"When we sat down, it was all about the vision and what we wanted to build,"
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.
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.
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.
Most if not all of them because they were all friendly deals and the acquired wanted the deal to happen. (In other words, the acquired's owners wanted BigCo's money more than they wanted to remain independent.)
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 doesn't suck. It is extremely complex, especially if there is a (misguided) desire for agile plugins and such, by Jira on its own is quite usable. You must have not used their competitors to consider it crap.
Jira's default state in many companies is more likely proof of broken processes. Something which no tool can solve.
The corollary of Jira being "extremely complex" turns out to be that most Jira instances are not set up optimally - meaning that the experience for a lot of people is "this is crap".
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.
Many companies have JIRA set up like a clock which is too tightly wound - not enough slack in their processes and permissions and too wedded to a development or organizational ideology.
JIRA is amazing if the overriding philosophy is openness and slack in workflows.
But it's almost certainly a config/training problem rather than a software problem.
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?
Change a few words and that becomes a defense of SAP.
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.
Sure, and I'd say the same (with a little less personal experience) for SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and a whole bunch of other "enterprise platform" scale tools. There'll be heaps of poorly thought out and configured installations, and a few much less talked about companies where they got it set up properly and trained the users - who're busy raking in money executing their company business instead of killing productivity and morale fighting with their software...
> and a few much less talked about companies where they got it set up properly and trained the users - who're busy raking in money executing their company business instead of killing productivity and morale fighting with their software
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.
I _suspect_ this is because you don't move in the same circles as the people who benefit most here.
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.
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.
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™...
Sure. vi, grep, and bash are all great tools, and you can do amazing software dev work using them - but that doesn't mean things like IntelliJ aren't also great. My Groovy/Grails devs think I'm some sort of Wizard when I pull out grep and pipe things to awk then pipe that to a Perl one liner, but I watch them using their IDE and think "Wow, that's _so_ cool!" as well...
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!)
Occams razor is slightly more sophisticated than 'complex != Good'.
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.
Complex Jira setups and bad management seem to go hand in hand. A bad manager will try and fix problems by introducing more process and avoiding the real issues. It lets them feel like they are doing something useful. And Jira is more than happy to let them do that. That's not a fault of the software, though.
Well, Jira has an 80/20 problem: it tries to do the 20% that satisfies 80% of the users (cases.) so far so good, but when you trip over one of the details that make up the remaining 80% you're SOL. JIRA-1330 is my favorite :)
Atlassian products are about one step improved from corporate financial management software. Think about the last craptastic time keeping system you've used. They all seem to be terrible in some weird way.
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.
Remedy is one of the worst software packages I've had the misfortune to work with, so saying something is better than Remedy is damning it with faint praise.....
From my experience Hacker News community dislike post like this but I have to agree, RIP Trello. Atlassian bought 17 startups and for better or worse they're not thriving.
I had to manage our corporate JIRA for a few years after the previous admins managed to get it stuck in an impossible configuration. My experience was it worked good enough if you stuck to the defaults. Spent a few weeks ripping out all kinds of weird workflows and started trusting the users instead. The thing was not perfect, but compared to the other stuff we had i'd give it 8/10 (or a B- for you Americans out there)
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.
- names of tags on cards, card id's for referencing from git commits, smarter use of screen estate. Everyone I work with uses at least a couple of plugins.
- 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I have quite the opposite opinion. I really like working with Jira (as opposed to e.g. bugzilla, clearquest).
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.
Bitbucket, unlike github, clung to a design of many servers connected to a big disk. GitHub instead went for many servers with their own disk and a distributed storage system. This means that bitbucket ends up being a lot slower in many operations than github.
> “When we sat down, it was all about the vision and what we wanted to build,” Pryor said. “The kind of people we hired, the kind of company we wanted to create.”
Soon as I read that line I knew this article wasn't going to be of any worth. Just a PR puff piece.
I guess "it's good". With the traction they were having, I think they could have raised more money and stay independent. So I don't think it's "it got scooped up", but more Trello decided to sell to someone they liked.
Remember Trello is separate from Fog Creek. Until the acquisition, they were complementary products. Now they are still complementary but being offered by a direct competitor.
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.
If anyone else thinks Atlassian are going to run Trello into the ground, there is an open source alternative that's sprung up called Wekan. https://wekan.io/
I haven't used it personally, but it appears to look and work just like Trello!
A much better account of an attempted Atlassian acquisition is told by Peldi from Balsamiq. Fascinating story with lots of juicy details about why it didn't happen. AFAIK Peldi tells the story at conferences but asks for it not to be recorded, to respect Atlassian's wishes.
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.