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Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

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Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#641

Post by trymas »

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.

IMHO, more depressing thing is the price tag.

I am far from expert when it comes to startups, their evaluations and acquisitions, but isn't >1million daily active users [1] not enough to make Trello a billion dollar unicorn? What Trello lacked to reach this? Is it all about the user count and it does not matter they pay or not or you have monetisation strategy or not?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trello#History

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#642

Post by kstrauser »

lobotryas wrote: post #627
cookiecaper wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually a great description of Trello v. JIRA, as well. Trello may not have the burndown charts, but what it does have is dead-simple list management, and it turns out that's what's most effective for managing tasks. JIRA's BDUF approach to ticketing/bug tracking pleases middle managers whose job is to spend all day clicking around arcane interfaces and finding a way to generate a report that shows their tea…

What's funnier, in an attempt to make things easier Atlassian is alienating power users. I liked Confluence's mix of html and their own markup well enough to write all my pages that way. Then an update hit and WYSISWYG was pushed down everyone's throats hard. To the point where you had to jump through many hoops to use even a limited subset of the markup that was previously available. Product managers need to learn a…

Same here. I'd written a Markdown-to-Confluence converter so that I could use a local toolchain to autogenerate project documentation. It worked brilliantly until I came in one Monday and found that the editing mode I'd used to upload my documents was gone. On purpose. For good. I invented some profanities that day.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#643

Post by thr0waway1239 »

golfer wrote: post #617
tomasduda wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows Phone version of Waze got abandoned after Google's acquisition, so it isn't a good example.

Honest question: if you ran a software company, would you devote any resources to a Windows phone version? If yes, then why?

You know, the entire installed app economy has turned into a big mess.

Would you devote your resources to an Android or iOS app if it isn't backed by a service which is useful in and of itself?

What about desktop Windows apps? Every time I see others interact with a Windows 10 app, I feel like throwing up. Mac apps seem to be doing slightly better, but that might be because it is an inherently tiny market.

Now that everything has moved to the web, people are trying to outdo each other with the creepiest possible tracking analytics. If you wish to develop useful, paid software which is mostly unobtrusive to the users, I would say you are already about 5 years too late.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#644

Post by [deleted] »

photogrammetry wrote: post #591
hoodoof wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about celebrating this as a success? All these negative comments and hand wringing about Trello being ruined sounds like whining entitlement. Atlassian is a fabulously successful independently run company that you should be happy bought Trello. For goodness sake all you haters in this thread make it sound like Trello was acquired by Trump Corporation or The Empire or something.

But, how are posters on HN supposed to get upvotes if they don't say something alarming/negative? Positive comments are explicitly discouraged in the "community guidelines." Perhaps we should consider whether sama or pg had a greater influence on that.

[deleted]

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#645

Post by keypress »

rangibaby wrote: post #636
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.

Google tried to mess with Youtube but mainly gave up after it was a massive disaster.

And the legacy seems to be a comment system that's impossibly hard to follow. Reply button implies some kind of threads but I just see disjointed fragmented comments that just end up in more confusion, and more worthless comments. I wish they'd pull comments from besides videos.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#646

Post by mjolk »

ajdlinux wrote: post #600
jsjohnst wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

David Karp (as just one example) said virtually the exact same thing re: Yahoo! acquisition. Don't be that guy and spin a Jobs-esque reality distortion field. If things were so perfect to begin with at Trello, you wouldn't be selling. The fact that you did indicates something needed changing. You hope things won't change for the worse, as do your users, but assuring people that won't happen makes about as much since…

I'm going to hazard a guess that the main thing that "needed changing" was "not having $425 million".

I'm willing to prioritize "having $425mm" over all the cards I currently have in Trello.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#647

Post by xiaoma »

krallja wrote: post #613
xiaoma wrote: post #543

Looks like too many customers decided they JUST MIGHT HAVE TO GO OVER TO THE AUSTRALIANS! So many that "the Australians" bought the team. This is poetic and this is why I'm glad blogs often stick around. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/07/20/fruity-treats-cust...

FogBugz is still wholly owned and operated by Fog Creek Software. Joel is the CEO of Stack Overflow, and does not work for Trello (nor Atlassian).

That essay was written about 5 years before Trello was spun out of Fog Creek. You can see Joel in the photo on the WSJ article covering that story: http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/07/24/digital-white...

To connect the dots, it's overwhelmingly likely that Atlassian was in fact "the Australians" referred to and Atlassian's tremendous growth (which was foreshadowed in Joel's piece) is why they could by Trello 7 years later.

It's interesting to look at in JOS in retrospect because he literally blogged the birth of company A, its competition with company B and it's spin-off C, which B later bought.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#648

Post by rapind »

lobotryas wrote: post #626
shortstuffsushi wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll mention one point: editing your sent messages sucks. Afaik, using s/foo/bar is the only way in the Linux client. If I mess up the /code command (very easy to do) the. Fixing it is such a pita that I might as well not bother. Why can't HipChat message editing be as easy as Skype's? If HipChat is at all targeted for devs, why is pasting/sharing code a pita? Where is bold/italics on linux? Your own hyperlinks (inst…

We switched to Discord and are pretty happy. Path we took was: HipChat (buggy, server outages) -> Slack (resource hog) -> Discord (gamer focused, but works well).

No doubt they'll sell someday though so w/e. Temporary / replaceable is the new norm for productivity tools. Beware lock-in! Might end up back on IRC next.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#649

Post by nurettin »

Atlassian has supported me with educational tools and discounts. Their git services and customer support has been the best for me and I became a paying customer.

Glad they bought trello. I'm hoping they integrate it to the existing issue workflow and make it a better product than it is. And there is a good chance of that happening.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#650

Post by hobarrera »

nimchimpsky wrote: post #573
hobarrera wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to look at GitLab, which basically has the best of every other world, with sparkles.

https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/01/a-better-pull-r...

This is really neat and educational, but I don't get how it's related.

Is there some joke in the middle that's passing right over me?

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