[btilly]

You may have arrived at this view now, but it isn't believable that you never saw them as direct competition with you.

For example http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/07/20.html makes it clear that you were adding features so that people wouldn't have to switch to "THE AUSTRALIANS". Which is a pretty clear reference to Atlassian.

[tptacek]

The whole quote you're referring to:

    FogBugz 7.0 will include a long list of simple
    improvements that will make life dramatically
    easier for people trying to get things done,
    especially when they want to do things just a wee
    bit differently than we do here in the Land of the
    Fog. Every little feature will be a delight for
    somebody, especially that person who keeps
    emailing us because he can't believe that the
    feature he wants which is obviously only six lines
    of code hasn't been implemented in FogBugz 1.0,
    2.0, 3.0, 4.0, "4.5", or 6.0, and if we don't get
    it soon he JUST MIGHT HAVE TO GO OVER TO THE
    AUSTRALIANS.

That reads like he's making fun of the idea that he's competing with Atlassian, not that he's existentially terrified of competing with Atlassian.

[Chipchipperson]

A compelling theory, but the Inc article he wrote in 2009 pretty clearly states that he considers them direct competition and laid out a plan to beat them.

This did not happen.

[atesti]

And now the plugins are gone :-( With the new GUI they do not work anymore. I was so excited when the plugins were released, it's a great SDK and we were quickly able to write two plugins that we really needed

[veidr]

I have at times used then-current versions of Fogbugz and JIRA over the past 15 years, and I remember the dichotomy pretty much like Joel lays it out.

I used Fogbugz on small teams, where we didn't have a dedicated person to do things like administer the bug tracker (and where the programmers chose their own issue tracker). When I saw JIRA, it would usually be because there were a lot of layers of management above the programming team (and a need for lots of reports and charts to go into presentation slides), or because the programmers were offshore and not known personally.

That is just one anecdata point, of course. But I think it was always pretty obvious that the two products had completely different philosophies -- and also that they still did compete to a good extent, because after all they are both issue trackers for software development (at least primarily; I guess JIRA also aspires to track issues building your airplane and whatnot).

If those were the only two bug trackers that existed, I myself would choose JIRA if I had somebody else to set up and run it, and Fobugz if I had to do it myself.