[deepuj]

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.

[mhp]

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.

"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)

[BinaryIdiot]

To be fair I've been a part of 3 acquisitions and have seen this story play out tens of times with beloved software. It always starts out this way. "The original folks are going to run it, not the new company!" "Things will stay the same" yadda yadda yadda.

1-3 years down the road, it'll be a different story. It'll be unlikely that the executive team will stick around past whatever agreement they signed with Atlassian.

I'm skeptical. I've yet to see this work out with a company I worked at or followed (yes yes I know, Instagram but I never followed them so I wouldn't know how or if they've changed). I'm sure it can and has happened. But you have an uphill battle :)

[inglor]

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.

[gkya]

Well I don't really use Trello, though I tried it for a while (wasn't my cup of tea). But the difference between WhatsApp and YouTube and Trello is that the latter is used by a different crowd than the former which is more conscious of and partial to their tools. Thus if Atlassian messed up Trello they'd certainly create lots of bias against the company as a whole in the Trello community, but that can't be said for WhatsApp or YouTube, where the majority of the users don't even care which company owns these services (I guess most wouldn't even know), let alone hating that company for changes to acquired products.

[meerita]

This is a minority sample of companies that survived post acquisition. There is a vast example of companies that doesn't.

[Sebguer]

I mean, it's a minority of companies that survive period.

[djsumdog]

I think Atlassian does a good job of not killing off apps it acquires (anyone have examples?). They just rebrand them and smoosh them into their whole suite of stuff they've bought.

Years ago I was talking to a Melbourne dev who said they've made very little (Jira and Confluence I think?) and the rest of it they've just bought and rebranded?

Yahoo likes to kill apps and take devs, like Astrid Tasks.

[hNz]

As much as you feel the same about Java and Hudson... what about Virtual Box. All of them are Oracle now and Virtual Box is pretty good?

[quanticle]

All of them are Oracle now and Virtual Box is pretty good?

It really isn't. VirtualBox was always mediocre compared to VMWare, and ever since the Oracle acquisition, I haven't heard of any major new features or performance improvements coming out of the VirtualBox team. Though, given what Oracle has done to its other acquisitions, benign neglect is a pretty good outcome.

[cookiecaper]

lol? VirtualBox has been maintaining its release cadence since the Oracle acquisition in 2010 (almost 7 years ago!), including 2 major-version releases. It seems to be one of the few parts of the Sun family that hasn't been mucked up yet. I keep waiting for Oracle to give it The Oracle Treatment(tm), but heretofore, that hasn't occurred. The VBox guys must have their cubicles hidden really well. ;)

If you want to see the "major new features" implemented, you need look no further than the changelog. [0]

And FWIW, I've tried VMWare Workstation several times and even own a copy of it, but VirtualBox has been and continues to be the most reliable, simple method of virtualization for me (and several of my colleagues). The VMWare drivers/tools are frequently broken by kernel upgrades, the interface is clunkier and more demanding (including requiring hosts to run a couple of background daemons; VBox operates fine on hosts with just the drivers installed), and the performance, while better in some areas, is much worse in others, making it a wash for general use.

[0] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog

[mrmondo]

Virtualbox... good? I don't think so at all, it's networking and disk IO performance is horrendous, as much as I dislike VMware - Fusion is miles ahead of VirtualBox in all ways IMO except price. But now we have Xhyve & friends which is truly fantastic.

[csmajorfive]

It just really depends on whether the scale/revenue of the acquired is immediately and clearly accretive to the acquirer. WhatsApp and Waze were pretty far along that path (and their prices reflected it!). Younger companies are more vulnerable.

[BinaryIdiot]

Fair enough. Those are great examples.

[rangibaby]

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

[keypress]

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.

[lostlogin]

Up vote and down vote. Suddenly the world would be a better place. Is there anyone anywhere that thinks the comments add anything?

[throwawaymaroon]

That's a terrible example. Remember Google+ accounts and Youtube?

[xiaoma]

I still haven't gotten any assistance from Google after losing my YouTube account when my f#@!ing plus account (which I didn't even want) spawned another account from the gmail address I'd signed up before Google bought them.

Plus was the real turning point where I went from loving Google to tolerating them.

[cellularmitosis]

I also lost access to my first YouTube account. That was the first time my faith in the cloud had been shaken.

[pbhjpbhj]

>didn't turn into Google Videos 2.0. //

Yeah, agreed, I was going to say the same.

YouTube was used as leverage to boost Google+. They backed off soon enough to save things (or perhaps YouTube is just too big to kill with such a mistake) but it was badly messed up IMO.

[tomasduda]

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

[zeroxfe]

Given that there were lots of companies that abandoned Window's phone, I'm not convinced it's related -- I suspect Waze would have abandoned it either way.

[golfer]

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

[thr0waway1239]

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.

[DannyBee]

I'm with you.

Truthfully, unless you are being acquired by an aggregator like berkshire hathaway, I don't get the "nothing will change attitude" you often see. Of course it will change. They bought you to change something (usually about them).

The number that stay truly autonomous is ... very very very low.

[jlarocco]

Exactly. No acquisition ever starts off with, "We're going to change a bunch of stuff as we assimilate this new company."

