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Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

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Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats! However, I'm still pouring out a little wine on the ground for my fallen homies who died a slow death from being Jira'd and Bitbucketed and Confluenced to the point that their will to live was crushed. Being the anti-Jira is what made Trello great. If feels like Luke Skywalker just got bought by the Dark Side while claiming that nothing will change -- I'm still with the rebels.

I feel like I'm the only one that likes Jira more than Trello. I started on Trello, then moved to a company that uses Jira, and couldn't be happier. It's just so functional . Why does everyone hate on it?

I agree with you, but I suspect that your experience with Jira/Confluence as a developer will depend on the quality of your project and management team. If your PM team use it as a way to distribute their work down to developers, then Jira will quickly become one of the litany of things that you hate. Meanwhile, if it's used well, it can vastly reduce the burden of upwards communication in a way that Trello never will.

In other words, like most enterprise software, the experience is highly dependent on how well it's implemented.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#472
post #412

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Is Trello really a competitor though? JIRA and Trello couldn't be more different. I'd think Trello and Asana are much closer competitors. JIRA is like an over engineered spaceship with more features than anyone could learn in a lifetime. Comparatively Trello functions more like a Prius. Priuses and spaceships don't compete.

We don't view JIRA and Trello as competitors. JIRA shines in areas that (a) have workflow and (b) require repeatable processes across a number of people. Once you have 20+ people on a project, you need repeatable processes. In cases like bug tracking, project management, customer service, help desks, HR onboarding and hundreds others you need workflow. Trello shines in areas where you have (a) small teams or (b) requ…

This. I hear a lot of whining about JIRA, which is fair since it's a huge pain to configure and learn all the quirks of, but usually it's overkill for those folks (perhaps myself included right now).

But the folks who have a working process and a large number of people and teams are usually complaining the other way round: that no tool supports their workflow. Which is where JIRA shines. I don't know another tool that can be configured to such ridiculous detail.

The Trello acquisition makes total sense because it fills in that gap that JIRA is bad at.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#473
post #272

This is really bad as Atlassian is like a prize winning show pony -- great marketing and webinars but once you get deeply into the product usage you find all sorts of problems and open issues. BitBucket has been waiting for 2FA for 5 years! Bambo was recently semi-retired going against a lot of users investments. And these are just recent. I would not expect wonderful things for Trello and thankfully it appears they…

I quite like Confluence (as in, better than Sharepoint as Wiki in enterprise gigs). But I'm always wondering if Confluence customers are aware that they're creating a huge data silo for their knowledge base documents that can only be accessed using proprietary Confluence software for years to come.

The XML created by Confluence is _very_ portable. If you're using Confluence plugins create buy propriety vendors (Gliffy, Balsamiq etc.) then perhaps you're doing some of what you describe.

The actual content that's in Confluence though, much more portable than anything you're going to get out of another enterprise software vendor.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#474
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atlassian will most likely "sunset" Trello or somehow include it in JIRA.

We have no plans to sunset Trello. Trello is an incredible product, and an incredible brand, with an amazing team behind it. Atlassian's product range today includes unstructured (Confluence) and structured (JIRA) products. Trello fits right in the middle. It has a myriad of use-cases[1] and is loved by the millions who use it daily. [1] - https://trello.com/inspiration Scott, CEO Atlassian

Whatever you do, just make sure you always keep a functional free tier. I can tell you that for for us, as far as Bitbucket and Trello is concerned, the free tier is what got us in before purchasing a plan several months later.

AWS applies the same trick with some startups in China (like they did with us) and I guess Silicon Valley as well. Bunch of free credits, free for a year. After you have your infrastructure with them it will be hard to switch to somebody else.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#475
post #432

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To be fair I've been a part of 3 acquisitions and have seen this story play out tens of times with beloved software. It always starts out this way. "The original folks are going to run it, not the new company!" "Things will stay the same" yadda yadda yadda. 1-3 years down the road, it'll be a different story. It'll be unlikely that the executive team will stick around past whatever agreement they signed with Atlassia…

I think WhatsApp and Waze are both pretty good examples of high profile acquisitions that played out this way. I also feel like (and I realize many disagree) that YouTube largely kept its "feel" and didn't turn into Google Videos 2.0. Of course there are plenty of examples of exactly what you describe. I feel the same way about Java, Hudson (lol) and plenty of other acquisitions.

This is a minority sample of companies that survived post acquisition. There is a vast example of companies that doesn't.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#476
post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I'm the only one that likes Jira more than Trello. I started on Trello, then moved to a company that uses Jira, and couldn't be happier. It's just so functional . Why does everyone hate on it?

Bear in mind that Jira is hugely customizable. So, saying "I use Jira" is more like saying "I drive a Ford" than like saying "I drive a Mustang." Your experience will depend on the plugins you've installed, how you've configured custom fields and workflows, your org's SSO policies, the hardware you're deploying it to and how well you keep it up to date (if you're deploying on-prem), etc.

Unless part of the reason you dislike Jira is that customizability.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#477
post #465
post #424

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HipChat (unless you concede it was always bad)

What's wrong with hipchat?

Having recently switched from a workplace that used Slack to one that uses Hipchat, my first answer is "everything". It's less reliable, and reliability is my number one desire in a communications tool. And there are just so many little UI and UX details that Slack gets right that it's a pleasure to use, whereas Hipchat is generally an irritation and a disappointment for me.

I guess one way to explain it is that Hipchat feels like an enterprise product, and Slack feels like a consumer product. The difference being that enterprise products get used because some high-level person says, "Lo, all my vassals shall now use Hipchat." Which means that user experience is secondary. Whereas consumer software has to earn each user, meaning that it works harder to please and support those users.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're willing to talk publicly, what's the pricing like for a very small, self-hosted group? I'm talking 3 normal users, might scale up to 5 or so. We're probably too small to be worth your time, but JIRA is offering $10/yr for up to 10 users, $10 more if you want the JIRA Agile features too.

Our pricing is here, you can check it out for yourself: http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/pricing In short: We cost a little bit more, but include features that are separate, add-on products for Jira, and generally software developers are a _lot_ happier using FogBugz. If you want to know more, just drop us a line; don't want to be too spammy here.

Just want to confirm - those prices hold for the self-hosted "On Site" version too, where you don't have to provide any management of the data and hosting?

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atlassian will most likely "sunset" Trello or somehow include it in JIRA.

They don't really have a history of doing that. Greenhopper was acquired and integrated into JIRA as JIRA Agile. Hipchat was acquired and now it lives on and nicely integrates with nearly all Atlassian products (JIRA, Bamboo, Confluence, etc). My guess is they'll keep Trello running for a while as-is, and slowly rework it to become "JIRA Lite". It will likely have Trello-like functionality with JIRA branding, and som…

> Hipchat was acquired and now it lives on and nicely integrates with nearly all Atlassian products

Except for when you run into a bug that requires disabling of the Hipchat integration with Confluence... You'd think a company could make its own products work together better.

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