It’s easy to criticise and find fault with almost any web site on the Internet. The design is wrong, the information isn’t organised correctly, the code is poor. There are no shortage of areas in which to mount an attack. However, when a product does exactly what it says on the tin, it’s quite difficult to be constructive about your thoughts. The web site whybasecampsux.org is a perfect example of just this.
I object to the way whybasecampsux.org has been put together quite strongly because it puts more effort in to attacking 37signals and Jason Fried than it actually does in evaluating the product and making useful criticism. The irony of it is, if you read their site, it’s almost a perfect example of why a company might ignore the requests of their users’!
Anyone that spends time in the same office as me will tell you that I’m not a massive fan of basecamp. That doesn’t stop me using it on an daily basis. Why? Because it’s the best solution for our needs right now. This is a major factor in why whybasecampsux.org is so far off the mark. It doesn’t acknowledge the purpose of basecamp, which is to provide simple collaboration between teams on a project whilst providing a very shallow learning curve. We can, and do, give all of our clients access to the projects we work on so that they can join in. Although all of our customers are of course very savvy :), I don’t think either Mark or I have had to provide ‘support’ to them when it comes to using basecamp. Surely this is enough of a reason in its own right to endorse it?
Top 5 Reasons whybasecampsux.org is full of shit:
(this list hasn’t been thought out very well – if you don’t realise that’s the point…. move along!)
- It says ‘sux’ far too much. Is this the agile alternative for a word?
- It’s a blatant attempt to obtain internet traffic (oops – guess I’ve sent some their way).
- It’s used the basecamp logo. I’m sure they don’t have permission to do this.
- The author seems to be selling product evaluation services! If his evaluations are thought out as well as his basecamp one is, I’m guessing he’s going hungry.
- Under ‘alternatives to basecamp’ it mentions activeCollab which, last time I checked, is a pretty good copy of basecamp.
- He only seems to attack 37signals. If you don’t like a supplier, change. There’s no need to slate the product though.
How can basecamp improve?
From my experience of using basecamp, customers seem to just follow on a message thread whenever they want to say something. This gives little or no context to a lot of discussions. Here are my suggestions to improve messaging:
- Allow personal tagging so that I can add my own context to a discussion (this could apply to a number of things).
- Allow an admin to close a discussion with a link that says ‘Start a new topic’ where the message box would normally be.
Before I wrote this, I asked Keir what annoys him most about the product (as I know he has certain sticking points with it). His response was “why can’t I associate messages with to do list items”. I totally agree with this one. The messaging is what our customers use more than anything, and it would be nice if I could assign them contextual ‘to do’ items based on a discussion. E.g. Topic ‘Need design elements for page x’, Message ‘Please provide me the following items:’ To do items ‘Provide A, B, C etc’. It would also then be very helpful if you could get to the relevant message from the to do list.
I’m not going to add any more. Hopefully, our suggestions will come across as short, sweet, and well considered.
The fact that you can try basecamp for free for 30 days means there’s little or no reason to see if it meets your requirements for yourself.
{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
Totally agree with Keir, being able to associate a message and/or comments with a to do item is a real pain. It means you either end up putting too much descriptive content in the to do which makes the to dos list look messy, or writing a message after creating the to do in the hope the client/team member reads it!!
Can’t imagine it would be a tough thing to add either, in Rails/Cakephp terms it a simple HasAndBelongsToMany association between 2 existing tables – but guess there’s a few more important things for them to sort first!
cheers,
jon
Clearly meant ‘not being able to’ above, woops!
Perhaps Keir and I will have a quick 4 hour development sprint to mock this up. Maybe in rails :)
Ahh, sounds like a plan!
Just had a client respond to a to do I assigned them via email. I was about to moan to them (nicely) about keeping communication all on BC, but then realised that there really is no way to do that in an intuitive fashion. There should be a link to create a message that’s associated with the to do item automatically, rather than what we currently have which is a link to the parent to do list.
just my 2p
I’m trying to add a comment, but your site won’t take it. Wonder if my comment was “too long?” Well, here goes a comment to test that theory…
Looks like my theory was right! So I’m going to break up my comment into smaller parts:
===========================
LOL! Well, I can accept the criticism; we all have the right to our own opinions, right? :-) What surprises me is that it took so long for a 37 signals fan to makes the observation you made (your post came >1.5 years after I launched the site.)