It's not hard to find "______ is being acquired by ________" headlines on HN, where everybody involved promises not to change anything, and then find the corresponding shutdown post on https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ sometime a few months later.

Unfortunately, even if Jira were really serious about not changing anything, it's not entirely up to them. No doubt there are some Trello employees who don't want to work for Jira, and a lot of them will eventually leave.

Even if everybody at Trello honestly believes it, in a few months it's not going to be their decision any more.

[quanticle]

    Exactly. No acquisition ever starts off with, "We're going to change a bunch
    of stuff as we assimilate this new company."

What about FitBit's acquisition of Pebble? Fitbit was pretty clear that they were going to shut down pretty much everything that Pebble was doing, and fold the Pebble team into FitBit. More generally, don't pretty much all acqui-hires work this way?

[jlarocco]

Good point, I didn't consider the "acqui-hire" scenario. I was only thinking of acquisitions where both companies are too big for that.

I just assumed Trello was too big to be an "acqui-hire", but I really have no idea how big they were.

[cookiecaper]

Atlassian is trying to own the migration path here, IMO. Trello was never really meant to manage software products, and I've been part of two separate teams that moved from Trello to JIRA when a PM who wanted more enterprise-y management features came on board.

Fog Creek always pitched Trello as a general list app, not a bug tracker, and refused to add features that would've geared it specifically toward bug tracking. I would venture a guess that Fog Creek kind of accidentally shot FogzBugz in the foot with Trello.

My impression is that Atlassian sees Trello's userbase as a strong opportunity to upsell to the enterprise-style tooling in JIRA and recruit more people into the JIRA ecosystem. If this is indeed the value they see, then it wouldn't make sense to change anything about Trello's fundamentals. They'll probably just create a JIRA plugin and plaster JIRA ads all over the place.

[eloisant]

To be fair, Atlassian acquired BitBucket a few years ago and I didn't see them butcher it or merge it with Stash.

On the contrary, it went in a good direction under Atlassian ownership.

[shortstuffsushi]

They did merge it with Stash, though, didn't they?

[pkaeding]

More accurately, they merged Stash with Bitbucket (Stash is now called 'Bitbucket Server').

[gilini]

I get where you're coming from but the guy above was straight up declaring Trello's death. Even with skepticism you can agree it's being too pessimistic too early.

And if it goes down a different path, there will be a hole in the market waiting for the next Trello and that's good too.

[huckyaus]

> there will be a hole in the market waiting for the next Trello and that's good too

Good for someone willing to take advantage of the market opportunity, maybe. But is it good for users that have to deal with their company churning from one enterprise to-do list to another?

Familiarity (or lack thereof) with software like Trello can be the difference between enjoying your day to day and finding it endlessly frustrating.

[BurningFrog]

The again, 1-3 years down the road things would have changed a lot anyway.

A lot of the time, the executive team that grew a startup into something big are not the best people run that new big company.

Nothing is forever, change is the only constant, cherish the time you had, and so on...

[hyperpallium]

Atlassian acquired bitbucket, and seems to be going ok.

Though it's not a profit centre for them, so may be different.

[thewhitetulip]

I've not been a part of acquisition but I've seen many from the outside, take the exame of Whatsapp, when they sold off to facebook they were like "we will never add calling to whatsapp, it will always focus on text messaging", " we care for privacy very much, never will we send your data" et al, less than one year after the acquisition, they do everything that they had promised not to do!

[grey-area]

Another example is slicehost:

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2974-the-slicehost-story

http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/229402851/rackspace-clarifies-...

It always starts with good intentions and fine words about nothing changing and ends with an incredible journey.

[nocman]

Amen to that. I used slicehost for years and was totally happy with them. Then Rackspace bought them and killed them off.

Needless to say, Rackspace did NOT get me as a customer after that. I switched to another provider.

[cookiecaper]

I was a longtime Slicehost user and while Rackspace eventually phased them out, they were not competitive with the new crop of VPS providers anyway. I was paying $70/mo for my slice. I don't remember the specs, but when they went away, I switched to a Linode that was about half the cost. (Linode has now also been outmoded for my uses, and I just have Vultr and DigitalOcean servers (+ 1 dedicated server in a rack somewhere) now).

[techcofounder]

Zappos is a good example of an acquisition that maintained its original culture.

[misiti3780]

it has worked out for instagram so far - no ?

[brianwawok]

How many handcuffs have expired?

[mooreds]

It has been over 4 years, so I imagine most of them have.

http://www.businessinsider.com/its-been-1-year-since-faceboo...

[mmanfrin]

  The (Startup)ists made (Startup). And the (Startup)ists are going to 
  keep working on (Startup) at (Acq. Company). (Acq. Company) understands 
  that (Startup) is unique and beloved and they definitely do not   
  want to mess that up.

It's Startup Acquisition Madlibs.

[pc86]

I'm sure you made quite a large sum of money off of this deal, but Atlassian doesn't have a great track record of purchasing non-Atlassian products and not messing them up.

And... "Trellists?" They're just people.

[iamaelephant]

Which products do you think Atlassian messed up after acquisition? Disclaimer I'm an Atlassian employee, but just curious.

