Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M • Hacker News Board

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#551

Post by BinaryIdiot » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 11:07 PM UTC

inglor wrote: post #432

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…

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.

Fair enough. Those are great examples.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#552

Post by wwalser » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 11:08 PM UTC

jedahan wrote: post #332

Can anyone point me to any acquisition that resulted in a net benefit to the customers of either company/product? Or maybe I should not consider the users of a product the primary customers?

Atlassian: Confluence - Went from very small user base to hundreds of thousands of users. It's a great tool for internal content management (think HR docs, decision documentation, meeting notes, etc.).

HipChat - Small user base and unscalable architecture. Hundreds of thousands of users and loads of resources to rewrite nearly all of it's backend. Still a work in progress but it's been very stable for the past year and the clients, which were all non-native web views, are coming along nicely.

Fisheye/Crucible - Small user base, unprofitable. Now has thousands of users and is hands down the best code search and review tool that lots of people don't know about.

SourceTree - Massive expose for a very small tool that wasn't well known before acquisition. Many new features, has remained stable throughout.

Greenhopper - Was a small, profitable, plugin. Now built-in, completely integrated hundreds of new features and has adapted well to various trends in Agile (scrum, kanban).

Despite this thread, which shows HN's consistent (and ironic) distain for (or is it lack of understanding of?) successful software companies, Atlassian is actually great at creating great products out of questionable acquisitions.

Outside of Atlassian:

Whatsapp is free now, people like free. That's neat. To people crying out privacy, honestly… privacy is the only thing that VC backed b2c companies sell that's actually worth real money. They were eventually going to open that pandora's box.

Twitch gets to continue existing and it's ad-free for prime members now as well. I like free :).

Firebase is better than ever. Let's all cry a single tear for Parse, we all wanted a massive Mongo cluster backing our data, right?

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#553

Post by OldSchoolJohnny » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 11:10 PM UTC

mhp wrote: post #366

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.

The Trellists made Trello. And the Trellists are going to keep working on Trello at Atlassian. Atlassian understands that Trello is unique and beloved and they definitely do not want to mess that up. Read this article that Jordan Novet wrote. I know seeing is believing and you will have to wait and see, but I agree with everything Jay Simons says in this interview. "During the interview, Simons took time to assure me…

We've all heard that story before, it almost doesn't bear repeating at this point does it? As you say, seeing will be believing.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#554

Post by shortstuffsushi » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 11:15 PM UTC

eloisant wrote: post #494

jlarocco wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They did merge it with Stash, though, didn't they?

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#555

Post by purerandomness » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 11:19 PM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #504

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.

I'm very satisfied using JIRA and Confluence at work. Are there better alternatives out there I just don't know about?

Taiga, Gitlab, ...

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#556

Post by xiaoma » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 11:21 PM UTC

mhp wrote: post #366

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.

The Trellists made Trello. And the Trellists are going to keep working on Trello at Atlassian. Atlassian understands that Trello is unique and beloved and they definitely do not want to mess that up. Read this article that Jordan Novet wrote. I know seeing is believing and you will have to wait and see, but I agree with everything Jay Simons says in this interview. "During the interview, Simons took time to assure me…

I recently bailed from bitbucket when they stopped allowing me to log in without making an Atlassian account.

I remain a happy trello user until that happens to your product as well!

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#557

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 11:24 PM UTC

slantyyz wrote: post #128

throwaway5752 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how much opinions can differ. I've used them both professionally and I think Trello scales poorly above 5-10 people while Jira is the least-worst option for running a project at any team size.

Fogbugz (also created by Fog Creek) is actually a pretty good alternative to JIRA.

[deleted]

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#558

Post by supercoder » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 11:24 PM UTC

shortstuffsushi wrote: post #468

pram wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HipChat (unless you concede it was always bad)

What about HipChat don't you like? I know it can be buggy at times, but from a strictly functional perspective, I feel like it's ok, or at least sufficient for me.

The bit where it hardly works and lacks a huge amount of functionality.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#559

Post by Benjamin_Dobell » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 11:33 PM UTC

aclsid wrote: post #452

iambateman wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would never say Github is superior to Bitbucket. I haven't checked if they have changed the rules, but on the startup I was working on, Bitbucket provided superior value by far. They allowed free private repos for teams of up to 5 users. After 6 months we ended up paying for the basic plan to accomodate about 10 users. I am mostly used to command line Git during my daily routine, but the designer/manager was happil…

I've used both Bitbucket and Github for years.

Until recently I would've said there wasn't at all much difference between Github and Bitbucket (aside from Github being the de facto home for open source).

However, I'd now argue that Github is significantly better value than Bitbucket for projects, rather than code. By that I mean, Bitbucket is just a component in the greater Atlasssian ecosystem, so it's not a huge priority to add and improve upon project management tools, as you're encouraged to use JIRA, Confluence etc. Even simple things like Bitbucket's Markdown README's not supporting HTML (in particular anchors for same page links) makes the project organisation experience a whole lot less polished.

Where Github shine these days is that they offer a pretty cohesive experience for an entire project's management. Code reviews have come a long way, as have issues and pull requests in general. More recently they've added support for Projects, which for the most part is a Trello clone with built-in integration into Github's issue tracker. Free hosting of Jekyll websites, previews and diffs for all sorts of non-text file formats etc. really put Github in front. Combine this all with the recent change to bill per user rather than per repo (which provides huge savings for small teams) and I don't at all see how Bitbucket are supposed to compete.

I still use Trello for management of clients' projects simply because my clients don't care about the code. However, I can definitely see myself transitioning entirely to Github Projects and the Github issue tracker in the near future.

Frankly, Trello did really well out of this deal from Atlassian. I know Trello have a lot of users, but I'm a bit doubtful about their ability to generate significant funds (paid stickers...?) With Github Projects maturing Trello were likely to lose a lot of users from the tech industry. Atlassian and Trello actually seem like a perfect fit, so it's a saving grace for Trello who couldn't have timed the acquisition better.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#560

Post by pbhjpbhj » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 11:35 PM UTC

throwawaymaroon wrote: post #441

inglor wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a terrible example. Remember Google+ accounts and Youtube?

>didn't turn into Google Videos 2.0. //

Yeah, agreed, I was going to say the same.

YouTube was used as leverage to boost Google+. They backed off soon enough to save things (or perhaps YouTube is just too big to kill with such a mistake) but it was badly messed up IMO.