While I admire 37signals I do find myself increasingly comparing them to Google and their offering. They make incredible services, but it's hard to trust them to build your business workflow around their products. If there aren't stripping back critical business features such as time tracking for our billing in the new Basecamp, they are looking to shutdown or sell others a few years on.
I hate corporate software as much as the next guy, but at least you know it will be around and supported for a long time to come and without stripping features core to running your business. /rant
The only feature I can think of that we ever removed (I might be wrong) is OpenID, because almost no-one used it and it was really confusing.
Time tracking is still there in Basecamp Classic, and that's not going away. If you rely on time tracking in Basecamp Classic you can continue to do so.
See this from the announcement page FAQ:
Q: What about Basecamp Classic?
"We are fully committed to running Basecamp Classic forever."
- http://37signals.com/
I want to switch to new basecamp, been a basecamp classic customer since 2005 (do i get a gift basket?), but rely on time tracking for my business. I don't want to have to rely on an external time tracking tool.
I get the feeling if a majority of people had switched to the new Basecamp, they would have killed off the old one, but it's such a breadwinner, they are not going to take it away, although I suspect if it ever gets to the point that a tiny portion is on Classic, they will change their mind, which is unsurprising as that's more or less been the concept of their company (to make bold statements and change them when circumstances change).
I really don't understand how the author of the parent post is still angry about this. 37s did the responsible thing by continuing to fully support the old version, giving users time to migrate (or not migrate).
I think there are a lot of 3rd parties that integrate with the new Basecamp to provide time tracking. Harvest is the one that immediately comes to mind. While this might seem to not be as good as a first party experience, I would argue that it is better to use a real time tracking app like Harvest, which is waaaaay more capable than the time tracking in Basecamp Classic.
Whatever criticisms you might have of Basecamp, they are certainly focused on avoiding feature creep and bloat. I suspect they agree with my assessment that Harvest et al. provide a better time tracking experience, so there is no reason to complicate their product with a (poorer) duplication of their features.
A million times this. We had a small division of our company using Basecamp for a bit but it got canned after some changes and they went crawling back to Salesforce.
It's pretty well documented that Basecamp is for a certain type of business. There's no reason to bash it. It serves a purpose, just not the one your small division found useful.
I admire a company sticking to their values when they could easily throw them out the window and grow into a massive corporate machine.
Something as trivial as time tracking can easily be done with an external application[1] that plugs directly into Basecamp.
I think this is a problem that's inherent in "the modern web". Trusting part of your business process to a SaaS application is always going introduce risk. Sometimes it's a calculated risk, and if you have contingency plans in place then it's acceptable. But in most cases, users simply aren't prepared for the day that a critical part of their workflow changes or disappears.
I know it's not a popular opinion here, but using SaaS is no different from outsourcing part of your operations. If it's a small part and there are plenty of direct competitors, the risk is minimal. However, if it's a critical part of your system and there are no direct alternatives, you really are putting the safety of your business in the provider's hands.
>Trusting part of your business process to a SaaS application is always going introduce risk.
Trusting part of your business process to yourself is always going to introduce risk.
This is the primary fallacy of the anti-SaaS argument. Cloud providers go down, but so do you. For an in-house solution to be superior from a reliability perspective, you not only need to show that cloud providers go down, but that you go down less. Which, unless you are in the infrastructure business - or have a large and competent (read: expensive) business area that's in the infrastructure business - is not terribly likely.
Like many others in the industry, I've had network applications which have run for years without unscheduled downtime. When I'm hosting my own application, I can architect whichever failover/redundancy solution I see fit. If my application does go down, I have physical access to the server and the data. My dependencies are all local, clearly outlined and easy to manage (from a risk perspective).
On the other hand, if I trust your SaaS application I'm also trusting that your backup and resilience procedures are at least as good as mine. I'm trusting that your dependencies are all managed in such a way that a failure can quickly be remedied or a contingency plan activated. I'm trusting your providers in the same way I'm trusting you. The opaque black box of your application frankly scares me. I can manage what I can see and what I can understand.
