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 paradigm of how tasks can be managed. Fog Creek is almost the ultimate startup - they keep it small, do things right, stick to their craft. What is the result? Regularly bring fantastic products to the world. Anybody contemplating how to get setup and run a software startup should start by reading most/all of joelonsoftware and then the later blogs about SO and Trello.
Yes Im huge fan - because i applaud geeks that put heart and soul into their craft as well as running their business and getting great outcomes like this. Would love to see more of it.
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 is like looking through a window back at 2012.
> Very happy for the folks at Trello. Great outcome for a great tool.
Great outcome for a great team? Perhaps. But I don't really see how this benefits the tool, nor the people who use the tool, because I (and a lot of other people here) are assuming, with reason, that this deal heralds the end of further development of Trello.
How on earth is this a good "outcome" for anyone who is not an equity holder? So tired of that word, it's the worst possible one because the outcome is terrible 99% of the time for the real people who actually care about the "outcome"
This makes sense. Atlassian is good at making money from its services and it is increasing its overall ecosystem here.
Github moves really slow in comparison. I guess Github is more focused, but there are a lot of contrasts between Github and Atlassian, and in terms of making money I think Atlassian is doing a lot better.
Has Github acquired anything significant? Github should have acquired Zenhub (which is Trello integrated into Github for the most part) instead of slowing trying to recreate it -- although I guess Github has better code purity if they develop it themselves, but it means they move slower.
1. Trello was smart in only taking $10M in VC funding [1]. This allows for a 40x return for it's investors. If Trello were like many other startups, they probably would have taken too much VC money and got themselves in a situation where the VC wouldn't sell unless it was $2B+.
2. Atlassian now has a product that is loved by many developers and business people alike. It will easily be interegrated into their existing stack and it complements their products very well.
TLDR: Both Trello & Atlassian were smart in this acquisition. Couldn't be happier for them (and as a user).
Trello are an amazing team and an amazing product, and what makes the product so amazing is how domain-agnostic it is. They refuse at all costs to add any feature that helps use Trello in one specific way over others (e.g. lists = stages in task lifetime, cards = tasks; lists = assigned people, cards = tasks; lists = dates, cards = events, ...), and that made Trello equally useful as a Kanban board, a CRM, or for a beer microbrewery tracking its different barrels and the stages of brewing they are at. The best thing about Trello is when you start organizing your board one way, then organically drift towards a more natural way to organize them, sometimes without noticing as you do. Trello is for processes that you're not sure yet about the right way to manage.
Atlassian is all about development team collaboration. Trello can be used for that, but not anymore than it can be used for brewing beer. Trello shines when you don't know in advance how you will want to manage a project. If Trello became a dev collaboratin tool, I would stop using it for dev collaboration because there are better specialized solutions for that. Keep Trello general. Please.
This is really bad as Atlassian is like a prize winning show pony -- great marketing and webinars but once you get deeply into the product usage you find all sorts of problems and open issues. BitBucket has been waiting for 2FA for 5 years! Bambo was recently semi-retired going against a lot of users investments. And these are just recent.
I would not expect wonderful things for Trello and thankfully it appears they got their money out up front.
My words of advice to anyone looking is to stay away from Atlassian at all costs. Once your in too deep you probably are trapped - which is what they count on.
I love their response to open issues like: we'd like to be able to delete pull requests.
Response: what a silly notion, no
Or another one I found recently: we'd like to comment on code that isn't within 10 lines of a changed file. You know, because one line change in file a can impact stuff elsewhere. Or even in another project but the chances of that happening are more slim than a tachyon hitting an atom as it passes through earth.
Response: Good idea, here's stuff we did this year, and here's other stuff we do. (aka the non committal middle finger)
It sucks because atlassian products are 80% of the way there, but the final 20% polish never seems to arrive. And its been years.
Trello, amazing because of it's small size and limited, elegant feature set. Atlassian, awful because they won't implement everything that their customers ask for. Oh and the only feature that you've pointed out that's missing, 2fa, it's not missing. It's been in place for literally years.
The open issue tracker that Atlassian maintains is there so that you can see things that they've said no to. You can actually dig in and find out if someone else has asked for a feature that you want. You can see, completely transparently, whether or not they might implement it. The things that Trello has been asked to build but has quietly and privately said no to? No where to be found (and reasonably so given comments like this one).
Using a companies transparency against them is gross. It shows a lack of empathy for the people who build these systems, the trade offs that they have to make and the responsible decisions they make to not implement every single feature request. JIRA is enterprise software, it's incredibly extensible and configurable. The fact that some people configure it poorly isn't entirely their fault (though sane defaults can solve for some of this problem). Trello is for small teams. It's compact and simple in ways that JIRA was never intended to be. The $425MM? That means Atlassian understands that Trello has captured a part of they didn't.
