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Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

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Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#491

Post by arielm »

pbecotte wrote: post #311
oblio wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're public, they need to make money for shareholders.

The set of shareholders who would prefer a company return profits / invest in existing products vs risky investments in non-core-competency areas is certainly not empty. If I wanted to invest in a dogfood company I can- I invest in Atlassian because they make developer tools.

> risky investments in non-core-competency

I disagree with this completely. Atlassian is in the business of collaboration tools. They've done that for developers, but it doesn't mean they're only capable of making developer tools.

Also, where's the risk here? Other than the inflated price I don't see any risk. Trello isn't just an idea but rather a real product with a massive team and a ton of users who love it. They've iterated on their platform enough so I imagine many of both the technical and experience aspects are polished enough. What am I missing?

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#492

Post by wpietri »

komali2 wrote: post #423
briandear wrote: post #421

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?

Personally, I hate it because it is too functional.

It has eight zillion features, all of them overlapping. It has so many fields, dimensions, views, and reports that I despair of ever getting a setup that usefully matches an actual workflow. The point of a work tracking system is to bring everybody together, but I regularly see people dealing with Jira by having their own separate tracking methods: docs, emails, spreadsheets, sticky notes on the wall.

I like Trello better because it's more straightforward. Less complexity means less chaos and an easier time getting a workflow representation that matches actual workflow.

But personally, I like things that are more straightforward still. E.g., my last company ran almost entirely on index cards, and we were very happy with that:

http://williampietri.com/writing/2015/the-big-board/

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#493

Post by allover »

aclsid wrote: post #447
deepuj wrote: post #322

This is depressing. Trello is a beloved software for a lot of people. It's sad that Trello decided to sell off to Atlassian. I can't believe the same company that makes Jira is going to run Trello. SourceTree is the only software that they make that doesn't suck.

Don't know what kind of stuff you are using over there, but Bitbucket has been fantastic for us for over a year already. About to start trying their Bamboo service. At most, this is welcome news if they manage to integrate Trello with Jira somehow.

Bamboo (cloud) is end-of-lifed so you might want to reconsider that purchase! (Pipelines is their new alternative).

(Yes you could buy the Bamboo self-hosted thing, which they're still supporting, but it's clear where their efforts are going at this point).

EDIT: Also, I should add some opinion here. We used to use Bamboo for 2+ years and ditched it (for Jenkins). Bamboo has a horrible UI, and everything basically has to be done through UI.

Jenkins meanwhile has an ugly UI, but you can do everything via config/Jenkinsfile, which is what these newer CI things incl. Pipelines are aiming at also, basically the `ci.yaml` file in your repo idea.

So yeah, avoid Bamboo!

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#494

Post by eloisant »

jlarocco wrote: post #414
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly. No acquisition ever starts off with, "We're going to change a bunch of stuff as we assimilate this new company." It's not hard to find "______ is being acquired by ________" headlines on HN, where everybody involved promises not to change anything, and then find the corresponding shutdown post on https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ sometime a few months later. Unfortunately, even if Jira were really ser…

To be fair, Atlassian acquired BitBucket a few years ago and I didn't see them butcher it or merge it with Stash.

On the contrary, it went in a good direction under Atlassian ownership.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#496

Post by wwalser »

sanguy wrote: 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…

Cognitive dissonance, it abounds.

Trello, amazing because of it's small size and limited, elegant feature set. Atlassian, awful because they won't implement everything that their customers ask for. Oh and the only feature that you've pointed out that's missing, 2fa, it's not missing. It's been in place for literally years.

The open issue tracker that Atlassian maintains is there so that you can see things that they've said no to. You can actually dig in and find out if someone else has asked for a feature that you want. You can see, completely transparently, whether or not they might implement it. The things that Trello has been asked to build but has quietly and privately said no to? No where to be found (and reasonably so given comments like this one).

Using a companies transparency against them is gross. It shows a lack of empathy for the people who build these systems, the trade offs that they have to make and the responsible decisions they make to not implement every single feature request. JIRA is enterprise software, it's incredibly extensible and configurable. The fact that some people configure it poorly isn't entirely their fault (though sane defaults can solve for some of this problem). Trello is for small teams. It's compact and simple in ways that JIRA was never intended to be. The $425MM? That means Atlassian understands that Trello has captured a part of they didn't.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#497

Post by cyberferret »

iambateman wrote: post #420
iamaelephant wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which products do you think Atlassian messed up after acquisition? Disclaimer I'm an Atlassian employee, but just curious.

I'm not sure about acquisitions, but compared to github, jira and bitbucket are poor. I tried to figure out what confluence even does and I'm still not sure. Considering I'm forced into the atlassian ecosystem at work, this is my plea for y'all to improve.

I infinitely prefer BitBucket to GitHub. I guess GitHub is great if you are working on public or open source projects, but BitBucket seems to be much better at handling internal (private) projects to me.

Their lack of popularity also seems to translate to a lower attack profile, so I feel that my private projects are safer on BB than GH.

I've evaluated many issue trackers too, and none of them seem to come close to Jira. Yes it is slow, but the depth of features (and plugins) are great, and BitBucket works seamlessly with it.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#498

Post by problems »

jessaustin wrote: post #429
problems wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not too concerned about someone getting the code, reading it and discovering a flaw allowing for exploit. I'm much more concerned about someone being able to modify code that will be pulled onto production systems by build and deployment scripts (not to mention the build and deployment scripts themselves) which would allow direct access without any need to hack anything beyond the external cloud service. Even a d…

Yes, code signing is important whether onsite or off-.

Hmm, code signing might not help us due to some specifics of how we do deployments and builds, but thinking a little more about it - what could help in an even bigger way here is PGP signing at the commit level. Git supports this builtin and recently there have been a few pushes for it's support on services. Probably have to hack together a little custom verification script, but I know of no reason that wouldn't be viable.

This would basically resolve my biggest problems with it I suppose, if used fully and properly. Currently comitting with your SSH key basically resolves this issue in the same way, assuming our internal-restricted server isn't compromised of course.

I'd still be a little uncomfortable putting code on 3rd party servers and having any data there at all for stability reasons, but this does make it more viable. I'll definitely be commit signing everything I have on cloud services from now on.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#499

Post by pyrophane »

fphhotchips wrote: post #471
komali2 wrote: post #423

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?

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 wil…

Strongly agree. JIRA can be made to work a lot of different ways, and by allowing managers to restrict the workflow in various ways they can use it to enforce a lot of cumbersome process.

Alternately, JIRA as a team board, particularly with remote teams, can be pretty great if you take the time to set it up so that it works for the team (rather than just for the managers or PMs). It can be no more (or at least not much more) cumbersome than Trello, but has a lot of features that Trello lacks.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#500

Post by qznc »

philliphaydon wrote: post #197
anildash wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're definitely investing in Gomix and we'll be revitalizing FogBugz this year, too — especially for folks who don't find Jira a satisfying or delightful way to work.

I can't figure out what Gomix is...

My understanding: Resurrect HyperCard/QBasic/Visual Basic online.

You get a live web editor + hosting and you can easily publish childish web apps ... uh MVPs.

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