A Response to Daring Fireball’s Take on Wired’s Article on 37signals
From the Daring Fireball post on Wired’s story on 37signals:
Long profile by Andrew Park in the March issue. Pretty good overall, but there’s an awful lot of ginned-up conflict. E.g. the last paragraph contains the sentence: ‘Call it arrogance or idealism, but they would rather fail than adapt,’ and suggests they’re somehow losing customers due to their emphasis on simplicity above all else.”
Doesn’t seem so “ginned-up” from here. Count me among the lost customers.
37signals have earned their success. They get an awful lot right in their apps, from lack of data lock-in to an admirable overall level of intuitiveness.
So why have I given up on them after trying to use Basecamp for nearly 3 years?
A big reason would be that “vetoing customer requests” is standard operating procedure at 37signals. Don’t take my word for it: it says so on page 62 of Getting Real:
Don’t worry about tracking and saving each request that comes in. Let your customers be your memory. If it’s really worth remembering, they’ll remind you until you can’t forget.
Or until they go away because they have better things to do.
It’s fine with me that DHH would say “fuck you” to this, but he doesn’t get to do that and have my money.
For people looking for something, um, less simple than Basecamp (on Mac OS X) take a look at OmniPlan, recently upgraded to version 1.5.
DHH Said,
February 26, 2008 @ 11:45 am
Christopher, we don’t say fuck you to customers requesting features. That’s insane. Why would we do that? The article did indeed offer a much “ginned-up” version of reality.
Now we may very well still say no to custom requests. We do that frequently. Including our own feature requests. That’s how we got to that “admirable overall level of intuitiveness”. It’s a very easy thing to lose. There’s nothing easier than just saying yes, yes, yes all the time.
So I’m sad to see you go as a customer and you definitely do the right thing by picking a product that has the features you feel that you need, but please don’t blow that into an image that we say fuck you to people who request features. That’s simply not true.
Jason Fried Said,
February 26, 2008 @ 5:14 pm
If you’re curious, we’ve just posted our response to the piece:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/admin/posts/881-37signals-featured-in-wired-march-2008-issue
Jason Fried Said,
February 26, 2008 @ 5:14 pm
Shoot, sorry. Gotta pull the /admin/ out of there:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/881-37signals-featured-in-wired-march-2008-issue
Chris Said,
February 26, 2008 @ 7:53 pm
David and Jason,
Thanks for your comment and follow-up.
David, it was wrong of me to put words in your mouth, even in a hypothetical way, and I apologize for that.
I won’t go into the specifics of changes/enhancements we’d suggested for Basecamp; that ship has sailed. Features that were crucial to our use of Basecamp were not important enough to implement. A negative response feels very much like a ‘fuck you’, especially when the suggestion wasn’t made lightly and others thought it worthwhile.
I do admire what you’ve done with Basecamp, Rails, etc., and I’ve recommended Basecamp to others who continue to rely on it. But we’ve moved on.
Continued success — and congrats on the coverage in Wired. Good ‘Warhol inches’ to have.