Bitching About Basecamp (opens in new tab)

For as much as we all love 37s and their preaching, Scott brings up some very valid points about their actual products outside of their books and brand.

The author of this post doesn't want Basecamp. He wants something that does fine-grained project management. I'm sure Zoho (or, late edit, Pivotal Tracker) does something closer to what he needs.

It's one thing to complain that Basecamp is too drag-and-drop. But not having detailed schedule management features is practically Basecamp's calling card. He's using it wrong.

Basecamp is awesome when your workflow is "generate some kind of file, post it, talk about it, repeat". A surprising number of projects boil down to that. For that workflow, Basecamp is the best thing I've used. For any other workflow, look elsewhere.

I've long been a fan of 'Getting Real' and now 'Rework' but I'm pretty sure I'm not their target customer -- I've found all of their products lacking in functionality. And, it just doesn't seem like they're listening to my customer type, or my problems. So, I've just relented and have assumed that I'm not their target, and they they're doing an awesome job with whoever their actual customer target is!

I think the real value proposition from Basecamp is that it replaces e-mail. Some of us don't really need all that fancy stuff, so much that we may even use e-mail to manage our projects (I still do use e-mail when it's something very small).

So Basecamp does not try to solve everything, it's just the best thing after e-mail.

The OP is truly missing the point of Basecamp, and some of the points don't make that much sense if I'm reading them correctly:

"No time estimates" - if you upgrade to the next highest version of Basecamp you will get time tracking functionality for all tasks, which would work just fine for basic time estimation. If you don't want to upgrade to the next highest version, then just put your estimate for the time a task will take into the comments for that task. The idea is to figure out a way to make this simple system work for you, and that's why they can cast such a wide net to so many different types of industries without catering to them specifically.

"Tasks have no correlation to Milestones" - this is not true, but probably mentioned because of the OP's brief interaction with the app. When you create a todo list you can choose which milestone it relates to. You can even set it to complete that milestone when all the todos have been checked off.

"Too much Drag & Drop" - this point is really pretty nit-picky and more a matter of personal preference. I don't claim to be a UI expert, but I could make equally compelling arguments as to why the drag and drop functionality they have in place would be better than up and down arrows.

"Why 6 categories of messages?" - This one is just laziness on the OP's part. Right at the bottom of the messages dropdown menu you will notice an "-- Add New Category --" option which allows you to customize categories. You can also globally customize categories so that they show up for other projects too.

I'm really surprised this post hit the front page of HN. It iss a cursory glance at a piece of software and a seemingly offhand damning of it. I wouldn't doubt that a few of these up votes came from people just reading the headline and having a general feeling of bitterness towards 37signals, for whatever reason. There's been a spate of anti-37signals posts over at reddit.com/r/web_design too so it wouldn't surprise me.

Basecamp is great software because it's extremely simple. They purposely keep the feature-set small and are very opinionated about how they do things. The result is a very solid tool that isn't bloated and can fit many different niches because of its accessibility. Before they came around you were stuck with overly complicated all-things-to-all-people solutions. Kind of like Rails and Apple products...

One of the issues I've seen with Basecamp is that it's bought quite a lot - I've done contracting work for a number of companies large and small in my area, and most of them had used basecamp in the past or were still paying for it when I got there. Problem was, no one was using it 'right'. Based on the comments here, and other critiques I've read, it seems to be a good fit to a far smaller group of orgs than people think (especially the people who buy it). They end up beating their heads against the wall, or abandoning web-based PM tools altogether - "well, we tried the leader and it doesn't work for us - we're too unique and special, so we'll just keep doing everything on paper" (not actual words, but the gist I've heard before).

So 37S ends up being phenomenal marketers that have a service many people want to buy, but more people buy it than can get real value out of it because it wasn't built for their needs in the first place.

Certainly 37S is not ultimately responsible for people continuing to pay for something that doesn't work, but they do a pretty good sales job via word-of-mouth evangelism, even when it's a poor fit for an org's needs. Maybe too good?

I get 37S's philosophy, and I thank them for being so transparent about their goals, so that I can be sure never to use one of their products.

Entrepreneurial companies, by their very nature, change. It's hard for me to fathom why a startup would build their software development process around a tool optimized for inflexibility, no matter how enticing, when that might inhibit their ability to fix something broken about their business later.

the biggest thing for me that basecamp is missing is email. I would want to have a direct integration into my email, so I can set tasks and organize projects directly from there. I think the likes of producteev and taskforceapp.com are probably on to something.