[mschuster91]

Hi,

just wanted to address my hugest complaint about the Atlassian suite, in the hope someone here can use it for improvement: please unify the administrative UI/UX of JIRA and Confluence (and the other tools). Stuff is named differently, and placed in different positions. Even as a sys-op, it is not always possible to claim access rights to a space that another administrator created. And why does Confluence use JIRA Crowd for LDAP authentication?

[pram]

HipChat (unless you concede it was always bad)

[madeofpalk]

It didn't 'mess' HipChat up, it just never improved it and adopted to a marketplace that has Slack in it.

[shortstuffsushi]

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.

[rspeer]

"Barely sufficient to stop people from switching to Slack" seems to be Atlassian's target.

Atlassian abandoned HipChat's bug tracker, and put up a fresh JIRA that they discourage you from using at several steps. That's one way to get the bug count down without fixing any bugs.

[Karunamon]

As an enterprise user: Just about everything to do with LDAP/AD integration. Disabling an AD user from the app and re-enabling them later converts their account into a local account, for one. If you have it connected to a Crowd server, and the Crowd server loses connection with its directory, it returns an empty user list to Hipchat, resulting in EVERY USER ACCOUNT BEING DISABLED. And as we just established, when it comes back, Hipchat sets up the users as new.

I still remember, and have nightmares about, the day ~300 users lost all private chats, private room membership, and chat history, all because of braindead design.

Hipchat is not my favorite atlassian product. The only reason they have any traction whatsoever is because Slack doesn't offer a behind the firewall product.

[lobotryas]

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 (instead of pasting raw urls?

I only use HipChat because the alternatives at my company are worse. Even IRC seems better at this point.

[supercoder]

The bit where it hardly works and lacks a huge amount of functionality.

[gurkendoktor]

It is okay on my Mac (except ugly and slow as molasses), but my Windows coworkers have been complaining about crashes, HiDPI problems and missed notifications for ages.

The editing function is embarrassingly bad. I get it, I've been on IRC when Perl was cool, but I can't believe they're shipping that. I don't think I've seen a non-programmer use it, ever.

I've also never felt so unwelcome in a bug reporter as in HipChat's. It really reminded me that Atlassian sells to suits, not to users.

[foota]

What's wrong with hipchat?

[wpietri]

Having recently switched from a workplace that used Slack to one that uses Hipchat, my first answer is "everything". It's less reliable, and reliability is my number one desire in a communications tool. And there are just so many little UI and UX details that Slack gets right that it's a pleasure to use, whereas Hipchat is generally an irritation and a disappointment for me.

I guess one way to explain it is that Hipchat feels like an enterprise product, and Slack feels like a consumer product. The difference being that enterprise products get used because some high-level person says, "Lo, all my vassals shall now use Hipchat." Which means that user experience is secondary. Whereas consumer software has to earn each user, meaning that it works harder to please and support those users.

[iambateman]

I'm not sure about acquisitions, but compared to github, jira and bitbucket are poor.

I tried to figure out what confluence even does and I'm still not sure.

Considering I'm forced into the atlassian ecosystem at work, this is my plea for y'all to improve.

[pfranz]

Not sure if you're playing dumb, but Confluence is a wiki. When I was using it, it was much better than any other I've tried (with or without live view). People at my company seemed to gravitate towards Google Docs when that came around--which is much better for creating and updating content, but isn't as good about searchability, linkability, versioning, or pulling docstrings from code.

At that same company, we switched to Jira from 6 or 7 different ticketing systems (a mix of in-house and third party systems split up by department). It was a herculean effort to transition, but the result was much better than any of the individual ticketing systems with the huge benefit of just opening a ticket anywhere and moving it to where it needs to go while preserving the history.

Now the cons I've seen are; I have no idea how much it costs and it seems to require a small to large team to manage and deploy it for maximum usefulness. For ad hoc deploys I've heard/seen performance issues if the server isn't beefy or configured correctly and the UI can be inscrutable if users are just dropped into the default. That's about (the best case scenario of) what I expect for enterprise software, though.

I have used GitHub Enterprise and haven't used BitBucket. I might not be using it correctly, but I don't see what's so great about GitHub Enterprise (especially for the cost). We still have to use a separate ticketing system for non-project related things (same with documentation).

I've used different ticketing systems since leaving the place that used Jira/Confluence, but have been disappointed at what they were using and what else I could find out there. What have you found out there that has worked better?

[nimchimpsky]

Confluence is rubbish, awful to use in my experience.

For ticketing systems, trello or youtrack.

[aclsid]

I would never say Github is superior to Bitbucket. I haven't checked if they have changed the rules, but on the startup I was working on, Bitbucket provided superior value by far. They allowed free private repos for teams of up to 5 users. After 6 months we ended up paying for the basic plan to accomodate about 10 users.

I am mostly used to command line Git during my daily routine, but the designer/manager was happily using Sourcetree. But as far as some products that are kind of worthless, yeah Hipchat would be one. You are way better off using Slack or even WeChat mobile/desktop app (if you are in China)

[Benjamin_Dobell]

I've used both Bitbucket and Github for years.

Until recently I would've said there wasn't at all much difference between Github and Bitbucket (aside from Github being the de facto home for open source).

