[dkarl]

I feel like the big marketing splash that will push a hot new competitor over the edge will be an acquisition by a big company. "BigCo acquires issue tracking startup X" will be the headline for a week, and they will gain a ton of credibility and momentum, and they will eat Atlassian's lunch. Eventually the big company will ruin them, and we'll end up with another slow and buggy version of Jira, but maybe we'll get a good 5-10 years of the default, ubiquitous issue tracking software being clean and snappy. I'd like to experience that before I retire.

[cosmodisk]

It's not hard to build something like Jira, it's not even that special. However it can be painful to uproot it once installed and used for years. It's probably not an issue for a small shop with a few devs, but imagine a large software house with hundreds if not thousands of devs and the amount of info that goes into Jira. Nobody wants to be that guy who proposes 6 month company wide data migration. That's the main reason it will take years to dethrone it.