[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...