Thoughts on 37Signals, Basecamp and Flexible Software

I love 37Signals and the products they produce, I have tremendous respect for what they’ve been able to accomplish with such a small team of people. Imulus is a big user of BaseCamp and our clients for the most part are happy with it. I say “most part” because lately I’m finding our customers are getting turned off by various features or lack of features and I have no way to modify the BaseCamp code to satisfy those customers. 37Signals has made it pretty clear that they aren’t interested in pleasing everyone. I applaud them for taking a stand and only going after people who fit their product; letting the rest of their users, like us, to move on.

At first Basecamp was new, different and easy to use; however the longer you use it the more shortcomings you begin to find. As time goes on you have a choice, deal with the shortcomings or move on to something new. I so want to stay with Basecamp but unfortunately it looks like we will develop our own product which is tailored to our own needs.

No doubt we will release this product to the general public, but the same issues we face with Basecamp will ultimately face the users of our system in the future. Which makes me wonder, can a company build a subscription web-application which gives the option to either use the unaltered web-app or change the mode of the web-app to a customized code version?

Having the ability to select a customized code version has it’s obvious pros and cons but I’d be interested to see if anyone has tried such a model. I believe software should be flexible enough to bend around your needs and processes. 37Signals angle is you should bend your process around the software until your process no longer works with the software. If I were to sum up our, take it would be, start with basic functionality and bend software to your process.

Our position is not unusually, in fact most custom code we come across is produced this way. Most of the time feature creep, backwards compatibility and integration tools are alway added to custom software, eventually turning it into a bastardization of what it was originally intened to be. Ultimately the software gets to a point where it no longer makes sense to customize, and starting fresh is the best choice.

So, can software be built both ways? Can you build a web-application in which customers can leave as is and benefit from ongoing updates to the code base, while other customers opt for customized code modified to their liking?