectrum, "money printers" due to their moat and inertia. Creative destruction is not a forgone conclusion, nor fast. Is the incumbent exploring the problem spaces adjacent to their core business(es) to increase their TAM to increase shareholder value? Are they innovating? Or are they just churning and burning up revenue on meaningless work?
All of these companies doing layoffs to invest in AI is not about AI specifically, it is about reaching for profits and yield in a challenging business landscape and macro post zero interest rate policy ("ZIRP") imho. They are desperate for productivity growth, whether that is doing more with less people, AI, offshoring, whatever because money now has a cost.
neogodless•1h ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47343156 Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI (reuters.com)
~yesterday, 273+ comments
bigwheels•1h ago
An important update on our team https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342835 - Yesterday, 18 comments