Comment by atourgates | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atourgates | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a bit behind the curve here - but now that I'm caught up, I'm concerned. When I saw the title of this article, I immediately logged into my Basecamp. Hmm, it looked the same. So I went and found their upgrade instructions. Then I learned that it's not a straight 1:1 upgrade, it's a different product. And they've dropped support for some quite important features, like, time-tracking.

My work runs on Basecamp. We chose it for two reasons, first because it did (nearly) everything we needed it to do, second, because it was being developed by a company we loved.

Now, it's completely integrated into our days to day production. We depend on it. If I walked in to work today and Basecamp was down, I might as well turn around and head home. We've let 37Signals premiere product become essential to us.

As of today, we're using their formerly premiere product. And if we wanted to upgrade to their premiere product, we'd lose completely essential feature.

Yes, they can say that Basecamp Classic will be the same great product it's always been, but it won't. Part of that greatness was innovation, and I don't think anyone believes that 37Signals will continue to innovate with a product that has "Classic" in its name.

The solution isn't hard. 37Signals just needs to be clear.

Will critical features like Time Tracking be in a future version of Basecamp, or will that requirement make us, forever, second class users? Because, I'd rather be a 1st class user at one of Basecamp's competitors than a 2nd class user at the service I've been using for the past 4 years.

We're launching with a great set of features we could do in a reasonable amount of time. If we had tried to reimplement every single Basecamp Classic feature in Basecamp Next before we launched, it would have taken a very long time.

Basecamp Classic originally launched without even file uploads!

We'll be busy bees making Basecamp Next fill in gaps all over the place in the coming months. Looking into how we can solve people's time tracking needs with a great workflow in Basecamp Next is high on that list!

Firstly, great products. I use Basecamp everyday as well, but we are also dependant on "Time", although I side with the philosophical argument that the "Time" feature is essentially useless. I would want to get rid of it, too. Here's why: project managers like to think it's a way of predicting the next project timeframe. It's a giant fallacy. In no way, shape or form, does Time keeping give you any sense of what to expect, so for that reason - I applaud removing it. However, Mr. Project Manager isn't happy. And when he's not happy, I can't use your new Basecamp. Once that sets in as a consciousness and we feel 'Classic', someone is going to start hunting for an alternative. Based on this thread, I'd wager someone is currently tying all of your features + Time together and imposing the "You don't have to be 'Classic' any more!" marketing ploy.

> If we had tried to reimplement every single Basecamp Classic feature in Basecamp Next before we launched, it would have taken a very long time.

As a software developer, I understand this. But I also understand that giving the user the power to migrate projects one-by-one, managing 2 codebases and offering support for 2 products is also a very large undertaking. I feel like adding Time and Private messages would have taken less time and perhaps only pissed people off momentarily when you flipped the switch, like when Facebook and YouTube users protest and then eventually shut up.

By over-engineering this process, I feel like you've opened yourselves up to competitors because now you're that company that is trying to satisfy everyone.

[T]he "Time" feature is essentially useless…[P]roject managers like to think it's a way of predicting the next project timeframe.

There's more to time management than just prediction. When I was working for a company doing client work, we used Basecamp to keep track of how long we spent on each project so we could bill appropriately.

Of course, I don't doubt that. We just don't use it for that, so for me it makes sense not to have it from my point of view.

That's great to hear - but why does it take a rant on HN to communicate that integrating Time Tracking with Basecamp Next is a high priority?

If you're committing to adding Time-Tracking in the future, publicize it, so users like me will be confident that it's worth sticking with Basecamp.

Until that happens, you're telling us, "Sorry, you're not our target user base."

We weren't happy with the time tracking integration in Classic. It was usable, but it wasn't great. We want to take our time to either come up with a better built-in solution or an integration with another tool or something else.

This is a big part of why we're keeping Basecamp Classic around for a very long time. Basecamp Next was not going to launch with all the features that Classic already has. So it's OK that it's not a perfect fit for all existing customers on Day 1.

The iPhone didn't have copy'n'paste for a while, either. There's just so much you can do for launch, if you want to ship.

The iPhone anecdote is such an important one. Probably the most important lesson I learned working at Apple was: people don't remember that a feature was missing once you implement it, but they remember broken features long after you've fixed them.

Consequently, missing features are extremely sore when missing again, such as the ability to turn off 3G on the 4S. (Useful battery saver.)

DHH seems shy about mentioning this so I will: 37signals has been thinking about killing time tracking. See the "Goodbye" list here. http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3110-basecamp-next-the-goodby...

There is a disclaimer, "Some stuff on the Goodbye list is completely gone from Next, while other things are just executed differently enough that they don’t resemble the way things worked in Classic... There’s some stuff on Goodbye that we ended up keeping."

That said, it's probably worth keeping this "goodbye list" in mind when DHH says carefully hedged things like how the team is "looking into how we can solve people's time tracking needs with a great workflow in Basecamp Next." There's a good chance that will NOT be time tracking as you know it.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I don't think you should be kept waiting around for a feature that may be axed.

"We have a lot of great ideas we’ll be exploring down the road. Time tracking may or may not be one of those – we haven’t made any decisions yet."

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3129-launch-the-all-new-basec...

Why did you do a full rewrite?

It's pretty much all explained in this blog post:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got-to...

Quote: "[...] one of the key arguments for a rewrite was that we wanted a dramatic leap forward in speed — one that wouldn’t be possible through mere evolution."

I agree 100%. Without time tracking Basecamp Next is useless to us too. Migrating Classic to Next and losing our tracked time is no option. We mainly use To-Do lists and time tracking. Time tracking as it only is available in the 49$/month price plan was the single reason we upgraded.

I'm a bit disappointed now as i was looking forward to Basecamp Next.

> it's completely integrated into our days to day production. We depend on it

37signals, and DHH, constantly warn anybody that will listen, that they should not use free products because that "makes them the product" and leaves them at the mercy of an acquisition, or failure, etc.

But your comment shows that one can face the same risks with every Saas... Boxed software wasn't all bad! ;-) and open source software that you host yourself isn't bad either!

Hmm, I'm thinking of a third model, where you have SaaS, but you get a custom install for you (or your company), that you get to decide when and if to update.

Something between boxed software and a one-for-all SaaS.

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