[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').