Not to over generalise, but there is a trend in SaaS application design towards the school of "let someone else worry about it" dependency management. This is clear in both infrastructure and libraries/frameworks. Many even outsource critical functionality to other third party SaaS services altogether (push notification, messaging, queue management, transcoding). Besides core application architecture, we also have to worry about connectivity (mine, yours, all of your dependencies). That's a lot of moving parts which can (and do) fail.
I trust my transparent, well documented system with its clear contingency plans much more than your opaque SaaS application, its unknown dependencies and its myriad moving parts.
And as we see all too often on HN, it's not just about downtime - SaaS applications shut down and disappear. If you're lucky, you get a chance to export your data. I'm certainly not suggesting that companies should continue to operate them at a loss for years, but given the choice between relying on someone else's SaaS product and depending on a locally hosted application, I'm going locally hosted every time when it concerns critical business workflow.
I'm not anti-SaaS at all, I just think we should be clear in our own minds about the risks introduced by relying heavily on third party providers (and I mirror that awareness in dependency management in my own software).
(On a side note: I find it interesting that while many of the users on HN ardently support SaaS, they condemn always-online DRM.)
The problem is spreading yourself too thin in the first place, getting people to rely on your products, and then pulling them. I think it's much more acceptable for a small business like 37Signals to do this than a large one like Google. Google has the resources to keep products around, 37Signals doesn't.
Sure, it's inconvenient for the end user. But as someone who's started a few projects myself, I would hate to think that starting something means you vow to support it until the end of times no matter what happens.
I think the target market has a big influence here.
For end user software, it's not such a big deal to drop support.
But for a project like Basecamp, businesses are buying it and potentially investing a lot of time and money to integrate it into their processes. Companies buying that kind of software expect it to be around a while. It's a bit disingenuous to sell to them knowing it may not be supported after a short time.
Even if you have the resources to support something, should you if its not your core focus?
Personal I feel that Google is still run as a startup, which is fantastic however people expect Google to be a corporate company.
>> "people expect Google to be a corporate company."
It is a corporate company. When millions of people rely on your products you need to be careful when introducing new ones and pulling old ones. I don't think you can run a business like a startup forever if you have millions/billions of users. You cans till maintain some aspects of that startup culture but there are other aspects you have to leave behind. You have to think of how anything you do is going to affect people's long term view of you. The Reader shut down may not have affected a majority of Google's customers but now some people are wary to adopt new Google services. If you pull that kind of thing often enough you damage your long term prospects.
I meant startup as a culture not in the terms of funding.
The fact that Google starts and closes down products very frequently is evidence of this.
What about Google X? Isn't that a bit like a startup?
Maybe I meant to say that departments WITHIN Google are run like startups not Google itself.
It still escapes me why this recent trend of naming companies with the names of products "for brand recognition" (the other obvious example is 10gen to become MongoDB Inc.)
It would be interesting to see other companies do that in the past:
- "Microsoft is going to become Windows Inc"
- "Apple Computers will be known from now on as iPod Ltd"
- "The new name of the company will be Air Jordan & Co. Nike no more!"
Large companies have big pockets and lots of people so they split their resources on multiple products. Things are very different for small companies and startups. Losing focus for a small company is deadly. It is extremely hard to be the best in a single market, trying to do it in multiple markets is crazy.
Best strategy for a startup is to find the best market they have a chance at dominating and focus all of their resources on it. Branding is just one of the resources you have. You want everyone to mention your product when they talk about you.
Bloomberg was once called "Innovative Market Systems". The customers called BBG terminal as Bloomberg from the start. Hence the renaming. (source: wikipedia).
One way to see the renaming is that it's not for outsiders, it's for those that work there. There's nothing that could do the job of informing everyone in your company what the new direction is more effective thank this.
I think it all depends. What 37signals have done makes sense because outside of the tech arena "37signals" is perhaps a confusing and difficult name/identity. I guess also because Basecamp has eventually become their flagship product they are primarily identified by it. You can trace this evolution in the blog post:
"37signals was founded back in 1999 as a web design firm. With the release of Basecamp in 2004, we began our journey to become a software company. Once Basecamp revenue surpassed web design revenue in 2005, the transition was complete."
"However, because we've released so many products over the years, we've become a bit scattered, a bit diluted."
