From lunch to acquisition: How Atlassian bought Trello
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
Two CEOs sit down, culture had better be the #1 thing they discuss before one writes a check to the other for the better part of half a billion dollars.
Good M&A adds tons of value by combining two companies who are better together than separate. Bad M&A (Google's acquisition of Nest comes to mind) means fired CEO, delayed/ruined product launches, and incineration of nine-figure amounts of shareholder value. It all comes down to whether the two companies want the same thing.
I won't argue that Atlassian software has no rough edges UX-wise, but that isn't the point. The point is that, when one company buys another, they'd better have roughly the same idea of where they want to go, otherwise you may as well fire up an industrial blast furnace fed by shareholder capital.
Bad M&As happen all the time. Good ones are the exceptions not the norms.
"Companies" are groups of people, and their leadership.
What the leadership wants very often has nothing to do with the company's long-term future.
This is all observable behavior happening all around us.
Is that really true? Here are lists of acquisitions by Amazon and Google:
+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
The vast majority of acquisitions are uneventful and added positive value to the acquirer. Maybe you're thinking of high-profile multi-billion dollar failures like Daimler+Chrysler, HP+Compaq, Microsoft+Nokia. It's possible that the amount of negative press those failures receive distorts the perception of the (quiet) successful acquisitions.
How many add positive value to the acquired?
Most of the targeted businesses were privately owned which means that the big acquirer cannot execute a hostile takeover and buy the company against the Board of Director's wishes. Amazon's acquisitions of Zappos shoes, dpreview camera website, etc were all friendly deals. Same situation with Facebook acquisitions of Whatsapp and Instagram.
Jira's default state in many companies is more likely proof of broken processes. Something which no tool can solve.
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.
JIRA is amazing if the overriding philosophy is openness and slack in workflows.
We can probably boil this analysis down a little bit, right? What's Jira's default UX for new installations/projects, does it _easily suck_ by default?
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.
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.
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.
It's nice to imagine an app with all the flexibility of Jira and all the speed of Trello, but it's probably a trade-off.
Unfortunately, you can't. For example, let's say I want to have a different set of priorities or resolutions for a project. I have to run a whole new JIRA server.
Twelve year-old issue with 2,319 votes https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-3821
Atlassian is right in not addressing this kind of feature request
Have to admit, I haven't used any of their competitor's software, but just because you can change every single setting, doesn't mean people will want to. I'm pretty sure no one in my company fully understands it. Settings are all over the place, and even small changes require many clicks to get to where you need.
I know it's a different product, but if you look at Zendesk, it's so simple to get setup, and there are still many integrations to achieve what you need but all at the click of a button, in a friendly interface. It just works™...
I'm old-school, deeply entrenched into the Unix "do one small thing well" philosophy. But there's no string of terminal command line tools that's going to do all the things Jira does for the entire group of people in a typical business that use Jira.
(I find it quite amusing when devs here discover/get-shown for the first time that SourceTree is - underneath - pretty just typing git commands into a terminal for them!)
Distinguish between inherent and accidental complexity. You'll see that every human endeavor has many known and unknown inherent complexities. Just ignoring those will hamper your ability to abstract and ascend.
For example, the system at my company has unexplained checkboxes everywhere, and for some reason disables copying of charge codes once their entered onto a sheet? Why? Nobody knows, it's probably not a feature, just some nonsense produced by some compatibility requirement for an old browser or something. Who knows. Other fun things: - search doesn't work right to find codes - it won't verify if you can charge to a code until you've tried it - it won't tell you codes have expired when contracts are over - it's a huge process to review old time entries, especially old sheets filed by employees - etc.
compared to this, the Atlassian products are at least usable when they're configured correctly. The problem is that they're almost never entirely configured correctly, or they'll somehow mysteriously fall out of correct configuration after months of working just fine. Oh, and this time keeping system is actually a step up from the old one we used to use.
I guess what I'm saying is that they aren't state of the art w/r to usability, but they're also not complete bottom of the pile garbage.
Trello is also a step or two above the normal Atlassian stuff, but the inability to self host and configure in certain ways also restricted the size of projects you could tackle effectively with Trello. Atlassian's normal project management stuff seems to work best at a scale just beyond Trello. And in that respect is superior.
I do, and have been using it since Atlassian was a tiny startup.
Don't know any project management software as flexible and powerful, with integration with enterprise source control and bug tracking systems as Jira.
I really don't have any reason to suggest anything else.
Atlassian's genius is having lots of adequate enterprise collaboration software under the same brand.
I've seen its exceptions and I figured it's made of some sort of auto-generated code translation of an Eclipse based think client.
Reminds me of the bad old days of round-trip engineering, UML and Corba...
Then a bunch of contractors came in with a paper full of boxes and arrows, titled Enterprise Workflow, and demanded admin access to do everything themselves. One month later stability is down the drain for everyone, and a few of their issues are jailed in a state, unable to go back and forth in the workflow, never to be closed or disappear from their status report. They declared Jira a non-agile, buggy product and bought something different. Our users now hate both products and track issues in excel.