I quite like Confluence (as in, better than Sharepoint as Wiki in enterprise gigs). But I'm always wondering if Confluence customers are aware that they're creating a huge data silo for their knowledge base documents that can only be accessed using proprietary Confluence software for years to come.
I spent quite a few hours trying to set up Atlassian's dashboard called Atlasboard, it was pretty awful. It relies on git submodules for extensibility. All of the plugins I tried were horrible, both 3rd party ones and the 1st party Atlassian ones.
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.
Nearly every company I've worked for eventually brings in the Atlassian bullshit despite my protest. It usually begins with hiring some project manager who likes Atlassian and forces the hire of an Atlassian shill to configure Atlassian products full time, but it never becomes any good. They pry us off our existing issue tracker and wiki (github, trac) and force us to use that awful content-editable-based wiki that destroys the document differently in every browser, then tell us not to use Chrome because clearly Chrome is the problem. Witch-hunts begin about who screwed up the wiki formatting. Everything breaks if you press the back button. And then inevitably somebody forgot to give somebody permission for something and now everyone with permission is out of town so nothing can be done.
You can get a better wysiwyg wiki just by sharing a folder in Google Docs and having them link to each other. And I'd take Trello over "greenhopper" any day.
JIRA interface blows. However you're looking at it from a very selfish standpoint. The Trello team has probably been working on this for years with the explicit goal of an exit, better to get bought by likeminded product people and make a big return than to be bought by Google and have the product killed entirely.
If they are smart, they'll pull a Facebook / Instagram and just leave it to continue working. Also, I'd say a large percentage of Trello users are outside of the classical Jira camp, so Atlassian should be really careful with the new baby. I believe they will be.
I don't blame Trello for selling but I'm not looking forward to whatever Atlassian could do to the product. I use Atlassian at work and I dislike their software, though it's not all bad.
Yeah. I would just add that Atlassian didn't make SourceTree either; Steve Streeting did, and they bought it. He worked on it at Atlassian for a while, then left.
After that, SourceTree has been slowly starting to suck. It has a bunch of annoying new bugs that don't get fixed, now requires logging into Atlassian to use it on every machine you use, and has had almost no useful or compelling feature additions in recent years. It is basically a good indie app from several years ago, with the Atlassian taint slowly being applied to it.
I dont like Jira either but I do like bitbucket. I started using it back in the day because besides public hosting they also gave me free unlimited private repos and found it does everything I need.
Trello has apparently about 19 million users. And I would bet that the majority of them are not the typical target audience of Atlassian products (i.e. software development teams).
So I wonder if they are mostly aquiring the user base here in order to expand their potential market?
Jira and Confluence are epitomes of corporate red-tape molasses. Not only the process tends to get tangled to death in all the features everyone gets a bright idea to use, but even without them it wants just too much hardware.
A measly company of 30 ppl|3 years history and you're scratching your head to blood keeping the basic actions not taking more that 5 seconds while attempting to not pay 10x license cost for the hardware.
Too bad there aren't many alternatives.
And thank god I'm not using Trello. It's dead, people it's dead.
On a side note -- I don't know if they still do it (I believe they do), but Fog Creek used to give out free Fogbugz cloud accounts (2 user limit) to startups and students.
- Merge checks
- Bitbucket Pipelines (Continuous delivery service in Bitbucket Cloud)
- 2FA
- Universal Second Factor (U2F)
- Improved SSH
- Support for multiple SSH keys
- Build status API
- Smart Mirroring
- Git LFS (including the embedded media viewer only in Bitbucket Cloud which allows for better large file uploads)
- Smart Commits (allow repository committers to process JIRA issues using commands in your commit messages)
- reviewer status on pull requests
- Code search (Server only currently)
- 0 downtime backups
- code review at commit level
- default review in pull requests
- pull request merge strategies
- Deploy Bitbucket Data center with AWS
- iterative reviews for pull requests
- pull request focused dashboard
- Bitbucket Connect add-ons (deploy from Bitbucket with AWS, Azure or Digital Ocean)
Can we all start using Trello clones as the tutorial substance? So in case Atlassian screws it up, we have 100s of developers that know how to re-create it? :D
I've used http://lavagna.io for a while on my own servers, but recently I've started using and enjoying https://www.favro.com whose free version has less limitations than the free Trello version.
Besides being a good one, it also didn't sound like a terrible idea at first. Boards with cards is a suitable simple application for beginners (or people that are just learning a new environment/language).
Then I remembered my difficulty with finding a proper to-do app. Yes, it will have millions of people make a clone, but it will also have thousands publishing crappy versions.