However, I'd now argue that Github is significantly better value than Bitbucket for projects, rather than code. By that I mean, Bitbucket is just a component in the greater Atlasssian ecosystem, so it's not a huge priority to add and improve upon project management tools, as you're encouraged to use JIRA, Confluence etc. Even simple things like Bitbucket's Markdown README's not supporting HTML (in particular anchors for same page links) makes the project organisation experience a whole lot less polished.

Where Github shine these days is that they offer a pretty cohesive experience for an entire project's management. Code reviews have come a long way, as have issues and pull requests in general. More recently they've added support for Projects, which for the most part is a Trello clone with built-in integration into Github's issue tracker. Free hosting of Jekyll websites, previews and diffs for all sorts of non-text file formats etc. really put Github in front. Combine this all with the recent change to bill per user rather than per repo (which provides huge savings for small teams) and I don't at all see how Bitbucket are supposed to compete.

I still use Trello for management of clients' projects simply because my clients don't care about the code. However, I can definitely see myself transitioning entirely to Github Projects and the Github issue tracker in the near future.

Frankly, Trello did really well out of this deal from Atlassian. I know Trello have a lot of users, but I'm a bit doubtful about their ability to generate significant funds (paid stickers...?) With Github Projects maturing Trello were likely to lose a lot of users from the tech industry. Atlassian and Trello actually seem like a perfect fit, so it's a saving grace for Trello who couldn't have timed the acquisition better.

[andrewingram]

You seem to be comparing Github to Bitbucket based solely on price. In which case Bitbucket is the easy winner.

To my mind, the UX of Github makes it worth the extra expense.

[vacri]

Bitbucket is better for companies than Github, though of course Github is supreme for open source collaboration. Github has improved recently, but Bitbucket had things like better user management more suitable for companies, and didn't have utterly brainless things like not allowing two repos to use the same deployment key (and deploy keys had full write access!). So everyone ended up making a 'fake human account' for their buildservers, which is Just One More Thing To Manage.

As for ticketing systems, they all suck. All of them. Even Trello. The basic problem is that the amount of information you need to put into a ticket in order to be reasonably useful is more than the users are (time-)comfortable providing. No ticketing software will solve that.

My major problem with Atlassian, though, is the licensing subsystem. It sucks hard. Getting support for it sucks. You can have the account that owns a license, and still be unable to access parts of your own account. They have support for multiple contacts, but only the first one receives relevant mail. The owner of the license can't control the order of the contacts, the contacts themselves have to log in and move themselves to that first position (no potential for abuse there!). Getting support through their support wizard process regarding licensing is painful. Ugh, they need to flog whomever designed that setup... I get the feeling that they used to work for the Windows licensing team....

[Confusion]

Github has nothing that comes near what Jira offers. Comparing them is like comparing a car to motorcycle factory. Sure they both deal with some comparable things, but the car gets me from A to B. The motorcycle factory cannot do anything that comes near it for me.

[cyberferret]

I infinitely prefer BitBucket to GitHub. I guess GitHub is great if you are working on public or open source projects, but BitBucket seems to be much better at handling internal (private) projects to me.

Their lack of popularity also seems to translate to a lower attack profile, so I feel that my private projects are safer on BB than GH.

I've evaluated many issue trackers too, and none of them seem to come close to Jira. Yes it is slow, but the depth of features (and plugins) are great, and BitBucket works seamlessly with it.

[hobarrera]

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

[bostand]

Maybe it's a matter of taste, I prefer bitbucket to github any day of the week.

[sngz]

hipchat, sourcetree.

[bsparker]

Culture of greatness and all that, let him be.

[angersock]

It really has been An Incredible Journey.

[jsjohnst]

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 as guaranteeing you have the winning ticket for next week's lottery.

[ajdlinux]

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

[mjolk]

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

[Lazare]

I really, really, hope you're right.

Because the obvious parallel is Hipchat, and while I know Hipchat has a lot of users and even fans still...well.

[briandear]

Congrats! However, I'm still pouring out a little wine on the ground for my fallen homies who died a slow death from being Jira'd and Bitbucketed and Confluenced to the point that their will to live was crushed.

Being the anti-Jira is what made Trello great. If feels like Luke Skywalker just got bought by the Dark Side while claiming that nothing will change -- I'm still with the rebels.

[komali2]

I feel like I'm the only one that likes Jira more than Trello. I started on Trello, then moved to a company that uses Jira, and couldn't be happier. It's just so functional. Why does everyone hate on it?

[wpietri]

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, spreadsheets, sticky notes on the wall.

I like Trello better because it's more straightforward. Less complexity means less chaos and an easier time getting a workflow representation that matches actual workflow.

But personally, I like things that are more straightforward still. E.g., my last company ran almost entirely on index cards, and we were very happy with that:

http://williampietri.com/writing/2015/the-big-board/

[jimbokun]

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

[komali2]

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.

[wpietri]

I think this works only if your process is standardized across your company. Which I think is generally a terrible mistake in software, because a) team needs can differ, and b) you can't improve process unless the whole company changes at once.

[fphhotchips]

I agree with you, but I suspect that your experience with Jira/Confluence as a developer will depend on the quality of your project and management team. If your PM team use it as a way to distribute their work down to developers, then Jira will quickly become one of the litany of things that you hate. Meanwhile, if it's used well, it can vastly reduce the burden of upwards communication in a way that Trello never will.

