Stowe Boyd and Jason Fried: Where Should Basecamp Focus its Resources?

Jason Fried responded to my criticism of Basecamp in a comment to a recent post, Michael McDerment on Software Should Be Social Because No One Works Alone. I had stated that I consider it a basic flaw that Basecamp doesn’t support a federated model of work: that is to say, if I am working with four companies who each have a Basecamp instance, I wind up with four account/login/password combinations, and worst of all, no unified dashboard view to consolidate all my Basecamp information.

Jason makes some well-reasoned arguments in favor of the current status quo:

Thanks for your thoughts. A couple things.

1. Most people are not like you. Most people are not as connected as you. Most people, the vast majority of our customers in fact, have one Basecamp account that they use with their clients or just internally. Yes, there are folks with multiple accounts, but they are the slim minority exception, not the norm. The majority of our customers aren’t well connected techies, they are small business owners that use a tool alone or with their clients. They have their own small world. Multiple Basecamp systems are rare among these folks.

2. We are working on a product we’ve code named “Compass” that will provide single-sign-like capabilities to customers that use multiple versions of our products. We don’t comment on release dates so I can’t share any additional information, but it’s something we’re planning.

The inconvienent truth for techies is that most people don’t have the problems that techies do. Most people aren’t roaming between multiple Basecamp accounts. Most people also use the same username/password everywhere so they already have “single sign-on.” But we do agree — a more unified sign on across multiple products is useful so we are working on it, it’s just not the most important thing right now.

Another thing to remember is while it feels like we’ve been at this for years, it’s only been 2.5 years since Basecamp has been released. Backpack just turned 1 a few months ago and Campfire is just a few months old. We like to nail the basics in our apps first and then work on the more complex issues later. Multiple products with multiple logins is a more complex issue. It’s time is coming, but it would have been wasteful for us to spend our time on such a complex issue a year ago.

Jason’s point about me being abnormal is true, as far as it goes. I made the same observation last week at Reboot 8, where I outlined the Basecamp Federation Bug as an anti-example in my talk on Social Architecture. I am more connected than others, and so I have encountered this basic flaw earlier than the majority of Basecamp users.

However, anyone who is a free agent — working for multiple companies, or across multiple projects in a big company that has more than one Basecamp account — will encounter this problem just as soon as I have, although they may not have the situation that I do, with over a dozen account/login/password triples in the past 12 months.

Note: the admin of the account picks the name for the instance, such as awm.seework.com, which is my A Working Model account. Other instances could be on any other the five or so non-intuitive domain names that 37signals maintains for Basecamp account. Then the admin picks the login name for users. I picked stoweboyd for myself, but my clients have picked stowe, sboyd, and other variants. And, yes, I can change the passwords to all be the same, but that is a minor part of the whole thing.

And I think that nearly everyone will encounter this issue in time, as more and more companies adopt Basecamp, and seek to collaborate with other users. And what about those “clients” that Jason mentioned? Aren’t they likely to be clients of other companies, even if they aren’t the one paying the bills?

I am happy to see that Jason is planning to work on this issue at some point, and regret that he doesn’t think that it is critical enough to address right now. And I still believe that this is a design flaw in the basic social architecture of Basecamp, not a feature that only supernodes like me need. Although Basecamp has had great success, a flaw like this retards growth of the user base. If this worked in a federated fashion, it’s easy to imagine that the product would be spread more easily.

At the present time Basecamp is super dominant in the market for online social project management, but they aren’t alone. And I can safely predict that the eventual Number 1 in this space will be the player that gets the social dimension right, not just the best list of features. That could very well be Basecamp, if they focus on that tier of social architecture. But some other enterprising players could enter the market with a stronger focus on the social dimension, and by virtue of that focus could move more quickly to create a marketplace to support whatever the larger context is for all that project work. And that marketplace is worth billions more than project tools.

And, remember that Basecamp is not really winning today based on the quality of the features: writeboards, as just one example, work well enough, but let’s face it, textile is a pain in the ass as a markup language. Have you tried to indent paragraphs, or sticks images into writeboards? Very kludgy.

