Most software companies won't survive the next 5-10 years, but the category itself is thriving. AI-powered development tools like Atlassian are booming while traditional support software like Zendesk stagnates, showing which SaaS categories AI helps and which it hurts.
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Maybe that's normal, like to take the most generous view. Will every single software and SaaS company make it through the next 5 to 10 years? Absolutely not. Will a lot of them continue to grow and prosper through that 5 to 10 years? Absolutely. Is that any different to the last 10 years? No. I keep saying internally, the competitors we had in 2000, the competitors we had in 2005, in 2010, in 2015, I went and pulled all these old documents. A whole bunch of those companies don't exist. They've been merged, acquired, gone out of business, right? And we have a set of competitors today that are new and upcoming, and we have to compete with those. That is the history of the technology industry, and that's going to keep going. The idea that software as a category is dead is ludicrous to me. I'm like, wait a second. It's very efficient for businesses to buy pre-canned solutions of technology. They don't write everything with assembly, and they probably still won't.
But can I throw in one microthought? It's too we have my— I view Atlassian, and I'm just a student, I didn't found it, as above the fold. And what I mean is you're not seeing seat reduction. Product and engineering is a beneficiary of AI spend, right? And whether it's Vibe Coding or however we mobile, we are creating radically more software than 6 months ago. Like any curve, if you look at for mobile, like it's exploding, right? And at least for a while, I think that benefits Atlassian because I need more tools, right? I need to track more issues, more tickets, more everything. I think there's plenty of other spaces that are being, that are being decimated. I mean, if you're traditional support software like Zendesk, the old Zendesk is growing 0%. Like we are cutting humans
