Microsoft clones Trello, smuggles it into Office

Remember the days when you could accurately predict what would appear in next year’s version of Office or Windows by looking at CNet’s Top 10 download chart this year? Well, happy days are here again. Redmond has unveiled a card-based collaboration tool that will be bundled with enterprise editions of Office. Microsoft Planner …

[wolfetone]

"Today Microsoft continues to sell cloud, server and standalone client versions for businesses that need its critical path analysis."

I must be suffering from cynicism at the ripe old age of 28 but I do declare this has the faint whiff of a product endorsement about it.

[BasicChimpTheory]

This is less ripping off Trello (which is just a simple Kanban board (and it rules pretty hard because of that)) and more half-arsing JIRA.

The headline and initial few paragraphs had me hoping work would buy this (we're not allowed to use Trello, we do have JIRA but we can't set up personal boards). However, actually looking at the product video shows this thing is probably pus.

[Rob Gr]

I always thought Trello was a rip-off of ThoughtWorks Mingle (https://www.thoughtworks.com/mingle/) anyway, so what goes around comes around.

[BasicChimpTheory]

@Rob Gr

I'm not aware of Mingle but it definitely looks similar enough that if they beat Trello to market then Mingle can say they were first.

But both are clearly simple Kanban board digital-analogues.

I've worked with physical Kanbans and digital ones (i.e. JIRA, Trello) and I feel like physical ones are sometines most productive (once a group psychology lens is applied) but I've also worked in the reporting field so, yeah, go digital!

But this Planner thing looks dinky AF, without the awesome simplicity of Trello (and apparently Mingle).

[Richard Wharram]

Had a play

It's a nice UI but without the ability to limit who can add/update/delete tasks or copy a new project from a template it's not a lot of use except for small teams.

[Dan 55]

I'd have thought MS would have bought Trello

They buy anything these days and Joel used to work at MS.

[roselan]

Re: I'd have thought MS would have bought Trello

Not expensive enough my son.

Plus it somewhat successful, it wont bode well at MS.

[PhilipN]

Explains a lot

MS must use this internally.

I mean have you ever been involved in a collaborative effort to do anything?

Imagine a physical meeting where 5 equally ego-driven "contributors" try to decide something. Hopeless.

Only thing which works is a project manager to knock heads together and tell (most of) the team to "Shut the *** up!" most of the time.

If the opening sequence of the video (quite laughable) is how MS thinks then no wonder we have seen .... (no I am not going to go there).

[dbosak]

Kanban

As said previously - ALL of the tools were just digital simulations of the Kanban methodology. No copywriting there. Nicely said (Quote): "Kanban (看板 ?) (literally signboard or billboard in Japanese) is a scheduling system for lean manufacturing and just-in-time manufacturing. Kanban is an inventory-control system to control the supply chain. Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota, developed kanban to improve manufacturing efficiency." (EoQ). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban

Kanban was developed in Japan from the fifties when Toyota started applying Shewhart's and Deming's ideas on Quality in practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

So, apps are as good as people can apply the methodology of linear project flow in practice. They do differ in the way they add and/or acquired data and in the way the administer user rights. What I would like to see is the development of the concept within the apps - so they stop emulating and start innovating :-)