What’s more, I really appreciate the exposure. As the say “All press is good press, right?” :-) I’m both honored and a quite a bit puzzled that you’d spend so much time writing a critique of my critique!
And yes, some of your criticisms are valid. Yes, the site really is critiquing 37signals and Jason Fried instead of Basecamp as an independent entity. But since you can’t get Basecamp without the attitude of Jason and 37 Signals, I believe Basecamp is effectively the combination of the online service and Jason Fried plus 37signals.
On the other hand I do feel compelled to correct your incorrect assumptions as well as disqualify four of the six reasons you gave as the “Top 5 Reasons whybasecampsux.org is full of shit”, and to give perspective on the other two:
“it’s the best solution for your needs”
I’m certain you can’t say that with any objectivity because you’ve not tried most (any?) of the others. Methinks Basecamp was simply the solution you choose first, it has met your needs without causing you too much trouble, and you’ve not been motivated to change. That’s hardly a scathing criticism of your comments but I felt it appropriate to make the counterpoint.
“1. It says ‘sux’ far too much. Is this the agile alternative for a word?”
Fine! That’s just your opinion, and I’m human. Your belief that the site “says ’sux’ far too much” is no different in concept than me saying that I think the color scheme on your blog is awful. Deal with it.
“2. It’s a blatant attempt to obtain internet traffic (oops – guess I’ve sent some their way).”
Technical yes, it is a blatant attempt to obtain internet traffic, but you are wrong because it’s not for the reason you (almost certainly) assume.
The site’s goal was to save others the pain I experienced after Basecamp failed utterly to meet my project management needs AND to save them from the resultant pain of dealing with Jason and 37 Signals intensely condescending attitude. I have never before and never since experienced any company representative with a worse attitude.
[continued...]
[...continued]
Part #2
==========================
“3. It’s used the basecamp logo. I’m sure they don’t have permission to do this.”
Actually the site is not using the Basecamp logo; the site is using a parody of the Basecamp logo. Compare them side-by-side and you’ll see. Parodies are fair use, see “/wiki/Fair_use#Fair_use_and_parody” on Wikipedia.org.
“4. The author seems to be selling product evaluation services! If his evaluations are thought out as well as his basecamp one is, I’m guessing he’s going hungry”
Wrong again. I put this site up after a failed project that was implemented on Basecamp. I decided to use Basecamp because it was marketed as a general purpose project management tool and it had lots of good press.
Later I found Basecamp was really only good for web developers to manage a small list of client projects, which is not what I needed it for, and that all the good press was basically from fan-boys that liked to play follow-the-leader and get talked down to (see: Group psychological abuse at “/wiki/Group_psychological_abuse” on Wikipedia.org.)
“5. Under ‘alternatives to basecamp’ it mentions activeCollab which, last time I checked, is a pretty good copy of basecamp.”
Wrong again. As I described on the site as well as previously in these comments the reason I felt Basecamp sux is because of Jason Fried’s and 37 Signal’s attitude; when you use activeCollab it does not come with Jason Fried’s and 37 Signal’s attitude.
“He only seems to attack 37signals. If you don’t like a supplier, change. There’s no need to slate the product though.”
Once again, this is your opinion so it can’t be right or wrong.
But what you don’t understand is how much I had invested in using Basecamp before I realized how it was utterly going to cause my small startup that was fully dependent on Basecamp to fail, and fail it did. Yes I theoretically could have changed but I had invested too much in a process that was dependant on Basecamp. Basecamp’s lack of a mechanism for visualizing timelines among multiple concurrent projects/resource, and a templating mechanism that would allow the creation of lots of projects with lots of identical tasks was what killed our startup.
And all that would have been okay, chalked up to bad judgment on my part. But what upset me was the fact that Jason Fried would not even acknowledge that my problems were legitimate. He instead talked down to me several times and said that he knew better than me what I needed. That’s what infuriated me so, and that’s why I launched WhyBaseCampSux.org, my first (and hopefully only) bitch site ever.
And yes, I have since learned to understand that that is Jason’s and 37 Signals “shtick.” But just because they position themselves that way doesn’t mean they should be immune to criticism. Choose to act like an asshole and expect to be treated like one.
[continued...]
[…continued]
Part #3 (Note I had to remove the “http://” from the beginning of the URLs to get your blog to accept the comments.)
