Goodbye 37signals, hello Basecamp

After a six-month review of its operations, Jason Fried's 37signals has decided on a wholesale liposuction of its business: it plans to offload all of its products but one, and assume the name of that product, Basecamp. The decade-old Basecamp is the staple of collaborative project management for 285,000 companies (and sparked …

[Paul K]

Jason Friend?

Damn you spellcheck! I assume you mean Jason Fried?

[Richard Chirgwin]

Re: Jason Friend?

Regrettably, I can't blame spellcheck, but eyesight. Even with my glasses on, I honestly read it as "Friend".

Thank you for correcting me, friend commentard.

Richard Chirgwin

The Register

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Jason Friend?

What's a small typo between friends :-)

I'll get my coat....

[sorry, what?]

Suckish

I know the idea was "minimum viable product", but my experience with Basecamp left me feeling it was "barely viable 'product'" - it sucked bad and had nasty issues with HTML embedded in the content etc. and 37sig didn't seem to be particularly driven to improve the 'product', preferring instead to start creating something else.

Fortunately for me the requirement to use it in my job evaporated.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I don't find the rendering bad

but the redesign of a couple of years ago "simplified" some bits of the ui and seem to have removed utility at the same time. The big list of all the comments on everything in time order is an example, it's difficult to read compared to the old list of message headers.....

This is why I balk when people go on about how great online services are, always updated and fresh. That's fine till you want to run the old version cos the new one removed something you need. All of a sudden locally installed apps sound much better.

[BlueGreen]

Re: Suckish

Agreed, have to use it at work, never understood it's purpose. Just seemed like a spectacularly crap issue tracker.

That 67signals spoof below is brilliant btw.

[Anonymous Coward]

Rails?

No mention here of the future of Ruby on Rails.

Presumably the larger ecosystem is enough now, anyway, but it would be nice to hear their take on it's future.

[baz rowlingson]

What about 67signals?

Are these guys going to do the same?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What about 67signals?

Debating forwarding that URL to a client that uses Basecamp...