So the strength of Basecamp’s competitiveness is the intuitive social media approach to sharing of project information. That’s the key to the product’s strength, and at the same time, hedging in that area may prove to be its Achilles Heel.

Jason and I will be attending the upcoming Collaborative Technologies Conference 2006, in Boston, in a few weeks. I think he is a brilliant entrepreneur, author, and developer, as I have said on numerous occasions (see my review of Getting Real, for example). So I hope that we will get a chance to discuss this again, in some forum or another at the event.

First Look: Basecamp Integration in Blinksale

I had an email exchange with Josh Williams of Blinksale following the recent post on Blicksale 2.0 coming down the pike.

Stowe: Integration with Basecamp?

Josh: While the BC integration is not public knowledge, it also does not take a rocket-scientist to speculate that we’re working on that. So, if you want to blog that you’ve heard from us that BC API integration is on the way, I don’t have a problem with that.

Posted. But he also said it would follow the release of Blinksale 2.0 by a few weeks, so the Basecamp integration is not the super unnamed feature set soming in 2.0. Hmmm. Must be an extension into the accounting side of things. One of the big empty holes in the web 2.0 solar system, and an obvious place to head.

Also, on the Basecamp/37 Signals front, Jason Fried had this to say about my review of Getting Real:

Dude, I LOVE IT. You nailed it. Great review. Thank you.

37Signals Lost the Signal (for a Moment)

Getting Real is a smart, readable, and mind-bending manifesto dedicated to debunking the misconceptions of death-march, stalinist style software development, and simplifying the inscrutable processes that lead to building high quality software. Inspired — perhaps indirectly, since it is never explicitly referenced — by the Agile Programming movement, Getting Real is at once an operating manual on building great software, and a comprehensive condemnation of the startlingly dumb preconceptions that animate most software development.

The book reads like the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Taoist guide to strategy and survival.

“The tao that can be described

is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be spoken

is not the eternal Name.

The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth.

The named is the mother of creation.

Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery.

By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real.

Yet mystery and reality

emerge from the same source.

This source is called darkness.

Darkness born from darkness.

The beginning of all understanding.” Tao Te Ching - part 1

” The Tao is like an empty container:

it can never be emptied and can never be filled.

Infinitely deep, it is the source of all things.

It dulls the sharp, unties the knotted,

shades the lighted, and unites all of creation with dust..” - Tao Te Ching part 4

“Sometimes the best way to know what your app should be is to know what it shouldn’t be. Figure out your app’s enemy and you’ll shine a light on where your need to go.

When we decided to create project management software, we knew Microsoft Project was the gorilla in the room. Instead of fearing the gorilla, we used it as a motivator. We decided Basecamp would be different, the anti-Project.” - Getting Real, Pick A Fight

“Every time you say yes to a feature, you are adopting a child.” Getting Real, Start With No

“Scope down. It’s better to make half a product than a half-assed product,” - Getting Real, Fix Time and Budget, Flex Scope

“Listen to your code. It will offer suggestions. It will push back.” - Getting Real, Code Speaks

The two works are unabashedly moralistic and enigmatic, using examples from nature and seemingly paradoxical juxtapositions of contradictory ideas to enlighten the reader. And they share the refreshing openness of the enlightened, who know that the secret to enlightenment is that there is no secret: the truth is there, right in front of your nose, even if you can’t see it yet.

Getting Real is as radical a break with conventional wisdom about building software as is imaginable. As an analogy, consider the impact of cargo containers on commercial shipping: instead of hundreds of stevadores carrying boxes of cargo, and manually stowing them in the ships’ cargo holds, today pre-loaded containers are lifted from trucks or trains, by cranes, and stacked on the ships like enormous lego blocks. A handful of trained crane operators can literally do the work formerly accomplished by hundreds. And the ship stays at the dock for a hundredth of the time it would have under the former approach to loading and unloading. Note that this productivity boost is not due to the specific individuals involved being smarter, or better trained: it is the outcome of a completely different approach to the problem, and the application of better building blocks in the processes involved. Getting Real is the same: throw out the preconceptions of striving to get hundreds to take small steps faster, and instead use a smaller group who see the process differently. In the case of Getting Real, however, the process insights rely on better programming tools — like Ruby on Rails — as well as a pervasive and zen-like certainty that less is more, small is the new big, and that anything that detracts from the act of delivering quality software to the user should be deep-sixed.

