Atlassian's HipChat desktop apps get group video chat and screen sharing
Atlassian's popular workplace chat app HipChat, used by companies like Uber and Expedia, is getting team video chatting and screen sharing, starting today. — It might seem small, but it speaks to a big trend in tech.
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2016 rollout completes a build-out Atlassian started earlier: its acquisition of open-source video conferencing company BlueJimp was made specifically to power HipChat's video chat, and this release turns that infrastructure into shipping desktop features — group video plus screen sharing — for enterprise customers like Uber and Expedia.
The move matters because HipChat was Atlassian's answer to the dedicated chat platforms eating into team communication, launched off the back of a strong public debut (stock trading up over 30% at $27 per share, valuing the company at $5.6 billion). What followed shows how hard that fight was: within about a year Atlassian launched Stride, a Slack-like service starting at $3/user/month beyond the free tier, and by late 2018 it had shut HipChat down entirely, selling the underlying Jitsi chat and videoconferencing tool to cloud conferencing provider 8x8.
First-order effects
- HipChat's installed base — companies like Uber and Expedia — gets native group video and screen sharing in the desktop apps, removing the need to jump to a separate conferencing tool for ad-hoc team calls.
- Atlassian gains feature parity on the two capabilities most cited in chat-platform comparisons, directly pressuring rival workplace chat products on completeness rather than price.
Second-order effects
- Feature parity alone didn't settle the market: Atlassian's next move was a full product reset, launching Stride as a Slack-like competitor priced at $3/user/month for features beyond a free tier — an admission that HipChat needed repositioning, not just more features.
- The video stack built via BlueJimp became a separable asset: when Atlassian exited chat, Jitsi went to 8x8, showing conferencing infrastructure had buyers independent of the chat product it was built for.
Third-order effects
- The arc from feature addition to Stride to shutdown suggests that in team communication, bolting video onto an existing chat product was not enough to hold enterprise accounts against focused chat-first rivals — platform commitment, not incremental features, decided outcomes.
- If the pattern holds, collaboration vendors face a consolidate-or-exit choice in bundled chat/video: Atlassian ultimately chose exit, divesting the technology to a conferencing specialist rather than continuing to fund the category.
The trend: Workplace chat is consolidating into all-in-one collaboration suites, and vendors that cannot win there — as Atlassian's HipChat-to-Stride-to-divestiture path shows — end up selling the pieces to specialists.