Perhaps Pivotal wins by being able to get a ton of enterprise engineers from EMC, turn them into Rubyists and scale their already very successful model. If they are profitable at ~100 employees, they would be even more profitable at ~150, ~200.
EMC Buys Pivotal Labs
51–60 of 68 posts
Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Desperation. Storage vendors are between a rock and a hard place these days because their business has been commoditized. The huge storage deployments of today are not running on EMC or NetApp anymore. They are running on arrays of beige boxes, for good reasons[1]. At the same time the low-end of the market is moving to the cloud, also for good reasons. Their customer-base is shrinking from both ends at a rapid pace.…
I could see that from EMC's point of view. But Pivotal would still have to accept their offer and I'm thinking they had no difficulties finding clients and the owners probably had enough money to retire already. EMC must have sold them on something more than just a huge pile of money. The vision that EMC sold them on is what would give them the assurance that Picotal is not selling just to die there.
> EMC must have sold them on something more than just a huge pile of money.
Never underestimate the power of huge pile of money. Even for the filthy rich.
Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's when open-sourcing vs. closing it down (if that were to happen) would be fantastic. (cf. one HN discussion from today about that) If Pivotal Tracker were to disappear, that would be quite the disaster for a lot of people.
I use Tracker and find it to be a major pain. It's close enough to the tool that I actually need that it's useful, but then it gets opinionated and makes certain things impossible. For example: "chores" skip the verification state. So I don't use them anymore. and the fact that "stories" can't actually track their own prerequisites, it's really to accidentally lose your sequencing information
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.
Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs
#54Pivotal Labs CEO Rob Mee just posted a short message on his company blog about the acquisition : http://pivotallabs.com/users/rob/blog/articles/2052-same-piv...
Every time a company is acquired, they say the same thing about how their larger parent is going to bring them greater resources and distribution. In reality, almost every company experiences the exact opposite effect. The early adopters and passionate base often leave and the company wallows in the murk of bureaucratic org charts. I think the stories of what happens a few years after the acquisition are much more in…
Of course there are exceptions. Reddit is a pretty good one of the parent not killing the acquisition. Although it's spun out again. It definitely grew immensely under Conde Nast and wasn't quashed.
Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use Tracker and find it to be a major pain. It's close enough to the tool that I actually need that it's useful, but then it gets opinionated and makes certain things impossible. For example: "chores" skip the verification state. So I don't use them anymore. and the fact that "stories" can't actually track their own prerequisites, it's really to accidentally lose your sequencing information
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?
Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs
#56Well, 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".
Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs
#57Any word on the future of Pivotal Tracker?
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 separate cards, but I couldn't find any other mention of it. Can you do that? That's one thing that I thought would make Pivotal much better.
Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs
#58EMC also has a consulting division - so perhaps plans to integrate it there?
http://www.emc.com/services/emc-consulting.htm
Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only people who run their business on a random startup webapp. I wish amazon or Google would externalities their pro quality trackers, though.
Having just quit Amazon and knowing firsthand the disaster that was project tracking, this comment amuses me. There is no "pro quality tracker" at Amazon.
Amazon had tools, but not every team used them.
I loved the tool Haakon wrote.
And there was actually a great third party open source tool back in 2009, whose name I forget, that was bizarre abandoned.
It's not like Pivotal sets a high bar. It doesn't even have a notion of progress, and it has that ridiculous multi column layout so you can't easily use a screen to look at a task. And it runs on a random startup webserver that can be turned off at any moment.
Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs
#60EMC could have just hired them as consultants to teach them the ways of being 'more agile' with their product set. hard to find a business reason behind this other than buying them for their non tangible 'processes".
What would have been in it for the Pivotal guys to do consulting to EMC? EMC wanted a solid team of next-gen developers. My impression was that Pivotal was doing fairly well so probably insisted on a good price for their company.
Not sure man. You could be right. They could be building the foundation to build next gen apps that better mesh all the product in the EMC product portfolio. Only time will tell.