The book is fun to read, even for people not involved in software development. There are gems throughout, like this one:

The best software has a vision. The best software takes sides. When someone uses software, they’re not just looking for features, they’re looking for an approach. They’re looking for a vision. Decide what your vision is and run with it.

And remember, if they don’t like your vision there are plenty of other visions out there for people. Don’t go chasing people you’ll never make happy.

[…]

Our vision has followed a similar path. They [37signals’ apps] don’t try to be all things to all people. They have an attitude. They seek out customers who are actually partners. They speak to people who share our vision. You’re either on the bus or off the bus. - Getting Real, Make Opinionated Software

The “on or off the bus” reference is taken from Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, his examination of the Merry Pranksters, a collection of hippies and beats who traveled around in a bus, experimenting with mind altering substances on an odyssey of self-discovery and enlightenment. Like the authors of Getting Real, the Merry Pranksters knew that there is no middle road: you are either on the bus — acting in accord with the right set of principles — or you are off the bus. No indeterminacy. No hedging. No compromises.

I expect that Getting Real will have a large impact, which is to be expected by the popularity of the author’s Signals v Noise blog and the following that 37signals has achieved through their software, writing, and seminars. When I interviewed Jason Fried, the president of 37signals and the ringleader of this new band of Merry Pranksters, I was struck by the ideas driving the software and their articulation. I concluded by saying this:

[from The New Visionaries: Jason Fried, 37signals]

The impact they [37signals] are having on the world is larger than the success of their apps, like Basecamp. It could be that the larger legacy of 37signals will turn out to be the promulgation of this set of design and life principles that will have a larger impact on the community of developers than the impact of their products on the community of customers.

Items of Interest: 2006.04.11

An interesting discussion is bubbling all over the place based on the success of 37signals’ Getting Real e-book. Jason Fried shares some numbers here. In 30 days they’ve sold 5800+ licenses, nearly 10% of which are 10 copy site licenses, and they’ve grossed like $120,000, with functionally zero expenses (completely discounting the labor of writing the book). Does this represent a tectonic shift in the tech publishing industry?

David Hansson wants us to think so, but I think Tim O’Reilly’s masterful dissection of the inexorable powerlaws in publishing buried down in the comments of that post undo David’s attempts at Shaking Up Tech Publishing, including this gem:

[from comment on Shaking up tech publishing by Tim O’Reilly]

Normal royalty levels are not some plot by publishers to screw authors: they are a reflection of the real economics of the business.

Tim points out that the 37signals guys are superstars, and that the experience that are having with Getting Real is an anomaly: other authors, even good ones, should not expect the results they are having.

Still… there still seems to be a opportunity to cut out various intermediaries: if not the editorial side of publishing — which Tim suggests is adding a vital function, since many knowledgeable geeks cannot string together grammatical English — then perhaps the retail stores, since in the tech space the readership is very much online.

But self-publishing a la Getting Real may represent a great path for the top 5,000 bloggers out there — those who have a well-defined community, who has honed their writing in the light of the blogoshere, and who have direct connections to a marketplace of readers — but for the rest, I’d guess not.

As Tim puts it:

For many authors, a royalty advance of $8-10,000, plus royalty upside of another $10,000 is more than they’ll see from a self-published book that sells 500 or 1000 copies at $20 or $30, after they deduct their manufacturing cost. And if a book really hits, the access to channels can lead to huge upside. I have quite a few authors to whom I’ve paid hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in royalties over the lifetimes of their books.

[Grig Gheorghiu has a good summary of these are other voices on the subject.

