I'd say this has more to do with an existential crisis - the landscape for project management collaboration tools is very crowded with competitors, and some are vastly superior in many ways to Basecamp. I stopped using Basecamp years ago and groan every time a client makes me log into it. The early adopters have mostly given up on their core product.

PM collab tools are becoming a commodity product in business, and 37 Signals got distracted and missed out on making sure that their brand was front and foremost in customers' minds. They could have doubled down on the brand and become the "Kleenex" of PM tools. But they waited too late and are now scrambling to re-affirm their dominance in the space. Thats how I see this.