"So with that in mind, last August we conducted a thorough review of our products, our customer base, our passions, and our visions of the company for the next 20 years. When we put it all on the table, everything lined up and pointed at one clear conclusion. We all got excited. We knew it was right."
"Moving forward, we will be a one product company. That product will be Basecamp. Our entire company will rally around Basecamp."
"From now on, we are Basecamp. Basecamp the company, Basecamp the product. We're one and the same."
This makes total sense. Even if in the future they launch another barnstorming product, if it's under the Basecamp brand/umbrella it will have a stronger brand identity than being launched as a 37signals product.
The same works for 10gen's rename to MongoDB Inc (even if as a UK citizen I find "Mongo" to be a difficult name to sell due to certain negative connotations associated with "mong").
Take a look at Oracle's history [1]:
"Ellison co-founded Oracle Corporation in 1977 with Bob Miner and Ed Oates under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL). In 1979 SDL changed its name to Relational Software, Inc. (RSI).[8] In 1982, RSI renamed itself Oracle Systems Corporation [9] to align itself more closely with its flagship product Oracle Database. At this stage Bob Miner served as the company's senior programmer. In 1995, Oracle Systems Corporation changed its name to Oracle Corporation."
Again, this makes total sense.
Apple and Microsoft were lucky from the moment of their inception to incorporate with cleverly simple names.
Moreover, "Microsoft" is hardly a clever or simple name -- it began as descriptive -- software for microcomputers -- but it's obscure enough in its construction and they've been willing to build strong sub-brands (e.g.: XBox) so its worked.
The point is that neither reflect the strategy taken by 37Signals here -- one that I believe will cause them problems in the future. Who else has done what they've done? One name definitely comes to mind -- RIM becoming "Blackberry". I'm sure there are others, but saying more about RIM would just be cheap shots -- but suffice to say it didn't do them any favors.
The short version is that a product company (Sprint.ly) bought the RoR services company (QuickLeft) and yet took the service company's name. This will let the combined company build the main product more efficiently, but also build more products down the road (which would be awkward if they were called Sprint.ly).
We recently changed our company name to Netsparker Ltd. after our flagship product. Because we have no intentions to build and sell 10 more products in the next decade.
However companies such as Microsoft and Apple are in business of building products, not selling only one.
Companies such as 37Signals are interested in building 1-3 products and never to become a huge corp with 1K people and 20 products.
> - "Apple Computers will be known from now on as iPod Ltd"
"It was incorporated as Apple Computer, Inc. on January 3, 1977, and was renamed as Apple Inc. on January 9, 2007 to reflect its shifted focus towards consumer electronics."
BTW, Alex Croox, once you start a business, you must run it forever right? Well, I have decided to build my flow around all your project here alexcrooks.me
I'd say this has more to do with an existential crisis - the landscape for project management collaboration tools is very crowded with competitors, and some are vastly superior in many ways to Basecamp. I stopped using Basecamp years ago and groan every time a client makes me log into it. The early adopters have mostly given up on their core product.
PM collab tools are becoming a commodity product in business, and 37 Signals got distracted and missed out on making sure that their brand was front and foremost in customers' minds. They could have doubled down on the brand and become the "Kleenex" of PM tools. But they waited too late and are now scrambling to re-affirm their dominance in the space. Thats how I see this.
No crisis. Business has never been better. The reasons are all honest and all clearly spelled out at http://37signals.com. We just don't want to hire a bunch more people and we don't want to have to spread ourselves too thin. Focus is where it's at and we want to regain it.
You underestimate the power of marketing, design, and timing then. A good product is not a prerequisite to being popular by any means (although it certainly helps).
1) Strategy is primarily about saying "No" to activities that are not aligned with your goals and values. Here is a great example for saying no in a pretty gutsy way.
2) I have used Basecamp since its launch for my client work and like it quite a bit. However, lately I have preferred to work with Trello. I'm curious to see how Basecamp will change in the near future. Maybe I'm not their target customer any more...
I was wondering from the headline if there was a merger... And from reading the post, it downed to me: I am one of.those that never realized the Basecamp 37signals connection, and I do read their blog!
