Trello is hugely popular amongst software developers, but I think the point being made is that it's also popular outside that niche. At work it came in through the back door being used for software planning, but quickly became the preferred tool for managing any sort of project. There's a similar story with me showing it to my wife, who just finished managing her PhD in history with it.
I'm a data scientist and I've been using it as an informal Kanban board because JIRA is way too complicated-looking for me want to even try to learn. Trello is about as dead-simple as it can get. There's already too much in my brain.
Bingo... that's the whole idea here. Small teams within larger companies and small companies can use Trello. When they grow up (or need to interact with the rest of the company) they use JIRA. In fact I would expect JIRA integrations that make it trivial to convert a Trello card to a JIRA task, probably with an option to automatically convert a checklist into subtasks.
This acquisition makes total sense; Trello and JIRA target mostly non-overlapping market segments and there are some easy low-hanging integration fruits to be picked. I'll also bet Trello becomes a deal-sweetener going forward. License JIRA and for +15% you also get Trello for your whole company.
Very well said, the larger the company, the less flexibility it has in choosing the right software for the entire company. Smaller teams can move quicker, faster, and tend to find their own solutions within larger corporations.
I know a lot of smaller dev teams use it for lowercase-a agile projects and I currently use it for all my personal projects. It's basically the antithesis of heavyweight tools like Jira.