In other words, like most enterprise software, the experience is highly dependent on how well it's implemented.

[pyrophane]

Strongly agree. JIRA can be made to work a lot of different ways, and by allowing managers to restrict the workflow in various ways they can use it to enforce a lot of cumbersome process.

Alternately, JIRA as a team board, particularly with remote teams, can be pretty great if you take the time to set it up so that it works for the team (rather than just for the managers or PMs). It can be no more (or at least not much more) cumbersome than Trello, but has a lot of features that Trello lacks.

[pcl]

Bear in mind that Jira is hugely customizable. So, saying "I use Jira" is more like saying "I drive a Ford" than like saying "I drive a Mustang."

Your experience will depend on the plugins you've installed, how you've configured custom fields and workflows, your org's SSO policies, the hardware you're deploying it to and how well you keep it up to date (if you're deploying on-prem), etc.

[taneq]

"Customizable" is a two-edged sword. The ultimate in customizable software is an assembler - you can configure it to perform the function of literally any software possible! But its utility at solving any fixed problem is very low.

The purpose of software is to specialize hardware to perform a required function. The more configuration is required to do this, the less overall value the software provides for that function.

As a software designer your job is to maximize the sum of that value across all functions that you support. As a software consumer, though, you just want the least possible configuration to perform your required function.

[lox]

Unless part of the reason you dislike Jira is that customizability.

[aclsid]

Trello is way easier to use though, and free to boot with paid extras. It's kind of like PHP vs Ruby on Rails all over again, where PHP is old and customizable, with RoR you get a cookie cutter workflow that is an industry standard, so people tend to gravitate towards that. Well, that and the fact that some people seem to be allergic to semicolons and C-style function calls :-P

Truth is both tools are just fine. The rest is just people defending their choice as the superior way of doing things.

[vacri]

I don't mind Jira, but I do find it s.l.o.w, same with Confluence.

[foota]

Could be that Atlassian is looking to support two vastly different styles -- rather than diffuse either.

[moonman272]

This is the same thing that is said with every acquisition. It's basically boilerplate at this point. A better vector is how the parent product is doing, and currently, Jira is too bloated and swiss army knife in approach that it can't innovate or do anything well anymore. This bodes poorly for Trello and comes off as a play to funnel their users into Jira after they rip the basic superficial look and functionality into Jira as an update to its agile board, and kill the standalone product.

[OldSchoolJohnny]

We've all heard that story before, it almost doesn't bear repeating at this point does it? As you say, seeing will be believing.

[bsparker]

Will the Trello/Slack integration be affected?

[mhp]

We will continue to support integrations with all kinds of other tools (regardless of the fact that they may compete with some other Atlassian product). Let the people use the tools they want to use - if they don't want to use your tool, then make a better tool.

For example: https://slack.com/apps/A0F7YS3MZ-jira

[hitekker]

Right on. We are all hoping for your success in Atlassian.

[jjuel]

I heard the same thing from Microsoft about Sunrise, but here I am still waiting for many features from Sunrise to get implemented into Outlook. Of course they also said they wouldn't get rid of Sunrise until all the features were implemented. That of course was a lie.

[sjcsjc]

Perhaps one of them is Mrs Trellist of North Wales?

[xiaoma]

I recently bailed from bitbucket when they stopped allowing me to log in without making an Atlassian account.

I remain a happy trello user until that happens to your product as well!

[sngz]

just like how the guy who made sourcetree is still working on it... oh wait....

[logicallee]

tl;dr: mhp, since you're active in this thread, how can I quickly get in touch with you?

Background:

I didn't find a competing product a good match for how I tried to use it, so I pitched that competition (your closest direct competition) on specific improvements (that they should make) but they didn't see my vision. (I was in touch with the CEO and exchanged a few messages back and forth.)

-> Do you have an email address I can forward the same thing to you to?

if you want to after reviewing my forwards you can reply by email. You can also reach out to me at my email in my profile. At the moment I don't use either Trello or them, anymore. (But I do use Atlassian products actually, which as you correctly state in this thread, are orthogonal.)

Thanks - I'd love to use specifically Trello products in the future.

-

EDIT: Why would anyone downvote this? (Let alone 2 people now.) I didn't have trouble getting in touch with the competition... Since mhp is active in this thread I don't see the harm of asking. I could probably find it out myself but I'm not going to waste any more time on this, since it was a waste of time with the other CEO.

[tiglionabbit]

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.

[allover]

This probably doesn't need saying, but seems you work in toxic teams. Your first paragraph suggests a ton of blame is being thrown about. If you work at a company like that, get out.

(That of course, or you suck at empathy for your managers, and you're the problem).

The place I work at, Jira is used pretty reasonably. Our devs, in 2 different teams have setup the workflows to show our progress and deployment flow in ways we prefer. The project managers use those workflows happily, they just want them to reflect reality.

I'd rather use Trello, but honestly I'm trying to communicate the work I've done to my proj. managers, so the right tool is basically whatever works for them, not me.

[flukus]

> If you work at a company like that, get out.

IME, this is most teams. If you get out you are likely moving into another team that's much the same.

