Highrise: Lowering My Expectations

I have been following the build-up to the Highrise release by 37 Signals with only one eye, so I was pretty surprised by the positioning of the product in the email from Jason Fried today:

THE ANSWER TO THE AVALANCHE So many people. So many phone calls, emails, notes, follow-ups, and tasks. Who's this person again? When did we last speak? What did we talk about? Has anyone else in my company talked to this person? What's supposed to happen next? Highrise is here to keep track of it all.

A PERSONAL ASSISTANT FOR EVERYONE IN YOUR COMPANY
When you use Highrise, contacts and communication history
can be shared across your entire company. No more "Jim has
the client's number and he's out of the office today."
No more "I don't know what Jane told the printer last week."
No more "Oops, I didn't know you already called her
back - I just did too." With Highrise, everyone's on
the same page.

So, it less that CRM -- which is what I had hoped that they would do -- but really more like a group information management system. But, hey, wait a sec... isn't that what Basecamp is? And Backpack, too?

These guys seemed destined to endlessly build a new take on the same set of issues. And all of them have annoying limitations (see Basecamp and The Federation of Work, and Jason Fried on Basecamp and the Federation of Work,

Why didn't they just rejigger Basecamp to support the handful of new notions in Highrise? Yes, you can tag people in Highrise, but couldn't they have rethought contacts in Basecamp to support tags, and linked notes?

I found that Highrise Cases aren't supported unless you sign up for the $49/mo plan, so I didn't get to fool with them, but I just don't think Highrise is worth using without Cases, really.

So, Highrise turns out to be a competitor to Basecamp, Backpack, and other social info managers like Stikkit, not something that is going to cut into Saleforce.com. At least not in this form.

tags: un+crm, crm, salesforce.com, stikkit, basecamp, jason+fried, backpack, sunrise, group+information+management

Comments

[Kevin Milden]

Boyd: We met through Clarence on Collective X. I was linked to this post about Highrise and I think you nailed what we have been talking about internally. Even Tom Peters mentioned how the products are missing key features.

"We're using basecamp for some projects at tompeters.com. One complaint is that basecamp doesn't have a calendar function. Jason assures me that that deficiency is being worked on. That's going to make someone on our team very happy."

While Highrise and Basecamp sit without adequate calendars which need them badly. Backpack has a personal "5 color" calendar. Each product seems to solve and reinforce the same idea. Over and over again. I would of loved the ability to forward messages into Basecamp.

Do we really need that feature in a brand new product?

Does 37signals make more money by providing features to existing customers or releasing new products and get another $12 a month out of each of us?