It Looks Like Atlassian is Going to Ruin Dia for Everyone ⭐

Well, I’ve got some bad news. Atlassian’s acquisition of The Browser Company is almost certainly going to ruin everything special about Dia, the innovative AI-powered web browser. So if you had your hopes set on using that product, as I did, it’s time to start reevaluating your options.

Last week, Atlassian announced that it was acquiring New York tech startup The Browser Company for $610 million in cash. This is interesting on all kinds of levels, not the least of which being that Perplexity AI also apparently made a bid for the company, too, as it did for Brave (and, hilariously, Google Chrome).

I was cautiously optimistic. But truth be told, Atlassian doesn’t mean much to me, just as companies like Salesforce.com don’t mean much to me. When I Googled this company, I was amused to see that “What does Atlassian do exactly” was the top result under the “People also ask” section in the results. So I guess I’m not alone. But what Atlassian does is uninspiring. It’s a “proprietary software company that specializes in collaboration tools designed primarily for software development and project management,” Google says. It makes products like Jira, which I’ve at least heard of, and Confluence, which I’ve not. And even a cursory look at its webpage is enough to make me close the tab quickly and pretend that never happened. Ugh.

But that’s not the problem.

I mean, Salesforce.com purchased Slack. I couldn’t care less about Salesforce.com if you paid me, but I use Slack every single day. And though I hate it in the same way that I hate anything that interrupts me all day long and then charges me too much money for that honor, I can’t claim that Salesforce has changed Slack in any meaningful way, let alone made it even worse. I assume this his the relationship that many Xbox fans have with Microsoft. Vaguely suspicious of the parent company but so far, so good.

And Atlassian’s announcement post gave me hope. It describes “transforming how work gets done in the AI era,” something that should resonate with me, given my pithy mantra, “Personal technology, with a focus on productivity, mostly Microsoft.” It notes that browsers aren’t built for work, they’re built for browsing, and that “it’s time for a browser that’s actually built for work – a browser that helps you do, not just browse.” (I added that emphasis.) So far, so good.

Granted, the post does mention the term “knowledge worker” several times. And maybe that should have been a red flag. But The Browser Company, the quirkiest of small companies in a market overflowing with quirky companies, was so decidedly focused on advancing the web browser for the AI age, a topic I feel quite strongly about, and one in which we both align. And Dia, like the Arc browser before it, debuted first on the Mac, not on Windows, suggesting a sort of focus on individuals over businesses, with perhaps the smallest imaginable startups in the mix as well. No Fortune 500 company is going to drop Chrome (or...