Comments on: 37Signals: Patchy workarounds are not “solutions”

By: Pete

Pete — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 12:48:00 +0000

This site says it all - http://www.whybasecampsux.org/. There are a bunch of great alternatives out there. 37$ are digging themselves into a hole. Its time to bail.

By: Pete

Pete — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 11:48:00 +0000

This site says it all - http://www.whybasecampsux.org/. There are a bunch of great alternatives out there. 37$ are digging themselves into a hole. Its time to bail.

By: Ned Griffin

Ned Griffin — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 09:15:34 +0000

I totally agree with you. Basecamp guys have created software that is popular, but now they don’t want to listen to their customer’s requests. I personally asked them to change this a couple of times. They ignored me, so I decided why stick to Basecamp, if people say that there’s much better software out there. So I switched to Wrike http://www.wrike.com. The tool definitely has more to offer than Basecamp.

By: Jake McKee

Jake McKee — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:36:13 +0000

@DHH I’d found that tip, but the problem is that in order to do that you a) have to still have access to the basecamp project you’re trying to remove, and/or b) have to actually log into the site.

The problem in this case is that I still have access to something I should have access to. I’m trying to remove the connection so that I’m not viewing anything I’m not supposed to without actually having to log into the thing that is off-limits.

By: DHH

DHH — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 20:50:00 +0000

If you don’t want to have a certain user account appear in your OpenBar, you can just switch from OpenID to a regular username and password on that user account. That’ll take it out of the bar.

By: Robert Dempsey

Robert Dempsey — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:23:24 +0000

We have been avid users of BaseCamp in the past and while it doesn’t work for us now, we loved it at the time. We do love Campfire however, and use it daily.

Having said that, you bring up a very good point – handling user accounts across a growing list of applications developed by a single company. The lesson here appears to be that if you start out with one application and grow to a suite of applications, you must support a single user account across the entire suite, and make it easy to jump from application to application. I doubt that anyone held back from signing up for all of the 37Signals products, however it is a good lesson for other companies growing their online application portfolio.