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Comment by chrislomax | Hacker News Reader

It seriously makes me wonder how these guys have survived so long without making any changes. It's the same today as when I had an account 6 years ago. It's basic and functional.

Game changer my arse, it's about time they changed it!

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And whoever down votes me I want a reason why you think 37 signals is so fantastic when they have essentially changed nothing in 6 years.

The fact that a product built six years ago is still relevant and effective is testament to just how fantastic their original decisions were.

Also, the fact that BaseCamp has quite decent APIs has enabled a "cottage industry" of third-party clients and add-ons to evolve. This has probably made the product a lot more durable:

http://basecamphq.com/extras?cohort=Landing%20Headlines%20/%...

Try searching for something

> I want a reason why you think 37 signals is so fantastic when they have essentially changed nothing in 6 years.

Maybe they just didn't need to change anything?

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

I personally outgrew their products within weeks of using them. I find their base functionality good and solid but nothing really ever extends beyond that. Maybe my experience was that their product simply didn't fit my needs but I felt it was always missing something that they never included.

I always felt I was going to go back in a year and it would be there. It simply wasn't.

So this really is for me an "about time" moment.

You are not the typical user; what makes 37Signals so good is that they clearly understand just how dumb typical users are and design apps normal users can actually use without having to get their tech buddy to explain it to them.

And honestly, it's not dumb enough. Email dominates the workflow of most businesses because that's about the complexity most users can handle, write mail, send button. I've seen people use Basecamp for weeks and still be confused by the fact that there's more than one tab.

Yeah, I feel like this questions answers itself. Why would you change a hugely profitable and popular piece of software? 37signals set the bar for web-based project management, period.

Why change Windows? Eventually all software becomes outdated.

For me the impressive part is that they've buckled down, slowly evolved the core in a way to add features without upsetting their existing happy customers to an extent that there's been much screaming online, and released additional applications along the same template that have also been well received.

Basecamp provided them with product/market fit - iterating on a successful business model in such a way as to gradually grow a profitable company might mean that they should no longer be considered a startup, but it's no less impressive.

Perhaps more importantly, for those of us wanting to build a company we enjoy working in that isn't trying to either (a) scale massively (b) sell (c) IPO they're a great reminder that such stories do exist.

Plus I think I rather enjoy the sheer chutzpah of their shameless self promotion, even if I do like to think that I've not entirely drunk the koolaid.

They're smart enough to milk the non-technical low end user. There's a lot more of them than there are the power-users.

So for their revenue stream of constantly revolving low-end users not changing much is the right thing to do.

You answered your own question: "It's basic and functional."

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