Mercurial support was the one reason for me to still use Bitbucket: there is no other Bitbucket feature I can think of that Github doesn't already have, while Github's community is miles ahead since everyone and their dog is already there.
More importantly, Bitbucket leaves the migration to you (if I read the article correctly). Once I download my repo and convert it to git, why would I stay with the company that just made me go through an annoying (and often painful) process, when I can migrate to Github with the exact same command? And why isn't there a "migrate this repo to git" button right there?
I want to believe that Bitbucket has smart people and that this choice is a good one. But I'm with you there - to me, this definitely looks like Bitbucket will die.
The article claims that virtually no new accounts are using Mercurial support at all.
I suspect that they are working on improving their build pipeline and CI tooling and it's proving to expensive (perhaps in both time and money) to get that working reliably for both Git and Mercurial.
The key differentiator on Github's side is community involvement. The UI allows you to quickly search for projects across repositories.
Bitbucket seems more geared to teams working internally; finding projects on Bitbucket is hard.
To be brutally honest, I used Bitbucket because I had a grandfathered academic account (most features free). Github offers nearly all that I had on that account now.
Github is great for "social" coding, but Bitbucket is very clearly moving towards targeting insular, corporate development tasks. But then, with the price ticket on Atlassian's products, that's hardly a surprise. B2B is their bread and butter.
yeah, I think that open source and other social products will gear towards Github. While Bitbucket will thrive in B2B space. currently, JIRA has a huge moat around it and I am not seeing that disappearing in the near future.
There's already a self-hosted version of Bitbucket which is fairly decent aside from being as slow as molasses (which, let's face it, is an 'Atlassian thing' at this point).
I used to use Jira extensively for my own internal projects (and, hilariously, my personal TODO list), but I'm moving away from that. I'm moving from my own personal server to a couple of Droplets, and I realised in moving JIRA across just how bloated it is. Most of the SCM integration tools I use are pay-for now, so for $10/yr, I'm getting less than I'd get with a Mantis or Bugzilla install.
I need to have a look for a new bugtracker. Custom Workflow support would be nice, that's really the only feature which kept me on JIRA for so long!
If it's going to die (and it might, I know I couldn't get off it fast enough), this can likely only help, not hinder.
Not every feature helps you. There's a support burden with every line of code, and the support burden for another entire version control system is probably pretty high. Every new feature you add has to either be written for that second version control system as well, or come with a disappointing article explaining why not.
If anything, this has the potential to free up resources they can spend on creating a differentiator that engages more than 1% of their customers.
As a data point, our company that only uses git moved from GitLab to BitBucket literally about two months ago. No idea why (waaaay to low on the food chain) but I'm guessing it must have some advantages at least.
We have moved from BitBucket after they had several days worth of unavailability over a year and the fact that they would regularly decline our company credit card, which would subsequently immediately block all commits to our repos.
It was a mess which was simply fixable by re-submitting the card details again.
It was preceded by GitHub:FI, but Enterprise has existed since I worked there in 2013. Definitely not a new capability for them and it’s actually really nice to administer, e.g. very easy high-availability setup and excellent documentation.
