You might be surprised how much of what runs Google (Anaplan, for example, for XWS) is fairly industry standard.

> "Do you want this tool more than you want to be employed?"

will be harmful to wellbeing of developers rather than sales guys.

It's true you need working software, but without sales and operations doing their part, the software will be scraped when the company folds.

Sales and operations get away with everything because they're the beating heart of any successful organization.

I think that it’s been diverted from its original purpose,and is now indeed horribly complicated since it’s supposed to be all in one package.

I’ve also noted that in large companies the quality of the product for end users, as long as it’s not a massive drag on productivity or on recruitment and is not core business, is irrelevant and that other factors are more important ( costs, contracts , easy to install integrate and maintain, quality of support, breadth of use within the company etc ). This makes atlassian a natural superpower.

Bugzilla is a Mozilla product so you’d hope they’d use it themselves (it’s often referred to as “dogfooding”). But Jira is everywhere so I’m sure some project managers argued that it was needed.

And once you have Jira then the same people push for Confluence too. But MediaWiki was the de facto standard before everyone jumped on proprietary solutions like Confluence and Notion. In fact I seem to recall that very early versions of Confluence was just a 3rd party Wiki that Atlassian bought. Or at least there was a Java-based Wiki in their early portfolio.

You also have to bear in mind that organising docs is an endless and thankless job which nobody wants to do. So these things tend to multiply like vermin once someone starts creating docs on another platform. One startup I worked for somehow managed to have stuff scattered between Confluence, Notion and Google Docs despite only employing 50 people. It was crazy.

Another client I recently worked for had Sharepoint, Notion and Confluence as their official tools for documentation.

As for IRC and Slack, every company I’ve worked at in the last 5 years had two of either MS Teams, Zoom or Slack. Literally every company. And that’s in addition to email. Go back further and there was Skype, WebEx, and so on and so forth too.

It’s almost a meme these days to hear the sentence “how would you prefer to be contacted” because so many solutions are competing against each other with overlapping functionality.

Then you have developer-focused tools like GitHub with their own docs and issue tracking too

At this point in time, it’s easier to just accept that each org is going to end up with multiple overlapping solutions because you’ll get new people join the team and they’ll want to use their preferred tool because that’s what they’re productive in and so the spiral continues.

So if Mozilla managed to keep the options down to just 2 for each product category, then I’d say they were doing better than most other organisations.