Atlassian Stride

» see stride.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

stride launched on september 7, 2017 as atlassian's official hipchat replacement. hipchat had been bolted onto the atlassian platform since the 2012 acquisition and was visibly losing the team-chat race to slack. instead of patching hipchat into something newer, atlassian rebuilt the product from the ground up. stride was the result: a cloud-only chat tool with built-in video calls and an "actions" system that pulled to-do items automatically out of conversations.

the launch was polite to hipchat customers. existing hipchat cloud accounts could migrate at their own pace, and the new pricing was competitive against slack's per-seat math. atlassian's pitch to its installed base of jira and confluence customers was that stride was the chat product designed to talk to the rest of the atlassian stack, the way slack was designed to talk to the rest of saas. the company knew it was entering a competitive market. it bet that the integration story would matter more than network effects already locked into slack.

i was not in the stride window. by 2017 the small turkish dev teams around me that paid for team chat at all were paying for slack, and the ones that did not were still on skype groups or whatsapp threads. stride read in the tech press as a curiosity, the kind of product engineers would read a review of and not install. that turned out to be roughly what happened inside its addressable market too.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it actually ended ~

on july 26, 2018 atlassian announced that stride and hipchat cloud would both be discontinued on february 15, 2019, and that slack technologies had bought the intellectual property of both. atlassian took a minority equity stake in slack. customers would be migrated to slack. ten months from launch to end-of-life announcement, with another seven months to actually switch the lights off. the announcement framed it as a partnership between the two companies. user forums framed it as a surrender.

~ the decline ~

stride had been growing, just not fast enough to matter. atlassian's executives said publicly that the cost of staying competitive in real-time chat against a focused upstart had become hard to justify next to the company's larger bets on jira and confluence. slack's user base inside the same accounts atlassian wanted was already large enough that stride was the second tab people opened, when they opened it at all. the partnership-and-acquisition deal let atlassian exit cleanly while taking equity in the winner.

~ what got buried with it ~

stride's "actions" feature, where the chat tool extracted to-dos from a conversation, was one of the early production attempts at letting a chat client write a task list for you. that idea kept showing up in later products under different names. the rest of stride was absorbed back into atlassian's broader effort to make jira and confluence feel real-time. the most lasting thing it left was the proof that even a profitable enterprise company could not enter a network-effect category late and outspend a competitor that got there first.

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