I doubt the harm caused to their users migrating project management is less than whatever harm they think 37signals is creating. So by their own logic, they shouldn’t cause this harm, or whatever.
Tl;dr; duke tech leadership seems incompetent
If I worked there and relied on Basecamp and had to migrate to something new, for these reasons, I would be frustrated. And I would trust my tech org less because they aren’t making decisions to make it most efficient for me to build things.
As a developer, I don’t want to worry about whether my company is going to arbitrarily decide to switch technologies to something inferior.
I don't know the root cause, but I do know from my own experience that a librarian is a very specific "type" of customer—extremely helpful in diagnosing any technical problem, generally positive and friendly, but God have mercy on you if you step on their politics.
Like, I know people who hate Ticketmaster but still use them because they have no other choice. It’s hard to replace.
How hard is it to replace Basecamp? Alternatives are aplenty. Some might even be cheaper and better.
This is a big reason to carefully manage your image as a company leader. It’s so a big reason DEI is financially beneficial in the: because you aren’t shutting out your best employees and customers by being unwelcoming to them.
Don’t make negative waves and unforced errors that give your customers a reason to explore alternatives.
Personally, I think basecamp is ok. But they definitely aren’t Ticketmaster.
“Initiating churn for no user value” that doesn’t mean anything. Basecamp was acting a fool and pissed off a group of purchase decision makers. And unlike companies like Ticketmaster or Apple/Google/Amazon, their product has a wide variety of alternatives.
I am aware of a company that switched away from AWS to GCP just because Jeff Bezos did something specific that personally annoyed the CEO. There was no significant cost savings and the effort to switch was relatively large.
> Initiating churn for no user value
What I meant by this is that changing tools is work. I do this when it helps me. Making me change part of my workflow is disruptive and I usually do this when it brings some value.
> switching off AWS because Bezos annoyed the CEO
I would probably plan on leaving a company that chose their cloud stack based on the ex-CEO’s actions. That’s a signal of complete stupidity or at least unpredictable chaos. I guess some people are good with this, but that drives me crazy as someone who builds things with tech. It’s a dumb thing to choose tech based on superficial things.
> acting the fool
Some people think this, some people don’t. Personally, I have no issues with what he said but typically don’t really care what CEOs say about affirmative action or whatever. I want to hear from people’s competence areas, not just common prerogatives. I don’t care their favorite flavor of ice cream either.
But buying or not buying their products based on what they say is not a good way to make decisions. As people will say many things over the years and I don’t want to be changing frequently.