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To be fair I've been a part of 3 acquisitions and have seen this story play out tens of times with beloved software. It always starts out this way. "The origina

To be fair I've been a part of 3 acquisitions and have seen this story play out tens of times with beloved software. It always starts out this way. "The original folks are going to run it, not the new company!" "Things will stay the same" yadda yadda yadda. 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 :)

misiti3780 10y ago
it has worked out for instagram so far - no ?
- brianwawok 10y ago
  How many handcuffs have expired?
  - mooreds 10y ago
    It has been over 4 years, so I imagine most of them have. http://www.businessinsider.com/its-been-1-year-since-facebook-bought-instagram-for-1-billion-heres-how-co-founder-kevin-systrom-spent-it-2013-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/its-been-1-year-since-faceboo...
DannyBee 10y ago
I'm with you. 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.
gilini 10y ago
I get where you're coming from but the guy above was straight up declaring Trello's death. Even with skepticism you can agree it's being too pessimistic too early. 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.
- huckyaus 10y ago
  > 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.
jlarocco 10y ago
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/ 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.
- eloisant 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    They did merge it with Stash, though, didn't they?
    - pkaeding 10y ago
      More accurately, they merged Stash with Bitbucket (Stash is now called 'Bitbucket Server').
- quanticle 10y ago
  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?
  - 10y ago
BurningFrog 10y ago
The again, 1-3 years down the road things would have changed a lot anyway. 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...
inglor 10y ago
I think WhatsApp and Waze are both pretty good examples of high profile acquisitions that played out this way. 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.
- throwawaymaroon 10y ago
  That's a terrible example. Remember Google+ accounts and Youtube?
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    >didn't turn into Google Videos 2.0. // 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.
  - xiaoma 10y ago
    I still haven't gotten any assistance from Google after losing my YouTube account when my f#@!ing plus account (which I didn't even want) spawned another account from the gmail address I'd signed up before Google bought them. Plus was the real turning point where I went from loving Google to tolerating them.
    - cellularmitosis 10y ago
      I also lost access to my first YouTube account. That was the first time my faith in the cloud had been shaken.
    - fuck_google 10y ago
      "Most people love taking it up the ass according to our A/B testing. We are sorry you are not one of us." -Googler
- 10y ago
grey-area 10y ago
Another example is slicehost: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2974-the-slicehost-story https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2974-the-slicehost-story http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/229402851/rackspace-clarifies-slicehost-shutdown-cloud-servers-transition.htm 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.
- nocman 10y ago
  Amen to that. I used slicehost for years and was totally happy with them. Then Rackspace bought them and killed them off. Needless to say, Rackspace did NOT get me as a customer after that. I switched to another provider.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  I was a longtime Slicehost user and while Rackspace eventually phased them out, they were not competitive with the new crop of VPS providers anyway. I was paying $70/mo for my slice. I don't remember the specs, but when they went away, I switched to a Linode that was about half the cost. (Linode has now also been outmoded for my uses, and I just have Vultr and DigitalOcean servers (+ 1 dedicated server in a rack somewhere) now).
hyperpallium 10y ago
Atlassian acquired bitbucket, and seems to be going ok. Though it's not a profit centre for them, so may be different.
thewhitetulip 10y ago
I've not been a part of acquisition but I've seen many from the outside, take the exame of Whatsapp, when they sold off to facebook they were like "we will never add calling to whatsapp, it will always focus on text messaging", " we care for privacy very much, never will we send your data" et al, less than one year after the acquisition, they do everything that they had promised not to do!
techcofounder 10y ago
Zappos is a good example of an acquisition that maintained its original culture.

misiti3780 10y ago

it has worked out for instagram so far - no ?

brianwawok 10y ago
How many handcuffs have expired?
- mooreds 10y ago
  It has been over 4 years, so I imagine most of them have. http://www.businessinsider.com/its-been-1-year-since-facebook-bought-instagram-for-1-billion-heres-how-co-founder-kevin-systrom-spent-it-2013-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/its-been-1-year-since-faceboo...

DannyBee 10y ago

I'm with you. 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.

gilini 10y ago

I get where you're coming from but the guy above was straight up declaring Trello's death. Even with skepticism you can agree it's being too pessimistic too early. 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.

huckyaus 10y ago
> 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.

jlarocco 10y ago

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/ 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.

eloisant 10y ago
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 10y ago
  They did merge it with Stash, though, didn't they?
  - pkaeding 10y ago
    More accurately, they merged Stash with Bitbucket (Stash is now called 'Bitbucket Server').
quanticle 10y ago
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?
- 10y ago

BurningFrog 10y ago

The again, 1-3 years down the road things would have changed a lot anyway. 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...

inglor 10y ago

I think WhatsApp and Waze are both pretty good examples of high profile acquisitions that played out this way. 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.

throwawaymaroon 10y ago
That's a terrible example. Remember Google+ accounts and Youtube?
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  >didn't turn into Google Videos 2.0. // 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.
- xiaoma 10y ago
  I still haven't gotten any assistance from Google after losing my YouTube account when my f#@!ing plus account (which I didn't even want) spawned another account from the gmail address I'd signed up before Google bought them. Plus was the real turning point where I went from loving Google to tolerating them.
  - cellularmitosis 10y ago
    I also lost access to my first YouTube account. That was the first time my faith in the cloud had been shaken.
  - fuck_google 10y ago
    "Most people love taking it up the ass according to our A/B testing. We are sorry you are not one of us." -Googler
10y ago

grey-area 10y ago

Another example is slicehost: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2974-the-slicehost-story https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2974-the-slicehost-story http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/229402851/rackspace-clarifies-slicehost-shutdown-cloud-servers-transition.htm 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.

nocman 10y ago
Amen to that. I used slicehost for years and was totally happy with them. Then Rackspace bought them and killed them off. Needless to say, Rackspace did NOT get me as a customer after that. I switched to another provider.
cookiecaper 10y ago
I was a longtime Slicehost user and while Rackspace eventually phased them out, they were not competitive with the new crop of VPS providers anyway. I was paying $70/mo for my slice. I don't remember the specs, but when they went away, I switched to a Linode that was about half the cost. (Linode has now also been outmoded for my uses, and I just have Vultr and DigitalOcean servers (+ 1 dedicated server in a rack somewhere) now).

hyperpallium 10y ago

Atlassian acquired bitbucket, and seems to be going ok. Though it's not a profit centre for them, so may be different.

thewhitetulip 10y ago

I've not been a part of acquisition but I've seen many from the outside, take the exame of Whatsapp, when they sold off to facebook they were like "we will never add calling to whatsapp, it will always focus on text messaging", " we care for privacy very much, never will we send your data" et al, less than one year after the acquisition, they do everything that they had promised not to do!

techcofounder 10y ago

Zappos is a good example of an acquisition that maintained its original culture.