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Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

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Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#721

Post by victorwu »

i386 wrote: post #719
victorwu wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! I am a product manager over at GitLab. Thanks for bringing up this very relevant discussion. We definitely recognize the shortcomings and we are working hard to improve in these areas. GitLab started out as a software management tool, similar to what you describe. But we are definitely looking to expand in multiple directions. One of them is definitely to make it a tool that is useful beyond just engineers. One…

How do you feel about project management in Gitlab now that Atlassian has acquired Trello?

There's lots to consider and analyze here. But one area of note is that JIRA is already used by many enterprises. But many folks find that despite it's many powerful features, the complexity is crippling. There's a lot to configure. And it's not an easy app to use with all that complexity. This is in stark contrast to Trello, which is essentially a digital agile board. (JIRA has an agile board too, as one of it's many plug and play features.) So if all you need is a simple board and you don't want the heft of JIRA, Trello is great. And now Atlassian can offer that.

The takeaway here is that project management and software tools are inherently complicated by what they have to solve. There's so many different ways to build software and run projects. How do you create the tools to support those workflows so that a new user is not crippled by the complexity? At least in GitLab we are iterating quickly with small improvements every month. But we also have a UX team to design intuitive interfaces and workflows that make sense. We dogfood GitLab ourselves so we understand the pain points (and the complexities!). And of course we develop out in the open to solicit that constant user feedback. As GitLab further matures and we add more features, we are hyper aware that we do not build another JIRA. There is so much configurability and complexity there. It's very heavy. So are iterating quickly, but carefully.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#722

Post by bobwaycott »

dx034 wrote: post #683
oblio wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus Fog Creek is more on an anti-start-up since it explicitly did not want to grow fast at all costs. That's why Trello was spun off.

Do all start ups have to grow at all costs? I know it's standard for most start-ups to accept as much VC money as possible and find ways to spend it, but there are also young companies that don't need VC money and are successful. Don't know why those shouldn't be start-ups.

Perhaps startups just have to look or be sexy to be startups. Successful and boring don't seem to get all the gushing press.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#723

Post by komali2 »

jimbokun wrote: post #511
wpietri wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, spr…

This is probably why I like JIRA better than you do, other people at my company configured everything, I just have to use it.

Yes, the same here, I came into a company with JIRA set up like a trello board, and all this awesome integration (stuff gets moved from "in progress" to "code review" automatically on a PR on that feature branch) and I got to work on top of the shoulders of giants.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#724

Post by edwinnathaniel »

Lazare wrote: post #681
zoom6628 wrote: post #654

Very happy for the folks at Trello. Great outcome for a great tool. Seems lots of JIRA-haters in the comments but lets get back and look at this event. The folks at Fog Creek brought us FogBugz, Stackoverflow, Trello. We should celebrate their success because its events like this that create the motivation for some of us to go create something that "stands on their shoulders" or competes with them or creates some new…

> Seems lots of JIRA-haters in the comments Not just JIRA; I think a lot of people were burnt by Atlassian's management of Hipchat or Bitbucket too. Historically there's something of a track record where Atlassian is the place where interesting, innovative products go to stagnate. Bug fixes happen glacially (a 1 year turnaround seems to be standard), and new feature development doesn't happen at all. Running Hipchat…

Do you think the reverse would be true?

If Bitbucket was not bought by Atlassian, it will be able to grow and compete with Github/Gitlab?

If Hipchat was not bought by Atlassian, it will be a serious contender for Slack?

Or perhaps the group behind those products reflected their growth today?

Do you think it is because Atlassian's management or because local's management? Say if Atlassian hold to their words: "we leave them alone".

Or perhaps the issue is Money+Motivation than anything else? Exit => rich => decrease in Drive.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#725

Post by fuck_google »

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.

Negative comments likewise. It's starting to feel almost like Stack Overflow, i.e. opinions and conversation discouraged, especially if the moderators do not understand your point.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#726

Post by reality_czech »

marcinkuzminski wrote: post #326
reality_czech wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because mercurial is legacy, like darcs, bzr, monotone, and the other zoo of "git-alikes" that were big in 2008. Now it's just like MacOS Classic in 2000: there are a few die-hard zealots who claim that the interface is better in some indescribable way, and everyone else has moved on.

Speaking as someone that works with Mercurial on daily basis, and also makes/sells software that supports Mercurial. I can tell you it's far from beeing legacy.

Some people work with COBOL on a daily basis. It's still antiquated.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#727

Post by rbbitbucket »

mitchty wrote: post #714
rbbitbucket wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We appreciate the frank feedback, but I have to disagree with the interpretation. I really hate that we can't say yes to every feature suggestion, and what we _are_ able to talk about seems to come across as non-committal to some. The fact that a suggestion is open means we think it has merit too (we close "silly notions"), it then becomes a matter of priorities. - Roger, Bitbucket Server PM

That may be the case. However when such tickets are open for 6-7 years with no update the general viewpoint everyone I know that uses Bitbucket has is that it will never be a priority to Atlassian. Adding things like large file storage support is cool, I guess, but when you never use it its rather a case of appearing to prioritize certain market segments over others. I know I've read the article that states how you p…

I think you've hit on a really important point. In isolation, a particular suggestion might be something of a papercut with a workaround. An unwanted pull request, for example, isn't going to stop others from getting their work done. But, if there are enough of these things that happen to affect a team together, it all adds up. It sounds your team is in that boat, and people not wanting to use the review functionality is a serious concern. Whether or not that's uniquely the case, I'd love to discuss further to make sure I properly understand your experience. If you're willing, please email me (rbarnes atlassian com) and we can set up a call.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#728

Post by sytse »

i386 wrote: post #719
victorwu wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! I am a product manager over at GitLab. Thanks for bringing up this very relevant discussion. We definitely recognize the shortcomings and we are working hard to improve in these areas. GitLab started out as a software management tool, similar to what you describe. But we are definitely looking to expand in multiple directions. One of them is definitely to make it a tool that is useful beyond just engineers. One…

How do you feel about project management in Gitlab now that Atlassian has acquired Trello?

Atlassian now has two products that do the same thing. Jira for the complex cases and Trello for the simple ones.

At GitLab we'll work very hard try to have on product that is pleasant to use for simple cases but still allows you to handle the complex ones.

This is a huge UX challenge but it will allow our users to use a single product for all their needs, so they don't have to move projects between tools when they 'graduate' to the complex one. And it will allow us to ship more features in the single product we work on.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#729

Post by theSpaceOctopus »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #689
beat wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atlassian has cracked the enterprise sales nut completely. Github is still struggling with it some. Completeness is a big reason for that.

And I hope GitHub stays incomplete! I don't need hierarchical access control to decide who can add, remove, and list issue labels, or whatever, just because some pointy-haired enterprise boss came up with that idea five minutes ago.

I hear you, but a simple folder system sure would be nice. Not organizations, just: Client/Project

Nice and simple.

Re: Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

#730

Post by i386 »

sytse wrote: post #728
i386 wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you feel about project management in Gitlab now that Atlassian has acquired Trello?

Atlassian now has two products that do the same thing. Jira for the complex cases and Trello for the simple ones. At GitLab we'll work very hard try to have on product that is pleasant to use for simple cases but still allows you to handle the complex ones. This is a huge UX challenge but it will allow our users to use a single product for all their needs, so they don't have to move projects between tools when they '…

I look forward to seeing that. Many product teams have tried that and failed miserably.
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