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Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

techcrunch.com

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Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#31

Post by bshipp »

Benjammer wrote: post #10

All this advanced tracking/planning stuff from companies like Atlassian seem to me like some kind of weird, dystopian "C-Suite-Porn." The going narrative seems to be this idea that companies have, throughout the history of business, been guided completely by the whims and emotional fancies of the leadership team and/or CEO. And now we're adding tools to surface more and more status tracking information up to the C Su…

This is a great comment. I'd go further and say that it can actually be harmful to a business (or government organxation) to put too much "raw" data in the hands of people who lack the context or training to effectively evaluate it. the analyst who generated/cleaned the dataset is going to have a much stronger basis for knowing when to trust the data and when to discount it.

Once the boss has thrown it through a pivot table and generated their own conclusions you're now not only fighting to get the correct conclusions forward, you have to fight management's ego when you tell them they've missed some important aspect in their analysis.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#32

Post by 013a »

Much like Oracle or IBM; they're a company that had some very interesting products and ideas in their day, and eventually just decided (or was forced, for internal reasons) to rest of their laurels. Today, they produce products that are purchased by people who don't actually use them, because the people who use them hate it. And, well, they pursue growth by acquisition. It's honestly a sad story, because they could have been so much more. Maybe they still can, but my faith dwindles every year that goes by.

I have more and more respect for Microsoft, who had every opportunity to go this route (and, really, did for quite a while), but was able to right the ship and continue to produce products that people actually want to buy. Sometimes they're buggy, and bloated, and strange to use, but they listen to their customers and continue to push improvements. That's why they ate IBM's lunch back in the day and have become the world's most valuable enterprise software company.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#33

Post by sytse »

nisa wrote: post #8
keithnz wrote: post #7

I've been really unimpressed with atlassian over the last few years. We started with bitbucket before it was acquired, it was super robust, then once atlassian got it slowly small bug after small bug kept making it into production creating mini headaches and they never seem like its super important to them. We also have Confluence, which is okish, but again, small bug after small bug keeps creeping in, like at the mo…

They just don't seem to care. You research something - after hours you'll end up at their bugtracker, where you can read the desperation of others (often some issues are not fixed in 10+ years). I don't understand their priorities. There is to date still no way to restrict visibility of work-logs on issues - a usecase basically every smaller shop has because the client is often participating directly in the JIRA. Ser…

You mean we're not going after Confluence or JIRA?

Wikis are certainly not a priority for us. I think if you don't separate the proposer from the person who accepts the proposal the wiki tends to grow stale. So we're betting on static websites with GitLab Pages.

There is a large market for wikis but you would have to use something easier than markdown, which is hard for us to get away from.

We're going after JIRA. In GitLab you can have a service desk on a project with an issue tracker. Do we solve the work-log issue too?

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#34

Post by MediumD »

"The price total of the acquisition is about $166 million, with $154 million in cash and the remainder in restricted shares."

Is it normal to have nearly the entirety of the acquisition be cash? I would have assumed the standard would be shares with a new vesting schedule to incentivize the founders to stay on board. To my uneducated self, this seems like the founders can basically immediately walk away with very little money left on the table.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#35

Post by [deleted] »

bshipp wrote: post #31
Benjammer wrote: post #10

All this advanced tracking/planning stuff from companies like Atlassian seem to me like some kind of weird, dystopian "C-Suite-Porn." The going narrative seems to be this idea that companies have, throughout the history of business, been guided completely by the whims and emotional fancies of the leadership team and/or CEO. And now we're adding tools to surface more and more status tracking information up to the C Su…

This is a great comment. I'd go further and say that it can actually be harmful to a business (or government organxation) to put too much "raw" data in the hands of people who lack the context or training to effectively evaluate it. the analyst who generated/cleaned the dataset is going to have a much stronger basis for knowing when to trust the data and when to discount it. Once the boss has thrown it through a pivo…

[deleted]

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#36

Post by jordanpg »

keithnz wrote: post #7

I've been really unimpressed with atlassian over the last few years. We started with bitbucket before it was acquired, it was super robust, then once atlassian got it slowly small bug after small bug kept making it into production creating mini headaches and they never seem like its super important to them. We also have Confluence, which is okish, but again, small bug after small bug keeps creeping in, like at the mo…

Atlassian software clears the good enough bar for me, functionally.

But it’s all _so slow_. Every action in the cloud UI takes 2 seconds. I would prefer any other product that was snappier.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#37

Post by rozenmd »

MediumD wrote: post #34

"The price total of the acquisition is about $166 million, with $154 million in cash and the remainder in restricted shares." Is it normal to have nearly the entirety of the acquisition be cash? I would have assumed the standard would be shares with a new vesting schedule to incentivize the founders to stay on board. To my uneducated self, this seems like the founders can basically immediately walk away with very lit…

Typically if a firm has the cash lying around, it may as well deploy it.

They get around the founders leaving issue by adding earn-outs and various contractual clauses to make it in the founders' best interest to stay.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#38

Post by neovive »

Contrary to some of the other commenters, I've been quite happy with Confluence over the past 8 years. We use Confluence heavily at our institution (higher-education) and it's been well-received by both technical and non-technical staff. It functions extremely well as a knowledgebase and is part of the daily workflow for dozens of staff. I also use a separate Confluence Cloud license for my personal knowledgebase and journal--I find it more productive than my previous Markdown+Git workflow for notetaking.

The only negative experience so far was the big price jump a few years ago for the higher-education license that forced us to reduce our licensed user count.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#39

Post by addicted »

Benjammer wrote: post #10

All this advanced tracking/planning stuff from companies like Atlassian seem to me like some kind of weird, dystopian "C-Suite-Porn." The going narrative seems to be this idea that companies have, throughout the history of business, been guided completely by the whims and emotional fancies of the leadership team and/or CEO. And now we're adding tools to surface more and more status tracking information up to the C Su…

Your comment has given me a lot to think about.

I think you distill the real responsibilities of different layers of an organization really well.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#40

Post by freddie_mercury »

jacques_chester wrote: post #29
DavidPiper wrote: post #9

I don't read a lot of TechCrunch, but did anybody else find this article quite poorly (perhaps hastily) written? (My apologies to the author for the flippancy of that question) An incorrect word in the opening sentence, a few places where tenses are mixed or incorrect, and generally long-winded sentences... Is this usual for TechCrunch? Regardless, interesting news to wake up to - I'll be interested to watch the dire…

It looks to be a lightly-edited press release. Very common for journalists in a hurry to make quota or get the first link up.

It may be common for other journalists but I don't think that's the explanation in this case. Every acquisition I've been part of, we've briefed journalists beforehand (almost always someone at Techcrunch), they were under an embargo, and the article was pre-written.
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