Atlassian buys team collaboration app Trello for $425 million

Jos

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Atlassian is all in on collaboration software. The Sydney-based developer behind Jira and HipChat is buying the popular collaboration app Trello in a deal valued at $425 million — $360 million in cash, and $65 million in stock. The acquisition is expected to close before March 31, 2017.

Based on the kanban-style, ‘board’ architectural model, Trello makes structuring work easier by giving you a visual overview of task responsibilities, progress, and upcoming deadlines with a simple drag and drop interface. It’s a flexible, simple product that can be used for a variety of purposes. We've been using it to organize our editorial calendar for the past few years, for example. The service currently has about 19 million users, including employees at large companies like Pixar, Adobe Systems and Google. 

Last year Microsoft launched a similar task centric work management tool for Office 365 called Planner that’s aimed at taking some of those users away from Trello as well as Asana.

This marks Atlassian’s 18th and largest acquisition to date. Trello's roughly 100 employees will join the 1,800 already at Atlassian, and just like with many of its previous acquisitions, the company plans to keep both the service and brand alive and current users shouldn’t see any immediate changes.

Speaking about the acquisition, Atlassian President Jay Simons says he sees Trello fitting in between their existing Confluence and Jira collaboration software. The company says it plans to ramp up efforts to integrate Trello with its own offerings, such as its HipChat group chat product, and it doesn’t plan to cut its current integrations with competing software like Slack.

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Anyone has good team collaborative apps for digital agency better than Basecamp at all?
 
Oh my god.

I've been using Jira for some years. Overall it works, but it has some problems that make you wonder whether any of the Atlassian developers have ever bothered to use it for real. And the worst part is that they don't give a damn about users' feedback. I've lost count of the bug reports and feature requests that they have closed saying that "there are still currently no plans to implement this suggestion, and it is not currently on any JIRA team’s roadmap at this stage". What are they working on, instead? Breaking once again the compatibility of plugins' APIs, probably.

My favourite feature request is https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-2997: opend on 20/Jan/2004, voted by hundreds, and ignored like all the others. Why is it special? Because of a comment:

"Atlassian, after ten years, it might be nice to give some sort of update on this.
I was in middle school when Pierre created this feature request."​

That reference to being in middle school made my day! Except that it's actually tragic, not funny.
Oh, and now it's almost 13 years. Keep up the good work, Atlassian! A few more years, and somebody will be able to reply to that comment with something like "Middle school? I hadn't even been born yet!"

Trello is a software that I wanted to try, since it has been created by Joel Spolsky, one of the founders of Stack Overflow, which is the best resource a programmer can find, hands down.

Well, now I guess I'll try something else...
 
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