37Signals Quietly Removes Its Famous Basecamp Manifesto

reorg.co

17 points·natasham25··13 comments

Internet archive to the rescue.

http://web.archive.org/web/20081218064511/http://www.basecam...

Awesome! Thanks.

Downvoters should probably know that she's the one who wrote the article.

Yeah, I thought people on here would be able to point me in the right direction. I really wanted to find and read the original manifesto.

Hanlon's Razor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)

I really doubt 37Signals took their manifesto down for nefarious reasons. Changing architecture, codebase rewrites, SCM tool, etc, all could have caused that page to be removed.

It couldn't have anything to do with being a PHP page on a Rails-centric company's site, I'm sure.

I'm just curious about what happened. Totally agree that it could have been some weird mistake.

I can see that one of the ills of being popular is that there is someone somewhere to write a shitty blog post about every fucking file system operation.

That's a bit harsh. It was a popular page that centered around the brand of a popular company and caused their fans to perceive them in a certain light. It is natural to want to know if the removal was deliberate or not.

There seems to be a big trend to try to expose 37signals as actually some sort of evil company or to diminish their image. Which makes sense due to their popularity and claims of excellence (which I think are, in this case, valid).

Search any sentence from the linked screenshot, quoted, in Google, for interesting results. For instance: "many of our competitors require a call back".

I'd guess they've outgrown the capacity (or desire) to keep answering support emails themselves, for one thing.

The emperor has no clothes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com