Some of Atlassian's previous acquisitions have turned into products mostly shunned by the developer community (Hipchat, Bitbucket) - I hope they've learned what went wrong since then, but my gut says Atlassian isn't very good at integrating external teams and supporting their products. Hopefully Trello won't go down the same path.
"In July 2014, Trello spins off from Fog Creek and becomes Trello, Inc. naming Fog Creek co-founder Michael Pryor as its CEO. The company raises $10.3 million in a Series A round of funding led by Spark Capital and Index Ventures."
Spark Calital and Index Ventures must have gotten a nice huge return, Trello only raised $10 million.
[+] [-] zoom6628|9 years ago|reply
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 paradigm of how tasks can be managed. Fog Creek is almost the ultimate startup - they keep it small, do things right, stick to their craft. What is the result? Regularly bring fantastic products to the world. Anybody contemplating how to get setup and run a software startup should start by reading most/all of joelonsoftware and then the later blogs about SO and Trello.
Yes Im huge fan - because i applaud geeks that put heart and soul into their craft as well as running their business and getting great outcomes like this. Would love to see more of it.
0.2c
[+] [-] Lazare|9 years ago|reply
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 is like looking through a window back at 2012.
> Very happy for the folks at Trello. Great outcome for a great tool.
Great outcome for a great team? Perhaps. But I don't really see how this benefits the tool, nor the people who use the tool, because I (and a lot of other people here) are assuming, with reason, that this deal heralds the end of further development of Trello.
[+] [-] 65827|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solipsism|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhouston|9 years ago|reply
Github moves really slow in comparison. I guess Github is more focused, but there are a lot of contrasts between Github and Atlassian, and in terms of making money I think Atlassian is doing a lot better.
Has Github acquired anything significant? Github should have acquired Zenhub (which is Trello integrated into Github for the most part) instead of slowing trying to recreate it -- although I guess Github has better code purity if they develop it themselves, but it means they move slower.
[+] [-] alberth|9 years ago|reply
1. Trello was smart in only taking $10M in VC funding [1]. This allows for a 40x return for it's investors. If Trello were like many other startups, they probably would have taken too much VC money and got themselves in a situation where the VC wouldn't sell unless it was $2B+.
2. Atlassian now has a product that is loved by many developers and business people alike. It will easily be interegrated into their existing stack and it complements their products very well.
TLDR: Both Trello & Atlassian were smart in this acquisition. Couldn't be happier for them (and as a user).
Edit: typos
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/trello#/entity
[+] [-] SonOfLilit|9 years ago|reply
Trello are an amazing team and an amazing product, and what makes the product so amazing is how domain-agnostic it is. They refuse at all costs to add any feature that helps use Trello in one specific way over others (e.g. lists = stages in task lifetime, cards = tasks; lists = assigned people, cards = tasks; lists = dates, cards = events, ...), and that made Trello equally useful as a Kanban board, a CRM, or for a beer microbrewery tracking its different barrels and the stages of brewing they are at. The best thing about Trello is when you start organizing your board one way, then organically drift towards a more natural way to organize them, sometimes without noticing as you do. Trello is for processes that you're not sure yet about the right way to manage.
Atlassian is all about development team collaboration. Trello can be used for that, but not anymore than it can be used for brewing beer. Trello shines when you don't know in advance how you will want to manage a project. If Trello became a dev collaboratin tool, I would stop using it for dev collaboration because there are better specialized solutions for that. Keep Trello general. Please.
[+] [-] joemaller1|9 years ago|reply
Hopefully Atlassian can learn from what makes Trello so wonderful instead of JIRA-ifying it into oblivion.
[+] [-] Communitivity|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aioprisan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sanguy|9 years ago|reply
I would not expect wonderful things for Trello and thankfully it appears they got their money out up front.
My words of advice to anyone looking is to stay away from Atlassian at all costs. Once your in too deep you probably are trapped - which is what they count on.
[+] [-] mitchty|9 years ago|reply
Response: what a silly notion, no
Or another one I found recently: we'd like to comment on code that isn't within 10 lines of a changed file. You know, because one line change in file a can impact stuff elsewhere. Or even in another project but the chances of that happening are more slim than a tachyon hitting an atom as it passes through earth.
Response: Good idea, here's stuff we did this year, and here's other stuff we do. (aka the non committal middle finger)
It sucks because atlassian products are 80% of the way there, but the final 20% polish never seems to arrive. And its been years.
[+] [-] wwalser|9 years ago|reply
Trello, amazing because of it's small size and limited, elegant feature set. Atlassian, awful because they won't implement everything that their customers ask for. Oh and the only feature that you've pointed out that's missing, 2fa, it's not missing. It's been in place for literally years.