[tiglionabbit]

Yep. I tended to get into a bunch of early-stage startups. They used to be cool, then they brought in some new management. You never know what things are going to turn into.

[nimchimpsky]

"I'd rather use Trello"

[krzyk]

I've been in a similar place but with Trello and Jira/Confluence switched.

Product owneres tried to force developers to use Trello, while we wanted to use Jira with greenhoper.

I really didn't understand what was so fun about Trello, I prefer Jira any time for product planning, Trello for me looks like another sticky notes app.

[tiglionabbit]

It is a simple sticky notes app. But do you really need anything more than that?

[tedmiston]

I once wrote a plugin that copied a Jira sprint into a Trello board and created all of the cards and labeled them to try to find the best of both worlds.

[_ao789]

Amen!

[nimchimpsky]

this +1

[brianbreslin]

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.

[aclsid]

Dude, go read the dev docs. Trello is not vaporware to make a quick profit. They kind of started that as a pet project and even them were impressed that it picked up that quickly. To the point where they had to fall back to some polling code because their webhook stuff was failing.

Pretty nice story if you care to read it.

[logn]

The new sprint-related features in Jira are pretty good and actually remind me of Trello.

[parthdesai]

Jira's interface itself is so clunky and it is so slow.

[jknoepfler]

He's a customer.

[brianbreslin]

Oh I get that. Do you think they should never sell? What's the optimal outcome in your opinion?

[toddmorey]

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.

[hoodoof]

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.

[photogrammetry]

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.

[RUG3Y]

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.

[jupp0r]

Just out of geniune curiosity: what's not bad?

[BinaryIdiot]

JIRA can do anything. LITERALLY. The configuration of a new JIRA server, projects, etc is insane. It just doesn't do anything explicitly well IMO. It's also crazy slow and their enterprise hosted version still has maintenance outages which, as a software developer in 2017, I find absolutely appalling.

[RUG3Y]

The fact that JIRA is so configurable is what's annoying. I spend way to much time fiddling with options and settings when I want the damn thing to just work so that I can get on to important things.

[r_smart]

|their enterprise hosted version still has maintenance outages

Even WoW doesn't really do that anymore :)

[RUG3Y]

It's not that I think JIRA is good per se, but it gets the job done, just like lots of other clunky enterprise software out there.

[veidr]

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.

[latj]

What do you like instead of Jira?

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.

[briandear]

I hate bitbucket. $12 or so per month for private repos is an extremely small price to pay for an infinitely better UX, better integrations and just all all around better experience. For a tool I use multiple times per hour, "free" doesn't matter much to me. Github isn't perfect, but it's damned close.

As far as Jira -- the tool itself isn't bad per se, but the way PMs turn it into their own little power-trip kingdom irritates me. There's so much focus on 'control' that I feel like a victim every time I use it. For example, if I want to move a card from In Progress to the Backlog, Jira has an option to restrict the non-anointed from moving cards. So I have to get 'permission' from someone with the right privileges to move a card. Jira is a micro-manager's wet dream.

Trello was the anti-Jira and that's what made it great.

[latj]

"As far as Jira -- the tool itself isn't bad per se, but the way PMs turn it into their own little power-trip kingdom irritates me."

Yeah, this is a pretty common sentiment. Jira is not a great tool, but the things devs really resent is being micromanaged and tracked in such a way that they are turned into a commodity. At the end of the day, if that really bothers you, there are plenty of ways to work free of this feeling- find a company that fits you better or a better manager within your company or strike out on your own. A better ticketing system wont make you happy.

[jschwartzi]

Furthermore, if the PM didn't have JIRA they would find some other way to micromanage your hours. The team I'm on uses a spreadsheet with a hokey gantt chart to pretend like we're meeting our deadlines rather than filling in timesheets in our JIRA system. Micromanagers are going to micromanage no matter what tool they do it in.

[jimbokun]

Ah, another reason I like JIRA more than people on here criticizing it.

Most things in our JIRA deployment are configured to just allow anyone to change anything, with only a few exceptions.

Locking things down like that is the project manager's way of making sure people are constantly blocked and work isn't getting done. Not sure why some project manager's try so hard to create this state of affairs.

[gregmac]

JIRA is _____ [1] because it has a ton of customization options, allowing it to be setup with a simple or complex workflow with user/group/value-based validation rules (among other things).

These can be ignored, used to enforce very simple house-keeping things like filling out a "fix version" or "deploy date" when closing an issue as "fixed", or to exactly codify all the rules in a complex development process based on a bunch of flowcharts someone with "project manager" in their credentials spent two weeks painstakingly creating.

[1] What word you choose here will probably depend on if a PM or developers have admin access in JIRA.

[himlion]

That depends how you set it up though. In our team at a big telco everybody has normal usage rights. In my experience it never gets abused and doesn't give people this powerless feeling.

[jimbokun]

I'm very satisfied using JIRA and Confluence at work. Are there better alternatives out there I just don't know about?

[allover]

Honestly yeah I'd like to hear this answer.

For a wiki especially, our team spent ages searching for one that was hosted, private and searchable. Confluence seemed like the only thing with a decent search.