Join us at mesh

Mark your calendars for the upcoming (and rescheduled) mesh — Canada’s web 2.0 conference - Toronto May 15 & 16. mesh will bring together great keynotes and speakers, including Om Malik, Paul Kedrosky, Andrew Coyne, Michael Geist, Tara Hunt, Paul Wells, Steve Rubel, Jason Fried, Stowe Boyd (yes, me), Amber McArthur, Ren Bucholz, Andrew Baron, Chris Messina, David Crow (whew!) and many others. Organizers include Rob Hyndman, Matthew Ingram, Mike McDerment, Stuart MacDonald, and Mark Evans.

Looks like a great conference, and a great venue. Toronto is a fabulous city.

[Long aside: I truly love Canada: even before my sister moved there and became a ‘landed’ immigrant after living in Toronto 20-odd years, I had traveled much of the country. In the past few decades, I have been to the country literally a hundred times or so, and I am increasingly enamored of this very foreign country so close by. I also hope that if I continue to say nice things, I will be allowed to emigrate, which looks like a better and better idea considering America’s political situation and progressive global warming. Although Toronto may be one day be under water as the Great Lakes slowly turn into a giant inland ocean.

MarketingMonger Podcast #3: Interview with Stowe Boyd

It has been a long time coming, but I am happy to announce that the first of the New Visionaries series that I started last year is being rolled out starting today. The first in the series is an interview with Jason Fried of 37 Signals.

[from the intro]

The impact they [37 signals] are having on the world is larger than the success of their apps, like Basecamp. It could be that the larger legacy of 37 Signals will turn out to be the promulgation of this set of design and life principles that will have a larger impact on the community of developers than the impact of their products on the community of customers.

Use the feed for .mov format: RSS Feed

Or download in your favorite format:

• Updated 3/14/06: smaller .mov
• .mov
• .m4v
• .mp4
• .divx

Coming up:

• Mary Hodder, Dabble
• Dave Sifry, Technorati
• Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra
• Chris Messina, Flock
• Michael Tanne, Wink

New Visionaries is sponsored by Podcast.com : the home of podcasting.

Basecamp and The Federation of Work

I have run up against what I think is a basic flaw in the Basecamp model.

Many times in the past few months, I have started a project up with a group, or groups, who like me are already using Basecamp. The problem that arises: Whose Basecamp implementation to use?

I would, of course, rather manage projects that I am involved with in my own Basecamp instance, while the others have the same perspective. But what happens, quickly, is that I have a bunch of memberships in other Basecamp projects, which do not collate into a coherent single view.

What’s missing is a fundamental insight: the federation of work.

Basecamp lacks the notion of federating project work. While I can invite my pal, Greg Narain, to join a project I am running, Basecamp is only willing to consider Greg as another individual, not as the owner of his own Basecamp instance. As a result, Greg must login to my instance to participate, and the status of the project does not show up on his dashboard.

The solution? 37 Signals should rework their participation model to reflect their new-found success: there are thousands of Basecamp users out there, and more of us will be running into this limitation. More important, perhaps, is that a federated model more accurately reflects the nature of the world. I am involved in a dozen or so projects, and I would like to have a single, coherent view of what’s going on across the board, as do all over my partners-in-crime.

Certainly, a single company still needs to be the administrator for each Basecamp project, but that doesn’t mean that we need to login at ten different instances everyday.

Basecamp should look at the federation model of Jabber and other successful bottom-up, federated tools. Within Jabber, I can login to my local server, and IM with any other trusted server in the world. The servers simply have to establish a trust relationship. In the Basecamp world, I should be able to invite Greg to participate in a project, and when he agrees, he should be able to simply point at his own Basecamp instance, rather than having to create a brand new, easily forgotten login.

At any rate, Jason and company are well-known for rejecting new features, but this is more than that, this is a fundamental need that should have been forseen from the start. And, in a way, it’s just another indicator of the success that the product enjoys.

Campfire: Basecamp Integration More Important Than Mobile

Russell Beattle bitches that Campfire isn’t mobile, but I am less concerned about that (although it might be a nice-to-have) than the lack of integration with Basecamp. Good news:

[from Jason Fried’s comment to Jason Fried on Campfire]

Stowe, ever try to have a chat with 7 people in IM? Every try to just coordinate that? And then what happens when you close your window by mistake? Oops, it’s all gone and someone needs ot invite you again. It’s an effen nightmare.

