Producteev

» see producteev.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The company that switched Producteev off had never bought it. Jive Software acquired it on 5 November 2012. Aurea acquired Jive in June 2017. The end-of-life notice appeared on a Jive community blog on 9 April 2018 and the service stopped on 11 May, which puts two corporate transactions between the people who wrote the software and the people who decided it was finished. Nobody involved in the second transaction had ever evaluated the product.

It started as a bootstrapped project in New York over the summer of 2008. Ilan Abehassera had the idea and brought in his brother-in-law as technical co-founder, and they took it on stage at LeWeb in Paris that December with 500 invites to give away. The interface was a grid of blank boxes on a web page. Each box was a project, each project took tasks, and you dropped other people into it and assigned things to them.

What made it usable was that it did not insist on being visited. You could create a task by sending an email, or by messaging a bot on Google Talk, and it had native clients for iOS and Android as well as desktop applications for both Mac and Windows at a time when that was uncommon for a small team. Individuals used it for nothing. Team plans ran from $20 to $500 depending on how many people were in them, and by the acquisition there were about 2,000 paying accounts, with Apple and the Financial Times among the names it put on the page.

I did not use this one and could not have named it before looking it up. That is not a regional gap or an era gap, since a free task manager in 2013 was reachable from anywhere with a browser and there was nothing about Ankara that kept it out. It is the category. Task software was the most abundant free product on the internet in those years, everybody tried several and abandoned all of them, and a tool with a million registered accounts and two thousand paying ones was describing that pattern rather than escaping it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what jive actually wanted ~

Jive bought two companies on the same day in November 2012 for a combined $7.6 million in cash plus 460,000 shares. The other one was Meetings.io, a Y Combinator video chat startup that had launched seven months earlier. Neither purchase was about the product as it existed. Jive sold an enterprise social platform and wanted task assignment and lightweight video inside it, competing against Salesforce's Do.com and against Asana, and the acquisitions were the fastest route to features.

The standalone app was the part left over. In May 2013 Jive made Producteev free for teams of any size and enterprise-ready at the same time, which sounds like investment and functioned as the opposite. Free users are not a revenue line, so from that point on the product had a large population and no number attached to it that anybody at Jive was measured on. It ran for another five years in that condition.

~ two acquisitions ~

Aurea completed its purchase of Jive on 12 June 2017. Aurea is a holding company in the business of buying enterprise software and running it for the cash it produces, which is a legitimate model and a specific one: products that do not produce cash are not kept. A free task manager acquired by the previous owner five years earlier, still carrying servers and support, is precisely the line item that model exists to remove.

So the decision was not a judgment on Producteev. Nobody at Aurea concluded that the grid of boxes had been the wrong idea or that Asana had won. Somebody read a list of assets and found one with running costs and no invoices attached to it, and the outcome was the same as if the product had been terrible.

~ how people found out ~

There was no announcement anywhere users were likely to be. The notice went up on the Jive community blog, which is a site for administrators of a different product, and the first widespread discussion was people turning up on the Asana forum in April 2018 asking each other how to get their data out. One post on 12 May notes flatly that the date had already passed. That is the whole public record of the shutdown.

Migration went where migrations went that year, mostly to Asana, or to whatever else could import a task list. Nine and a half years, a launch on the LeWeb stage, a million accounts and a mention in the trade press for the acquisition. The exit was a blog post on somebody else's forum, and even the secondary databases got the date wrong afterward and still list June.

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