Major drawback of Confluence I've found is that Markdown is not first class, and only supported via some shitty plugin, that renders badly to boot. But the rest of the company (and half my tech team for that matter) doesn't really care about that (the default wysiwyg stuff looks good if you stick to the guard rails).

Still, we're not aware of a better thing we could move to?

[acidburnNSA]

Phabricator is pretty good for issue tracking and code review. The wiki is totally usable but not as polished as Confluence.

[tedmiston]

Yes, several. GitHub + ZenHub is another nice combo.

[purerandomness]

Taiga, Gitlab, ...

[rsp1984]

SourceTree is the only software that they make that doesn't suck.

If you compare SourceTree to other halfway modern git clients (like Tower or GitX-dev), oh boy does it suck! The layout is completely disorganized, the diffing is super lousy. It's slow. It sucks up lots of memory. It's literally the last GUI client I'd use before just going to the command line.

[sb8244]

I switched to SourceTree after GitX (not dev but another fork) kept crashing. I haven't looked back. It's a great client and I haven't had any problems with it. I'm working on decently sized repos but keep a pretty clean flow.

[aclsid]

Did not know about GitX. Will still rely on the command line over here, but it is nice to know there is a free tool to give to less technical people that is faster.

[tedmiston]

Second that Tower is so much more Mac-like than SourceTree. On a non-Mac platform, SourceTree would probably be my pick for a git GUI though.

[melvinmt]

Ah, I almost forgot about GitX, my first git GUI client before I started using git gui itself.

[bbcbasic]

+1 I have to use it over a VM :-(. Commit time is coffee time.

[amelius]

> This is depressing.

Yes, I often long back to the days when you could just put software on a floppy disk and be sure that it would never change. That this isn't practically possible anymore is one of the biggest downsides of the cloud.

[aclsid]

The one thing I have learned in the computer world after almost two decades on this stuff is that you should never rely on things being constant. Tools will keep changing, and it will be a repeating cycle. I saw it with Delphi, VC6, VB6, QuarkXpress (sis is a designer), etc.

About the only thing that has had massive longevity is VIM, and at least for me, its throne was taken away by SublimeText. Maybe Atom will replace it or something else, who knows. But in the end, just enjoy the ride while it lasts.

[foxylad]

I'm happy - I use both Trello and Bitbucket. Atlassian bought Bitbucket years ago, and it's only got better since then. If the pattern persists, I think we'll see Trello remain largely as it is, but with added hooks to Atlassian's other products.

[aclsid]

Don't know what kind of stuff you are using over there, but Bitbucket has been fantastic for us for over a year already. About to start trying their Bamboo service.

At most, this is welcome news if they manage to integrate Trello with Jira somehow.

[allover]

Bamboo (cloud) is end-of-lifed so you might want to reconsider that purchase! (Pipelines is their new alternative).

(Yes you could buy the Bamboo self-hosted thing, which they're still supporting, but it's clear where their efforts are going at this point).

EDIT: Also, I should add some opinion here. We used to use Bamboo for 2+ years and ditched it (for Jenkins). Bamboo has a horrible UI, and everything basically has to be done through UI.

Jenkins meanwhile has an ugly UI, but you can do everything via config/Jenkinsfile, which is what these newer CI things incl. Pipelines are aiming at also, basically the `ci.yaml` file in your repo idea.

So yeah, avoid Bamboo!

[i386]

I hope you don't think our (Jenkins) UI is ugly now ;) We've recently launched the Jenkins Blue Ocean project that aims to modernize the developer experience and UI https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/

[allover]

Hehe, thanks for replying. We're pretty hyped about Blue Ocean, and have it installed already, just eagerly awaiting for it to have all the functionality of the Jenkins of old, best of luck to you with it :)

[i386]

No worries! Ahh what are you missing? drop be a line at [e-mail]

[emmelaich]

psst :-)

@i386 used to work on Bamboo for Atlassian.

Good luck James, I really want to try out BlueOcean but might depend on stuff[1] at work.

1. GoCD (blah) CircleCI (not used yet but frankly looked better)

[i386]

Thank you! I've had the pleasure of designing not one but two of these products. I'd like to think I know where the pitfalls are the second time around ;)

[aclsid]

Was trying to avoid self-hosted devops as much since after hosting my own Gitolite server before using bitbucket, I learned to not try to do everything ourselves. The gitolite setup proved to be very functional and nice, after everything was setup that is, but it is a bit of a hassle in the maintenance department and definitely something that took its sweet time from other pressing matters at the time.

But based on what you said, I guess I can try Jenkins over the weekend on a pet project to see how it goes and then compare if it really is too much of a hassle. Thanks!

[manyxcxi]

I don't get this. Except for HipChat, (and I'd argue SourceTree), how exactly does Atlassian kill/destroy things?

I have yet to use another ticket system for software development that is as decent to use as JIRA. I'm not saying I love it, but I've done my time with all the usual suspects and I CHOSE JIRA for my company. I found most people who have really hated JIRA for a good reason actually hated the borked workflow that their administrators put them into.

BitBucket has been a great private hosted Git repository for us, we have at least 150+ repositories- the addition of 'Projects' has adequately solved my biggest complaint.

Confluence is fine as far as intranet wikis go, the fact that it's somewhat integrated with JIRA and BitBucket makes it work fine. We tried using Google Pages- never again. Our documentation is easily discoverable and content authoring is easy. We don't try and run anything publicly so our use case is dead simple.

