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EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

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61–68 of 68 posts

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#61

Any word on the future of Pivotal Tracker?

Switch to Trello. It's practically the same thing, but far less opinionated/religious.

One of the nice things about Pivotal Tracker was that it was opinionated in just the right ways.

That being said, I like Trello as well. I will not be surprised if Trello provides an imported for Pivotal Tracker because of the uncertainty of this news.

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#62
EMC seems to be slowly building up an "enterprise software" portfolio. They bought Zimbra from Yahoo, which includes "Zimbra Collaboration Suite", a groupware. Now they've acquired Pivotal, which makes (among other things) Pivotal Tracker. I think I see a pattern here.

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switch to Trello. It's practically the same thing, but far less opinionated/religious.

Trello is great, the interface makes me a lot happier than Pivotal, but I think it's more suited for something like a big data collection and processing project, where you have a lot of little pieces to keep track of. It doesn't seem like it would be that great for software development. Correct me if I'm wrong though, please. BTW I thought I read someone comment somewhere about being able to split checkboxes out into…

> It doesn't seem like it would be that great for software development.

See how the Trello team uses it: https://trello.com/board/trello-development/4d5ea62fd76aa113...

> split checkboxes out into separate cards, but I couldn't find any other mention of it. Can you do that?

Yes. There is a "covert to card" link that appears when you click on a checklist item.

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#64
post #38

Well, that is the end of that company. I was involved in a very successful company that was bought by EMC (infra) and I can assure you that as soon as they bought it they forced out the founders, screwed up the support offering, stymied development efforts with layers upon layers of beurocracy (over 9 levels from the top to the bottom in the hrirachu chart - not including "dotted lines"), political appointees over so…

Off-topic, but I was curious what "hrirachu" meant in english, and now I'm just incredibly impressed by DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hrirachu http://www.google.com/search?q=hrirachu

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#65

This reminded me Mozy story. EMC CEO was searching for backup software for his home PC and found Mozy. He liked it so much so he acquired company making Mozy. Maybe this time he found Pivotal Tracker? ;)

Sure, but EMC and Mozy are a natural fit. It's not like he heard a really good song on the radio, and the next day EMC bought the record label.

You never know.

The scenario you described not much different from ebay buying Skype.

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#66
post #56
post #38

Well, that is the end of that company. I was involved in a very successful company that was bought by EMC (infra) and I can assure you that as soon as they bought it they forced out the founders, screwed up the support offering, stymied development efforts with layers upon layers of beurocracy (over 9 levels from the top to the bottom in the hrirachu chart - not including "dotted lines"), political appointees over so…

I am weirdly excited that there is exactly one Google hit for the word "hrirachu".

Yeah, I saw that... I wrote this from my iPad and didn't notice the typo till way too late :-)

I suspect my comment will for ever more rank highly in Google search results for "hrirachu".

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We switched from tracker to Planbox about 6 months ago and have been thrilled. Same general model as tracker with better execution. It's a young product so there are still some issues but it's clearly heading in the right direction. They also have an import from tracker so it's painless to try out.

I'm annoyed by Pivotal's interface too, but the intro video from Planbox didn't really impress me much (maybe because I work at a really small company and that level of hierarchy and customization probably isn't relevant to us.) Do you have any particular examples of what it does better than Pivotal?

I came to loathe the columnar setup of Pivotal. I found myself constantly rearranging the interface just to be able to work.

We have a lot of project and subprojects here, and Planbox's hierarchy (there is basically one more level than in Tracker) is really useful. Their UX for slicing and dicing based on person, label, project, etc is also nice. The search is faster (it's all client side so it's practically instant). The charts make more sense to me. It doesn't treat stories as a unit of work; rather they are a goal. Thus all of the tasks in Planbox can be individually assigned to different people and estimated and time-tracked at that same level of granularity.

Overall I just found that there were a lot of things I was hacking around in Pivotal, and frankly I didn't even notice it. It's only when we hired a couple of people and they pointed out frustrations with Pivotal that I started looking around. When I started using Planbox, that's when I really realized how much I was adjusting myself to the limitations of Pivotal. I find myself much less stressed managing things via Planbox.

Hope that helps!

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#68

This reminded me Mozy story. EMC CEO was searching for backup software for his home PC and found Mozy. He liked it so much so he acquired company making Mozy. Maybe this time he found Pivotal Tracker? ;)

Sure, but EMC and Mozy are a natural fit. It's not like he heard a really good song on the radio, and the next day EMC bought the record label.

They sound like they should be, right? Mozy did storage, EMC did storage?

But as a Mozy employee during the time of the acquisition, I'd like to state for the record how emphatically and fantastically wrong this is. There is more of a "natural fit" between Sesame Street and Godzilla's wang than there was between Mozy and EMC. :)

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