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 :)
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.
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.
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.
Plus was the real turning point where I went from loving Google to tolerating them.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. No acquisition ever starts off with, "We're going to change a bunch
of stuff as we assimilate this new company."
I just assumed Trello was too big to be an "acqui-hire", but I really have no idea how big they were.
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.
On the contrary, it went in a good direction under Atlassian ownership.
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.
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.
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...
Though it's not a profit centre for them, so may be different.
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.
Needless to say, Rackspace did NOT get me as a customer after that. I switched to another provider.
http://www.businessinsider.com/its-been-1-year-since-faceboo...