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Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

I didn't read the OP's question as hostile, or suggesting their applications are rubbish. I think it's a valid question - clearly some people are willing to pay money for inferior products, because they value other things. Trust? support? name brand? Love RoR and want to support people using RoR?

Analysing what those things are seems a good idea if you're trying to emulate it, and you can't do that by "Trying the app yourself". The best way, as the OP has done, is ask customers why they pay for it.

I have tried Campfire, and I'm still not quite sure why people pay for it. I think you can take simplicity too far personally. It could be replicated on a weekend (As was done at google with huddlechat) so I don't see the value proposition there. I haven't tried basecamp so maybe that's more complex.

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You make a good argument that follows logically from your initial assumption - that "clearly some people are willing to pay money for inferior products." So I'll just challenge that assumption ;-) By and large, I think you and the OP are defining inferior products as synonymous with less fully featured products. But it's not that simple (witness the iPhone, still lacking cut & paste).

For example, compare Highrise with Salesforce. My company (a 50 person consulting firm) is moving away from SF to HR right now, even though SF has many, many more features. Why? Because HR has all of the features we need, and most of the features we like (but don't absolutely require). And we are much, much more productive when using HR. It's easier to use. I don't have to think much when filling in information. The reports take me about 5 seconds to read and comprehend. This time savings is very valuable to me and my company - I've got better things to do than think about how to use a CRM application. The features Salesforce possesses that HR lacks, by contrast, don't have any value.

You'll get it if you just look at things through a slightly different lens. You might be getting tripped up by the confusion of effort and size with value. Value is what software has to a customer - effort is the cost software has to developers. And size is just a number. It would be nice if these three number always correlated. But unfortunately, that isn't the case.

I'd say a sure fire signal that it's inferior is if it can be replicated by someone else easily. If so, they can replicate it, then improve it - making the original inferior.

The iPhone looks extremely simple. But it's a ruse - it's actually massively complex and a feat of engineering. It's hard to copy.

I agree, it takes a lot of thought to decide what to leave out - lack of features can be a good thing. But those decisions are not really defendable in terms of IP (Unless you complain Huddlechat 'stole' your whole UI and they roll over)

I haven't used basecamp or highrise extensively, so perhaps they make up for campfire.

I am not stating that 37 Signals products are inferior at all. The classical mindset was that people would move from one product to another because of some killer feature or low cost alternative. 37Signals has seemed to flip this idea and challenge the idea of what better software means. This brought me to wonder how other users felt about their products and their motivations for using them. I like your distinction between effort and value. I don't agree at all with the notion of the amount of effort put in equals the amount of value to the user. It simply doesn't work in reality. The effort is also a vague concept as it could be related to development time, marketing, customer service, etc. Effort in dealing with users, gathering feedback and iterating on the product based on that feedback is what gains value for a product IMHO.

thanks axod! I feel like this is a valid forum to ask this question. I think some of their products can be emulated quickly in feature sets but it usually is their design and user experience that sets them apart. also i believe their audience is either small businesses (fortune 5,000,000 :D) that don't have resources or ones that would rather not allocate the resources to develop similar solutions.

Campfire's just-work quotient is pretty high. As someone who's got his own web hosting, I was casting around for a hostable Campfire-workalike and there was nothing that I could find to compare. I also know some folks who have developed a very similar system as a part of their larger product and I hear enough of their bitching to know that there is some degree of skill in getting things to be 37S-level smooth.

Just because _you_ can replicate something on a weekend doesn't mean other people can (or want to).

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