Seems to me that they've been successful mostly because of their involvement in the Ruby and startup world, rather than making great products. Nothing wrong with that, but it's good to be clear about the distinction between a company that makes great product and a company that's good at marketing itself.
Campfire is pretty bad though, yeah.
Or, rather, that there's no significant loss to them due to shuttering, because of the (relative) lack of use.
That said, spinning off would be the -wise- idea. Most likely they'll find a good amount from a buyer based on the name and reputation.
You also need to look at when basecamp & campfire were first released. They were significantly better in comparison to the competition at the time. And while basecamp doesn't personally fit with how I run and manage projects, I know a lot of people who are very happy with it. It fits in with how a lot of companies (many of them not "technical" companies) run their projects. For a certain kind of business it's a very good product.
"Nothing wrong with that, but it's good to be clear about the distinction between a company that makes great product and a company that's good at marketing itself"
A company that's not good at marketing and sales doesn't stay a company - no matter how good the products are ;-)
does a product that grows due to word of mouth amount to good marketing? i believe not. dropbox, github and recently put.io. i learnt about these products because of word of mouth e.g show hn not Google ads or some youtube marketing gimmick. i tend to use a product if a friend i know is immune to FOMO recommends it to me.
We[0] differentiate by keeping it as simple as possible: have discussions and make decisions together, that's it.
Other tools are great for other types of projects, such as Trello[1] for a sort of collaborative to-do list.
If your entire product can be copied in a day, it's probably not that great.
The idea that campfire is refined to perfection is laughable.