Atlassian might be not great but it's not sold on golf courses and actually works
- Not usable without browser plugins
- Referencing cards from other systems impossible (no stable urls)
- Referencing other systems from cards difficult. For example, try referencing a commit in a repo
- Not all actions on cards are logged
- Referencing cards from within cards in a stable way is impossible (hello web!)
- Limited keyboard control
- Changing certain things concurrently does not warn user
- Only two part hierarchy
- The complexity of over engineering processes shows up in a year in both JIRA and Trello. But in Trello you can't blame the program.
- Drag and drop frustrations in Firefox
- Side scrolling nightmare when pasting long logs because of narrow design of cards
- Endless gimmicks
- Advertisements in cards for plugins (at least I think it was)
I can go on, but I think I've made my point. Could you give specific reasons why you don't like JIRA?
- Cards do have stable URLs. Not sure why you think they don't.
- A Github url to a commit will link to that URL. Powerups can be used if you want tighter integration.
- Very few people actually need this. If you do, then you need a fully auditable system.
- Copy paste the card URL. Again, card URLs are stable and Trello will detect that it's a card URL.
- There are fairly extensive keyboard shortcuts: https://trello.com/shortcuts
- Such as?
- Boards -> Lists -> Cards -> Description/Comments/Check Lists/Polls/etc. At least 4 levels.
- Is this a prediction??
- Sounds like a Firefox problem.
- Are you putting logs in the titles of the cards?
- Such as?
- Haven't ever seen an ad in a card.
It sounds like you set out with the intention of not liking it and found (or made up?) reasons.
- Not when you move them from board to board
- But that's not linking a commit, that's linking to github. In JIRA I had full integration and even auto linking of commits to issues. You give a repo url and the rest is easy.
- I recall (can't test this) that moving a card is not logged. I think that's pretty basic functionality and it helps in asynchronous communication.
- card urls are not stable over different boards.
- moving cards over columns.
- Yes, but I cannot nest cards. Simple divide and conquer strategy will scatter takes over many cards. To-do lists are not sufficient.
- seems like a nasty ui decision, dragging with scrolling.
- No, in the description. But the pre has no word wrap and the pop-up only takes a quarter of the width of my screen (without browser plugin)
- large smilies on cards for example, or whatever these things are.
- I'm absolutely sure I saw advertisement in a card. Maybe it was caused by a browser plugin?
I've used many task management systems. I understand the appeal of Trello. For me, it is just not sophisticated enough and misses essentials.
That's not true. Did you try it?
> I recall (can't test this) that moving a card is not logged.
Moves between boards and lists are logged. Moves up and down a list are logged, but not shown in the UI (only visible via the api). All moves were shown at one point, but it was just way too noisy.
> card urls are not stable over different boards.
That's still not true.
> moving cards over columns.
The card moves physically each time and each move appears in the log.
> I'm absolutely sure I saw advertisement in a card.
Trello suggests turning on a power-up if it looks like it would help (like github power-up if you attach a github link). "Advertisement" seems like a strong word here?
Actually, it seems changes in descriptions are not logged. Even though I normally would not want to see this, it sometimes comes in handy. Just a simple line: "Edited: John Doe, 2017-02-22".
Well, suggesting to turn on power-ups on each and every card, styled in a way as if it is part of the card.
W.r.t. moving cards over column: if I move a card from A to B and the move is not synchronised (because of lag or a Trello Server outage), a co-worker might move the card as well (say, from to-do to in-progress). Once the situation stabilises, there is (or was, the last time I noticed this issue) no visual feedback of this situation. It's a minor annoyance, but I've noticed that the 'eventually consistent' UI makes it possible that inconsistent states are reached.
Not a Trello user, but sounds like a huge positive to me. If you can't blame the software, there might be some chance of pushing back against the process-advocates.
And I really prefer Jira agile plugin to Trello, some PO tried to force Trello on us (developers) but we had to resist for some time, until they stopped pushing it. Trello looks like a sticky notes app and nothing more to me. Not to mention it is not "on-premises" so if a given company cares about security it won't use it.
Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash) is also quite nice, but I don't have comparison to GitLab or Github Enterprise, so I don't know what I'm missing.
The only thing they suffer from is NIH syndrome.
I am a happy user of Bitbucket and a sad user of GitHub, so there is that.
Also because I generally tend to prefer the silver (underdog) candidates like Pepsi, the Falcons or Hillary.
Aside from that, it's fine.
Jira, Bitbucket, Confluence, Bamboo all amazing tools
I do, just because you dont like it does not mean others will have the same opinion.
If you think you can do a better job you should start your own company.
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?
Soon as I read that line I knew this article wasn't going to be of any worth. Just a PR puff piece.
Is that good or bad?
I have this nightmare where one day I open Trello and it looks like Jira.
Seeing how successful Trello has become makes me sad for the lost potential of our former promising stars, like Copilot and Kiln.
So the question is how do the people who were left behind at Fog Creek feel about something that was spun out of them now going to make their biggest competitor stronger.
I haven't used it personally, but it appears to look and work just like Trello!