To me 37signals was that webdev shop that made Rails and had a cool blog, I never connected them to any of their products Oo
Software is a hard business. Novel becomes trivial fast. Competitive edge can become a standard "best" practice fast and a product or business which was revolutionary and profitable one decade can seem naive the next.
Basecamp needs to move to keep up. They have their commitment to "not too much software" and simplicity which is great but has some tradeoffs. In any case, collaboration between people working on things remotely or in the same office using the internet is not done yet. There are still big things to be figured out. The culture and the technology is evolving. Personally, I use Basecamp and it is better than email for a lot of things, but there are a lot of thing I wish it did or did differently.
In essence, there is plenty of work for a 50 person team in this space. Good luck to them.
Anything is possible with software - especially horrible complexity. Rolling more things into something isn't the way forward. We're committed to getting simpler over time, not harder. Not more stuff, but the right stuff.
Basecamp may not have all the power features that some HN readers (and myself) would want, but in retrospect that's exactly the point - it makes their software simple and accessible.
I love these guys. 37signals are an inspiration, and I've been using and loving Basecamp since I was 17 and running a company with my friends in school.
We managed dozens of clients at a time and one of the biggest compliments we get is on how easy it is to use Basecamp. Really looking forward to the new ideas they have in store.
Did you read the post? They specifically said they don't want to grow, and want a company where everyone knows everyone else. Simple "hiring more devs" flies in the face of this desire.
Honestly it can be liberating to strip out less than ideal elements from your business to focus on what you love and what is working the best.
Campfire and Highrise are not failures at all. They generate millions a year in profits. They just aren't our focus anymore. We want to focus all of our energy on one thing, not multiple things. Nothing more than that. No hidden agendas or hidden news.
Am I the last guy still paying $7/month for a solo Backpack account? I've looked for good alternatives a few times, and never found anything I like as much as Backpack for basic note-taking. As long as they'll keep taking my $7, I guess I'll keep using it.
10 years after they released Basecamp and apparently it's still their "best idea". This explains why every 37signals blogpost I read was so devoid of good ideas. One hit wonders.
I remember DHH talking about this on a podcast once i.e. for most super-successful companies, the lion's share of their of their PROFITS (not usage or revenue w/o profit) have typically come from 1 or 2 core products.
Think of Google and AdWords, Microsoft and Windows/Office, Amazon and their e-commerce business, etc. These companies all have lots of other successful products, each of which is used by millions of people and may generate lots of revenue, but at the end of the day their actual profits come from their 1 core product.
Apple is the most recent example of a company that has successfully been able to create multiple different product lines that were extremely profitable on their own.
So saying that Basecamp is 37Signals' "one good idea" is not a knock on them at all. It simply puts them in the same league as any other super-successful company.
P.S. DHH is an unabashed capitalist and he's gone on the record many times saying that he'd rather be part of a company valued at $100 million that takes home $10's of millions home in profit every year vs a company valued at $1 billion that takes home minimal or no profits every year (e.g. Groupon). I'm assuming that this sentiment is shared by others at 37Signals as well.
"When we meet people, and they ask us what we do, we say we work for 37signals. If they aren't in the tech world, they'll squint and say "what's that?". When we say "we're the folks who make Basecamp", their eyes light up and open wide. "Basecamp! Oh I love Basecamp!..."
I haven't seen someone so proud of their mediocre-at-best product. Basecamp leaves A LOT to be desired. We switched to Jira and couldn't be happier.
Wow, as one of the "pioneers" of the SaaS model, and a highly successful bootstrapped startup for 10+ years, I would have to say... yes, I would imagine you are one of very few people in this community who would have never heard of 37signals.
It's weird how open-source encourages using something without really understanding how it originated. I bet less than 10% of the people who use Rails realize it came from a company, let alone which one. (The same will probably become true of dotCloud with Docker soon enough.)
I suppose even Yahoo and Google were "startups" at one time. 37signals probably kept the moniker longer than other businesses because they were profitable early, and they didn't need or want to grow fast for growth's sake.
and they didn't need or want to grow fast for growth's sake.