[vecter]

Can you put in concrete terms why you see this as a problem?

[dilap]

Companies create software that reflects their structure and culture. The software that Atlassian makes is radically different -- and opposed in spirit -- to Trello. I think Trello will inevitably lose its Trello-ness.

Hope to be wrong though!

[RUG3Y]

I hope you're wrong too! I use Trello a lot, and I also use Jira a lot. I would much rather use Trello than Jira.

[creativityhurts]

Atlassian will most likely "sunset" Trello or somehow include it in JIRA.

[farkas]

We have no plans to sunset Trello. Trello is an incredible product, and an incredible brand, with an amazing team behind it.

Atlassian's product range today includes unstructured (Confluence) and structured (JIRA) products.

Trello fits right in the middle. It has a myriad of use-cases[1] and is loved by the millions who use it daily.

[1] - https://trello.com/inspiration

Scott, CEO Atlassian

[aclsid]

Whatever you do, just make sure you always keep a functional free tier. I can tell you that for for us, as far as Bitbucket and Trello is concerned, the free tier is what got us in before purchasing a plan several months later.

AWS applies the same trick with some startups in China (like they did with us) and I guess Silicon Valley as well. Bunch of free credits, free for a year. After you have your infrastructure with them it will be hard to switch to somebody else.

[dukedougal]

@farkas I know this is off topic - but whilst you are here can I ask you a question?

If we have built a product that is a (we think) great fit to the Atlassian customer base, who would we speak to in order to create a partnering arrangement with Atlassian? Does Atlassian do such business partnering arrangements?

It's not an addon for an Atlassian product so does not seem to fit to the Atlassian marketplace.

[dukedougal]

Downvoted for what reason?

I would have thought that making business connections on HN is just exactly the right thing to be doing.....

[briandear]

For now. I've heard this all before.

[petetnt]

I thought Bitbucket Cards[1] was the middle product, heh.

[1] - http://www.bitbucketcards.com/

[harigov]

Atlassian isn't Google or FB that they can buy something for $425M and then sunset the product. It is more likely that they will probably provide Trello as an option for their users to better manage their projects.

[vecter]

That's an incredibly wild claim that they would sunset it after they just spent $425 million to buy it. Why would you think that?

Also, the might include it or leave it separate. They might even include it and still keep it a great product.

[bandrami]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

[cialowicz]

They don't really have a history of doing that. Greenhopper was acquired and integrated into JIRA as JIRA Agile. Hipchat was acquired and now it lives on and nicely integrates with nearly all Atlassian products (JIRA, Bamboo, Confluence, etc).

My guess is they'll keep Trello running for a while as-is, and slowly rework it to become "JIRA Lite". It will likely have Trello-like functionality with JIRA branding, and some sort of migration path to the heavier JIRA for companies that have grown a lot.

[mrbill]

> Hipchat was acquired and now it lives on and nicely integrates with nearly all Atlassian products

Except for when you run into a bug that requires disabling of the Hipchat integration with Confluence... You'd think a company could make its own products work together better.

[briandear]

Hipchat is a piece of shit. Inline code highlighting anyone? /code is crap.

Slack has more speed, better integrations, better search, reliability. (For example, getting notifications on iOS.

I hate HipChat. Apologies to those that love it, but it's likely you never used both side-by-side during normal working days to compare.

So if Atlassian tried to put their mark on Trello, I have little confidence that it will still be Trello.

[cialowicz]

I used HipChat for two and a half years in a previous role, and have been using Slack daily for the past 7 months in my current role. Both are fine.

HipChat is certainly not perfect, but I don't agree about Slack being faster. It definitely has its issues.

[iamaelephant]

I don't have any information one way or another but to my knowledge Atlassian has never done this with an acquisition.

[trymas]

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

[Confusion]

I really don't understand all the hate on Atlassian. We're a small company (< 20) and we like Jira. There's nothing that offers near the same functionality. It's worth every penny.

We also used and liked Crucible (their code review tool), but it didn't yet offer some features of Gerrit that were very important to us, so we moved to Gerrit.

[bigbugbag]

Sadly this is more often than not the destiny of service and software you can't host/run yourself. At least this is not google or the like buying something to can it. Though it would not be surprising if trello got merged or integrated in some way in jira.

Luckily there are free software alternatives to trello you can self host that are not going to sell out such as wekan[1], taskboard[2], taiga[3], kanboard[4], ...

[1]: https://wekan.io/

[2]: https://taskboard.matthewross.me/

[3]: http://taiga.pm/

[4]: https://kanboard.net/

[wsy]

For sure they won't change Trello to become like JIRA, and there is a little hope the JIRA UI will become more like Trello. So IMHO nothing to worry about.

[dickbasedregex]

I can see the clunky from Jira seeping into Trello over time. Especially if some of the devs weren't part of a package deal.

I like Jira but I understand why others aren't fond of it. I'd argue it completely depends on how you configure/use Jira. Administering it is annoying regardless though.

[ChildOfChaos]

Surely this is not an issue though, if they do, some teenager in there bedroom will make a clone in a fortnight or less, Trello is great but it's very simple software.