==========================
Now, you may think that I am still secretly just trying to gain traffic to my site so I can sell ads or services or some such and that my admonitions to the contrary as just so much hooey. But there is actually a way I can prove it; archive.org:
web.archive.org/web/*/ whybasecampsux.org
Take a look at the site when it first made it into archive.org back in July 2006; no directory, no ads, no nothing but the basic which is where my points above:
web.archive.org/web/20060716105835/ http://www.whybasecampsux.org/
It wasn’t until 2007 when I started listing other products, and that was because I got so many emails from people requesting that I give alternatives. Yes, many were from the vendors themselves, but many were also from users who either liked a given alternate or wanted alternates to consider.
web.archive.org/web/20070218134233/ http://www.whybasecampsux.org/
And if wasn’t until more than a year after the site launched, August 2007, when I first started soliciting for advertising:
web.archive.org/web/20070813050155/ http://www.whybasecampsux.org/
Ironically, archive.org stopped archiving the site (wonder why?) in October 2007 but from all the archived versions you can see that your criticisms regarding being “a blatant attempt to obtain internet traffic” and about “The author seeming to be selling product evaluation services” apply, at least not for the first almost 1.5 years the site was online.
Yes, for a short time I solicited to be paid for doing evaluations but only because people were asking me to do it for free so I figured some might want to actually pay me to do it but nobody did. I later realized I wouldn’t want those types of projects anyway, so I took it down (which you can see on the.)
Yes, I am now selling ads. And it’s great because I’m getting something back from all the time and money I invested in the startup that failed in large part because of Basecamp’s limitations. Since I launch I’ve had more and more people sending me alternatives for the list (I probably have 10 to list I’ve just not gotten around to listing) and more and more people asking me to advertise. But “let’s be real” (as Jason would say ;-), the monthly ad revenue for the site it little better than pocket change and beer money.
But the reality is I’ve been trying to figure out how to back out of the “bitch” aspect of the site for a while now. I’ve now got the most comprehensive list of project management apps on the web that the site has truly become far more than it was originally intended to be. As a one-pager and as a bitch site I can’t really do with it what I could do if I made it a proper site containing information about selecting a project management app. So maybe I’ll convert it or sell it to someone who will convert it, or something else. I dunno yet.
More importantly I’m relatively well-known in certain web designer/developer circles and that’s why the site is anonymous. I badly wanted to legitimately vent my disgust but didn’t want to create enemies among all the 37 Signals and Rails fan-boys. Still, I might like to close this chapter and move on. Not exactly sure what I’ll do but as I’ve always got 110% more things to do than I have time to do them, it might be a while before I actually do anything to change this.
Anyway whatever the outcome of my comment here on your site I do appreciate you giving WhyBaseCampSux.org the type of additional exposure it so richly deserves. :-)
LOL… Love these comments Editor @ WhyBaseCampSux.org
I love Basecamp, I’m sure there’s better products out there, each to their own. I get your point about the Fried thing though… :)
We could go on and argue everybody’s points, one by one. But there’s no point…
I forgot to mention http://www.whybasecampsux.org/ has a lot of other project management adverts too. ;)
Woah! That took a while to get the reaction I was hoping for.
>>@Mark: I forgot to mention http://www.whybasecampsux.org/ has a lot of other project management adverts too. ;)
Yeah it does. It finally pays my hosting bill plus some beer money. :)
But they only came after >1.5 years and like I said I’m trying to figure out how to move off a sux site and move it to a legitimate list of alternatives because there is huge value in the list for people who need to select such a product.
@Tom: Yeah, I just ran across your post the other day. The site is by no means something I think about (or monitor) very frequently. :-)
Anway, @Mark & @Tom thanks for being respectful and helping me shine some light on Basecamp/37 Signals because, as they say, light is the best disinfectant. With your post people don’t even need to see my site to get the gist of my complaints.
P.S. Note that I linked back to you: http://www.whybasecampsux.org/#press
Those are great suggestions! I didn’t even think about the “close topic” button, that would help SO much! Also, moving messages from one thread to another if they are off topic (which they often are…) would be a life saver.
However, I want to disagree with you on activeCollab being an exact copy. They have tickets (!!), custom user permissions (!), to-do scheduling and priorities (!!!!!!++), project templates (!) all of which are essential to effective project management. They have a lot more extra features of course, but these are just a few that made me switch. You really should have given it more of your time before claiming that it was nothing but a copy…
Hi Vera,
Thanks for your comment. Bare in mind here ActiveCollab are doing their best to take market share from Basecamp (and I hope for the benefit of the free market they continue to do so). I’m fairly sure when I reviewed the product it didn’t have the functionality you mentioned but I would obviously urge any interested party to do a full review of it first.