The HN/YC model of a "startup" is something that is growing rapidly, as per http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html, so perhaps 37signals was never a startup in the HN use of the term ;-)
SaaS as a business model, not as a technology. Webmail was a feature, not the entire business, for the most part. I'm sure you can find examples of SaaS before 37signals, but that doesn't detract from the fact that they were amongst the first to build an entire company from the business model.
I couldn't possibly give you more upvotes for this snarky comment. While 37 Signals/Basecamp (whatever) has made some great products over the years, their self-righteous (IMHO) blog posts always turned me off to them and left me with the impression that they believed in their own bullshit.
Just because you've had success doesn't mean you know everything about even your success or why you achieved it. Be humble, even while educating and talking about your achievements.
DHH co-founded a multi-million dollar business, created one of the most famous web-frameworks, races on Le Mans, and has one-of-a-kind sports car made specially for him [1]. He's fucking cool.
1) Will they lose the ability to experiment as a one product company?
2) "If we can't find the right partner or buyer, we are committed to continuing to run the products for our existing customers forever." This is very impressive. Forever is a long time, and comes with a real cost if you're not putting in new users.
Bravo for a successful company to be willing to make big strategic moves.
I don't think Asana competes with base camp, at all. It's an over customizable nightmare that you need engineers to administer for Big Corps. It competes with Jira. Basecamp is something that a nontechnical person can use.
Can anyone name a trust-worthy competitors? I've done some searching and most competitors seem to be still branded with "Web 2.0" bubbles and the apps left rotting in its own feces the last 5 years.
I'm genuinely looking for competitors to Basecamp for small businesses. Zoho?
Not sure about the move itself but I am glad they chose Basecamp. Started using Basecamp in 2005 and still use it. Basecamp is a nice umbrella all their products seem to fit into.
And I am for making the company and the product as one. One less thing to sell. For companies of that size.
I had just signed up for Highrise but haven't started implementing it yet. Sounds like the product will live on but I wouldn't mind some recommendations for alternatives if anybody has some.
I've used both Salesforce and SugarCRM and they seem a bit overkill for my use.
There's nothing much you need to know to write a webchat client. Campfire isn't high volume, so it doesn't need to be too efficient either. Last time I checked campfire processes a few messages a second. Heck you could rewrite it in PHP/MySQL if you were that way inclined.
Campfire didn't succeed because it was a good product. It succeeded because they marketed it to their "following" who bought into it.
You could levy that same criticism on any company who leveraged an existing success to market and sell a less than stellar product or service.
Many times people will see a product or company and think "how simple, I could have made that ... why did they succeed?" Everyone has assets they bring to the table that help them succeed. For some it means they can create and sell a less than stellar product because they have existing leverage in a market that give them an advantage an average "Joe" wouldn't.
I saw a couple of people saying things like this, it always seemed to me they are different customers, Trello is for internal project management, where Basecamp is better for external client facing management (which is what 37s made it for to begin with).
> When we meet people, and they ask us what we do, we say we work for 37signals. If they aren't in the tech world, they'll squint and say "what's that?". When we say "we're the folks who make Basecamp", their eyes light up and open wide. "Basecamp! Oh I love Basecamp! My wife uses Basecamp too! [my emphasis] Even our church uses Basecamp!"
Sometimes, right before I submit a comment I'd ask myself, "What do I hope to achieve by writing this comment? Will people be entertained by this comment? Will the audience find their worldview challenged? Would the world be better off with the comment I'm about to make, or am I just wasting everyone's time?"
With even a superficial study of the company, its public figures, or their publications you would know that "taking VC money" or massive growth would be anathema to 37Signals. On the level of "Doctors without Borders" going into the landmine business.
37Signals has an interesting and often counter intuitive approach to a modern software business. While I don't always agree with their methods or dogma, it is fascinating to watch what they try and, more specifically, how they actually execute on their ideals. It's like a science experiment that I don't have to pay for :-)
The worse thing for everyone, customers and voyeurs, would be to take VC money and become like Atlassian.
Profitable companies take VC money all the time. In fact, I would guess that's where most VC money goes to (despite all the high profile SV startups that get press). Companies do so to grow at a faster rate.
I hate corporate software as much as the next guy, but at least you know it will be around and supported for a long time to come and without stripping features core to running your business. /rant