| The article makes some excellent points. However I'm not sure I understand how acquiring Trello would save JIRA. First off, I'm not sure that JIRA is in need of saving. IMHO it has grown to become a very bloated product which very few people really know how to use. If I were to pick a tool for project management, I wouldn't consider JIRA for one second. On the other hand, they have a fine game going in the enterprise segment. Enterprises value a bloated feature set because they pay up big money and because Bob in purchasing needs something semi-substantial to justify the high cost. Besides, Bob won't be using the product anyway. Trello, on the other hand, would be favored by different types of customers. Small projects, small companies. It offers low pricing, has a small sales department and a large customer base. According to Joel Spolsky, in his "Camels and Rubber Duckies" blog post (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...), there is usually no middle road. There is rarely a segment for a mid-range product with half the feature set of the enterprise product and a far higher price than the simple product. Which begs the question: What does Atlassian hope to achieve? 1) create some unified product which will cater to both the garage startup and to Bob in purchasing? Good luck with that 2) turn off Trello? That's what Darth Vader would have done but there is a certain amount of negative publicity to using the death star ray 3) Make Trello rot, either by 3a) stopping funding of Trello and let it become slowly obsolete 3b) sprinkling with bloated features, such as JIRA integration or what have we Probably 3b). Anyway, move Trello too much off its current trajectory and boom, some new startup will pop up, offer an "Import Data from Trello" feature and do things right. Trello is pretty simple by design, and the APIs are open. There is really no customer lock-in. I think Atlassian is smart enough to know this. |