No milestones? What are we supposed to use instead of it? Our workflow heavily depends on them ..
The all-new Basecamp is live
51–60 of 156 posts
Re: The all-new Basecamp is live
#52No milestones? What are we supposed to use instead of it? Our workflow heavily depends on them ..
Same here. That's the only jolting aspect for us.
I suspect we'll have to use to-dos or calendar events. But calendar events don't seem to appear on the overview page and can't be checked off as completed either.
Anyway, clearly I need to keep investigating.
Re: The all-new Basecamp is live
#53I'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.
Re: The all-new Basecamp is live
#54What about the API? Is it still going to be supported in the new Basecamp or will it remain just for the classic Basecamp? I really hope there will be some kind of continuity where the data structure make it possible. Beside this, it looks really clean and fast. I like it! :)
We'll be introducing a new API. It's not ready yet.
Re: The all-new Basecamp is live
#55It appears they just bought basecamp.com as well. It's been basecamphq.com for a while.
basecamphq.com remains for Basecamp Classic accounts. basecamp.com is for new Basecamp accounts.
Re: The all-new Basecamp is live
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. $20/mo is definitely going to be too expensive for a ton of potential customers. I guess it's a luxury that 37Signals can not only afford, but will maximize their profit and I would assume they have some good historical data to back up the decision. I do think that there is a magic $5-9/mo range that individuals will pay without thinking too much. Above that amount, they start equating a subscription with a…
I totally disagree, $20/mo for a service like Basecamp is not expensive. I pay $20-50/mo per month for a whole host of services (hosting, backup storage, payment processing, etc.) and don't really think twice about them since they're business expenses. FYI: I'm an individual who has a full-time job but does projects/apps at night with a separate LLC.
I agree--$20/mo is not expensive but like @thehodge says... it all adds up. I think that in this space tho, you have a huge market of people who are "pre-business" who just couldn't justify 5-10 $20 services a month when they are pre-profit or only making a few hundred a month off of their products. Basecamp could appeal to some of these folks with a sub $10 offering.
Re: The all-new Basecamp is live
#57Looks like they have got rid of the free plan... (I'm not saying this as a negative thing, it's going to be really interesting to see the response to this, I know there was a blog post a while ago saying there hardly anyone on the free account upgraded) I'm using a free basecamp account but we only have one project and $20/$25 is just a little much for that a micro plan at $10 would be awesome :) )
As others have posted here about other businesses, prices under around $20/month start to rapidly become unprofitable. One common reason cited is that a price of e.g. $10/mo doesn't allow any budget for support time, etc. Lower price points work for consumer applications with potentially massive scale. But businesses unfortunately need to pay for results.
Re: The all-new Basecamp is live
#58Old Basecamp was not being improved actively anyway. It took them 5 years to add deadlines to to-do's, for example.
The new product reminds me (even in the name) the failed NeXTSTEP operation systems. The incompatibility with existing solutions was part of it. Basecamp Next is not an upgrade, but a new product. It does not have the same set of features, in fact it has even less (time tracking, milestones, etc). Free accounts are also dropped out, as it seams. Old browsers like IE7 do not seam to be supported... A lot of things are going against what J was preaching all those years.
I can see Basecamp fans buying it, but if I would be a new user and I would check their website for the first time (that is also designed with you already knowing about Basecamp in mind) I would ask myself "why would I pay $20-$150 a month for a product with so few features"). It's a nice to-do list, but the users got smarter and the market moved forward - users need more features, not just a one-page project page (Google Docs can do half of it out of the box and for free).
Re: The all-new Basecamp is live
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. It would be nice to see a list of added/removed features vs. Classic. For example we use the time tracking functionality for our invoicing needs. Also, does the API ( http://developer.37signals.com/basecamp/ ) stay the same?
This post has a good list: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3110-basecamp-next-the-goodby... The API isn't ready yet, soon though!
Thanks! Seems indeed a lot of useful stuff was dropped. I wonder if that was based on usage analysis, or just an opinion on what the product should have.
It is a shame that API appears to be only an afterthought. Otherwise third parties could possibly offer some of the missing features.
Re: The all-new Basecamp is live
#60The comments here remind me of Joel Spolsky's excellent 80/20 essay: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html
Excerpt: "...A lot of software developers are seduced by the old "80/20" rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release "lite" word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the "word count" feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it's not there, because it's in the "80% that nobody uses," and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can't use this damn thing 'cause it won't count my words."