The open issue tracker that Atlassian maintains is there so that you can see things that they've said no to. You can actually dig in and find out if someone else has asked for a feature that you want. You can see, completely transparently, whether or not they might implement it. The things that Trello has been asked to build but has quietly and privately said no to? No where to be found (and reasonably so given comments like this one).
Using a companies transparency against them is gross. It shows a lack of empathy for the people who build these systems, the trade offs that they have to make and the responsible decisions they make to not implement every single feature request. JIRA is enterprise software, it's incredibly extensible and configurable. The fact that some people configure it poorly isn't entirely their fault (though sane defaults can solve for some of this problem). Trello is for small teams. It's compact and simple in ways that JIRA was never intended to be. The $425MM? That means Atlassian understands that Trello has captured a part of they didn't.
[+] [-] ArlenBales|9 years ago|reply
BitBucket has had 2FA since Sep 2015: https://blog.bitbucket.org/2015/09/10/two-step-verification-...
Do some research, unless your goal was to slander.
[+] [-] randlet|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tannhaeuser|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhinoceraptor|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmerl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deepuj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhp|9 years ago|reply
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 that Atlassian wouldn’t ruin Trello." http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-is-buying-my-bel...
(disclaimer: I'm the Trello ceo)
[+] [-] tiglionabbit|9 years ago|reply
You can get a better wysiwyg wiki just by sharing a folder in Google Docs and having them link to each other. And I'd take Trello over "greenhopper" any day.
[+] [-] brianbreslin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toddmorey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoodoof|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RUG3Y|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veidr|9 years ago|reply
After that, SourceTree has been slowly starting to suck. It has a bunch of annoying new bugs that don't get fixed, now requires logging into Atlassian to use it on every machine you use, and has had almost no useful or compelling feature additions in recent years. It is basically a good indie app from several years ago, with the Atlassian taint slowly being applied to it.
[+] [-] latj|9 years ago|reply
I dont like Jira either but I do like bitbucket. I started using it back in the day because besides public hosting they also gave me free unlimited private repos and found it does everything I need.
[+] [-] rkrzr|9 years ago|reply
So I wonder if they are mostly aquiring the user base here in order to expand their potential market?
[+] [-] lstodd|9 years ago|reply
Jira and Confluence are epitomes of corporate red-tape molasses. Not only the process tends to get tangled to death in all the features everyone gets a bright idea to use, but even without them it wants just too much hardware.
A measly company of 30 ppl|3 years history and you're scratching your head to blood keeping the basic actions not taking more that 5 seconds while attempting to not pay 10x license cost for the hardware.
Too bad there aren't many alternatives.
And thank god I'm not using Trello. It's dead, people it's dead.
[+] [-] SwaroopH|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DCRichards|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willvarfar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ccostes|9 years ago|reply
Edit: I guess the spinning-out doesn't say anything about ownership (though the article does say Trello did a round of funding after the spin-out)
[+] [-] manmal|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slantyyz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rileymat2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hackergirl88|9 years ago|reply
Cloud: https://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/09/07/bitbucket-cloud-5-mill...
- Merge checks - Bitbucket Pipelines (Continuous delivery service in Bitbucket Cloud) - 2FA - Universal Second Factor (U2F) - Improved SSH - Support for multiple SSH keys - Build status API - Smart Mirroring - Git LFS (including the embedded media viewer only in Bitbucket Cloud which allows for better large file uploads) - Smart Commits (allow repository committers to process JIRA issues using commands in your commit messages) - reviewer status on pull requests - Code search (Server only currently) - 0 downtime backups - code review at commit level - default review in pull requests - pull request merge strategies - Deploy Bitbucket Data center with AWS - iterative reviews for pull requests - pull request focused dashboard - Bitbucket Connect add-ons (deploy from Bitbucket with AWS, Azure or Digital Ocean)
[+] [-] kevando|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] open-source-ux|9 years ago|reply
Restyaboard: http://restya.com/board (open source, self-hosted)
Phabricator Projects https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/projects/ (open source, self-hosted, or paid hosting)
Kanban: https://kanboard.net/ (open source, self-hosted, or paid hosting)
Wekan: https://wekan.io/ (open source, self-hosted)
And no doubt, lots more not listed here...
[+] [-] quicksilver03|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] konart|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucb1e|9 years ago|reply
Then I remembered my difficulty with finding a proper to-do app. Yes, it will have millions of people make a clone, but it will also have thousands publishing crappy versions.
[+] [-] arc_of_descent|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjacobel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nodesocket|9 years ago|reply
Spark Calital and Index Ventures must have gotten a nice huge return, Trello only raised $10 million.
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ridruejo|9 years ago|reply