
From lunch to acquisition: How Atlassian bought Trello - andytolt
https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/21/how-atlassian-bought-trello/
======
p0wn
"When we sat down, it was all about the vision and what we wanted to build,"

Blah blah blah. It's all about them benjamins. Who likes atlassian software?
Shittiest software I've ever used. They have a shitty version of everything
you could want.

Bitbucket, JIRA, HipChat. All suck. RIP Trello.

~~~
oblio
Jira doesn't suck. It is extremely complex, especially if there is a
(misguided) desire for agile plugins and such, by Jira on its own is quite
usable. You must have not used their competitors to consider it crap.

Jira's default state in many companies is more likely proof of broken
processes. Something which no tool can solve.

~~~
bigiain
The corollary of Jira being "extremely complex" turns out to be that most Jira
instances are not set up optimally - meaning that the experience for a lot of
people is "this is crap".

I'm not sure the blame for that can be placed on Atlassian thouh - the problem
space they're trying to solve is large, varied, and complex (perhaps _that's_
Atlassian's fault, trying to do too much?) I've yet to come across any
alternative to Jira that solves a large subset (or superset) of the problems
Jira solves, that isn't equally difficult and resource intensive to set up and
customise for a specific company/team. Trello's a great example of a _much_
simpler (and on the surface much less "crap") piece of software, but it falls
_way_ short of doing everything a typical Jira shop needs Jira to do... A 5-10
person bike shop building custom bikes? Yeah, Trello will probably crush it. A
10-20 (or50-100) strong dev team working on multiple complex projects? Nah -
Trello won't solve all your problems.

Jira can _easily_ suck (and does, way too often). But it's almost certainly a
config/training problem rather than a software problem.

~~~
flukus
Change a few words and that becomes a defense of SAP.

The fact is, no software can make everyone happy all the time and the software
will suck if it tries to do it. Yet we keep falling into the trap of thinking
crap like JIRA and SAP can be customized just right.

~~~
bigiain
Sure, and I'd say the same (with a little less personal experience) for SAP,
Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and a whole bunch of other "enterprise
platform" scale tools. There'll be heaps of poorly thought out and configured
installations, and a few much less talked about companies where they got it
set up properly and trained the users - who're busy raking in money executing
their company business instead of killing productivity and morale fighting
with their software...

~~~
flukus
> and a few much less talked about companies where they got it set up properly
> and trained the users - who're busy raking in money executing their company
> business instead of killing productivity and morale fighting with their
> software

I've never seen evidence that these companies exist apart from a few CTO's
blabbing on about how great their latest implementation is, even though they
never have to deal with the problems.

The only ones it ever works for are those with very generic problems.

~~~
bigiain
I _suspect_ this is because you don't move in the same circles as the people
who benefit most here.

Spend some time talking to the sales people who's haircuts look like they cost
more than you make in a week, or who's suits probably cost more than your car.
They're _all_ got finely tuned Salesforce (or equivalent) setups and can
probably at any time tell you off the top of their head the number of leads
and prospects in their pipeline, the size of their expected deals, their
recent conversion rate, the estimated total value of their prospects/leads
(and the precise dollar value of their commission and bonus...)

I've seen the same with large logistics operations - the ops/management people
know exactly where all their assets are and the schedule of movements compared
to the upcoming work requests.

You won't hear these stories at a Ruby On Rails meetup or in a weekend
hackathon. It's not part of most tech/IT stories. But it's 100% happening out
there.

------
PhilWright
Did I miss something or is this a content free article?

Mike fly's from Australia to America. Has chat over meal saying they want to
work together. Fly's back to Australia. Agree on a price. Deal done.

What am I supposed to learn from this?

~~~
simplehuman
You are supposed to learn that content free articles can be good PR. They can
make it to hn front page even.

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r29vzg2
> “When we sat down, it was all about the vision and what we wanted to build,”
> Pryor said. “The kind of people we hired, the kind of company we wanted to
> create.”

Soon as I read that line I knew this article wasn't going to be of any worth.
Just a PR puff piece.

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skrebbel
I've always wondered what the Fog Creek people think about this. After all,
their little baby got scooped up by their biggest competitor.

Is that good or bad?

~~~
jimnotgym
I just hope they keep the free Trello up and running forever, and it stays
simple on the surface at least.

I have this nightmare where one day I open Trello and it looks like Jira.

~~~
desireco42
You are not alone in that thought.

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7ewis
If anyone else thinks Atlassian are going to run Trello into the ground, there
is an open source alternative that's sprung up called Wekan.
[https://wekan.io/](https://wekan.io/)

I haven't used it personally, but it appears to look and work just like
Trello!

------
stevoski
A much better account of an attempted Atlassian acquisition is told by Peldi
from Balsamiq. Fascinating story with lots of juicy details about why it
didn't happen. AFAIK Peldi tells the story at conferences but asks for it not
to be recorded, to respect Atlassian's wishes.

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tedunangst
Please tell me the restaurant was mad dog.