IM is great for one-on-one, but miserable on many levels for group chats.

Anyhow, today is just day one of Campfire man. We have a lot planned for this bad boy — including some integration with a certain product you like. ;)

So it looks like I will get my wish, even if Russell doesn’t get his.

Jason Fried on Campfire

I recently reviewed Campfire, the new real-time group chat solution from 37signals. My first take was this:

So Jason Fried and Co. are hoping to provide a baseline level of chat, outside the conventional IM networks and chat systems, under the assumption that business is ripe for this sort of service. I buy it, especially if they integrate it into Basecamp, which has not been done yet.

And please do a better and tighter job of integrating chat into Basecamp projects than was done with Writeboards. That is not a seamless integration at all.

I am not sure that Campfire, independent of Basecamp, has a real path forward, even though I am a strong supporter of real-time communication, Web 2.0 apps, and Basecamp. There is a tremendous degree of competition here, these days. Leaving aside IRC — a really entrenched community of hardcore bitheads, there.— there are more and more competitors on every side. Gmail Chat has emerged, along with whatever version of the major IM networks are out there, and now there are literally dozens of VoIP competitors. AOL has big plans for AIMSpace, an IM-based collaboration and social networking scheme. And Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are close behind.

As a Basecamp user, I am dying to see it integrated. As an analyst and student of the space I wonder if the unintegrated Campfire has a solid future. I could be wrong, but I will wait and see.

Jason Fried of 37signals responded in a comment on that post:

Thanks for the feedback Stowe. Keep in mind that there are a lot of people out there that don’t use Basecamp but have an immediate need for real-time group communication. You can use MS Project, Dot Project, or any of the other project management apps and still use Campfire. Or you don’t have to use it with project management at all, of course. At 37signals we’ve been using it for over a month and we can’t live without it — it’s become the best productivity tool we have.

I agree that there are a lot of people out there that don’t use Basecamp, and many of them may be interested in a solution like Campfire. But there are so many competitors, and so many impediments for people that are used to what ever they are using — IRC, AIM, whatever — that I wonder about the uptake. And also, I really want it integrated in Basecamp, where I manage my projects. Bad.

Campfire: Group Chat for Businesses

37 Signals have launched Campfire, the company’s entry into the real-time chat space.

I spent a few minutes running around with my partner-in-crime, Greg Narain, and the service seem cleanly designed (big surprise), fast (we’ll have to see about that), and extremely intuitive.

As a few seconds of registration, I was quickly presented with my Campfire Lobby (a bit of a mixed metaphor there), and my first chat. I invited Greg in a few seconds, and we were rolling. The chat interface works in the obvious way, by entering text into a box at the foot of the window.

One of the great features of Campfire is uploading of images into the chatstream:

Greg and I apparently use the word ‘neat’ alot, as I found with this search:

And this screenshot shows the obvious business model:

So Jason Fried and Co. are hoping to provide a baseline level of chat, outside the conventional IM networks and chat systems, under the assumption that business is ripe for this sort of service. I buy it, especially if they integrate it into Basecamp, which has not been done yet.

And please do a better and tighter job of integrating chat into Basecamp projects than was done with Writeboards. That is not a seamless integration at all.

I am not sure that Campfire, independent of Basecamp, has a real path forward, even though I am a strong supporter of real-time communication, Web 2.0 apps, and Basecamp. There is a tremendous degree of competition here, these days. Leaving aside IRC — a really entrenched community of hardcore bitheads, there.— there are more and more competitors on every side. Gmail Chat has emerged, along with whatever version of the major IM networks are out there, and now there are literally dozens of VoIP competitors. AOL has big plans for AIMSpace, an IM-based collaboration and social networking scheme. And Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are close behind.

As a Basecamp user, I am dying to see it integrated. As an analyst and student of the space I wonder if the unintegrated Campfire has a solid future. I could be wrong, but I will wait and see.

[Pointer from Steve Rubel].