The other big change since my writing is ActiveCollab is nolonger free!
Cheers,
Tom
Well, they still offer the free version that’s kinda fail, but their new one is very nice and they do work with the community to integrate frequently suggested features, unlike Basecamp :( I think aC is doing a good job in attempting to take market share away from Basecamp by offering features that Basecamp refuses to. Granted, neither is perfect, but it looks like aC is trying harder.
Btw, if you’re interested in project management apps (like me, cause I’m weird), give Staction (http://staction.com) a try if you can get your hands on the private beta (I got one but I can’t invite people myself). They have a twitter+basecamp approach which is kind of unique, but may be confusing for most clients :(
Seems like both Basecamp, whydoesbasecampsux and your blog suck. Nothing interesting.
~BaseCamp user
Basecamp’s largest problem is not being able to associate due dates with tasks. This would be such an easy thing to fulfill. There’s tons of people asking for it. However, they do have an API… and TeamworkPM does not. If Teamwork and Basecamp got together, that would be the product. Thinking they both need some gantt charts too.
@Tom – basecamp are never going to add the facility to link messages to do items – it’s just too complex for their app. We use basecamp message all the time and a single message could relate to a whole load of to do’s. It’s not that I think your suggestion is a bad idea, it’s just a step too far for basecamp in my view. It’s pretty obvious that they are trying to keep the app deliberately simple – new features might be great for some users but will put others off and I guess they have to keep that in mind. I agree they should listen to customer feedback and I think they do. We use basecamp and we just accept that it does what it does and it does and it does it well. For us we find more benefits to than drawbacks – and for 50 dollars a month we’re not going to start stamping our feet and asking them to dance to our tune. If we reach a stage where we feel that it’s a hindrance rather than a help we’ll just switch to a different app. No need for any fanfare.
@ sux Editor
“And it’s great because I’m getting something back from all the time and money I invested in the startup that failed in large part because of Basecamp’s limitations.”
Don’t blame your failed start up on the limitations of piece of software. It was your choice to use it and given there’s a free trial you can’t go into it with anything other than open eyes. I know people who have built hugely successful design agencies and some still run all of their projects and operations on a bunch of dispersed spreadsheets, an accounts package and a shared hard drive. When they get introduced to tools like basecamp it makes their life a bit easier, but I don’t think they’ll ever wonder how they survived without it.
If you want a tool that helps you to run your whole business operation, then it’s bound to be complex and very personal to you. Basecamp and many of the other tools are never going to tick all of the boxes for you. If the software is going to be that important that it will make or break your business then you need to go out and get a developer to build a solution that fits your exact requirements. Or if you can build it yourself, then build it. Either way, you get something that’s built to your spec, and then you’ll have no gripes about it. If you do want changes, then it’s likely that you’ll be paying a lot more than 50 dollars a month to your developer, so you will be in a position to stamp your feet, make a fuss and get the changes you want.
I think your list of basecamp alternatives is a good idea, but I really don’t understand why some of those companies would want to advertise on a site that just slags off one of their competitors.
We’ve built a tool for a single client that is web hosted and helps them to manage their projects and finances. We’re now trying to re-develop it in a state that can be rolled out to more clients. We don’t see it as a competitor to basecamp though – on the whole it’s going to do a lot more stuff, but that won’t make it a better app. It just means it will fit the needs of certain clients better. It won’t have the collaborative aspect which I think basecamp does particularly well. It will be more about scheduling and finance. I’d love it to appear on a page of basecamp alternatives, but I’d never want it to be listed on a site like yours. You don’t get ahead in business by slagging off your competitors – you do it by talking about your proposition what’s good about it. Not what’s bad about what everyone else is doing.
that’s my two penneth.
@nick – thanks for your in depth response. Out of interest:
“basecamp are never going to add the facility to link messages to do items – it’s just too complex for their app.”
Basecamp have implemented this now, you can start messages based on to do items!
Cheers
Tom
@tom – I guess that shows how much I know!! I can see how you add comments to do items and I use that facility myself quite a bit but I can’t see how to start a message – maybe that’s the same thing. In which case my apologies, I use comments on to do’s pretty much every day! (although it’s been about for a while I think). I guess the point I was trying to make was that they deliberately keep the app simple and are less likely to implement more complex requests.
thanks, Nick.
{ 1 trackback }