We use basecamp and campfire at work. Basecamp is mediocre, not horrible and not great. Campfire sucks compared to similar tools that I've used in the past.
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.
A lot of people (myself included) would disagree with you there. The fact that they can afford to do something like the OP is announcing is sort of proving that... I've not used any project management tool that I've liked as much as Basecamp, and I've used heaps of them.
"Seems to me that they've been successful mostly because of their involvement in the Ruby and startup world, rather than making great products"
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 ;-)
"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.
The thing that Basecamp does well is that it is a generic project management tool that can be used for any kind of project - thus its wide appeal. The most interesting alternatives are ones that specialize in particular types of projects. For example, if you are a designer there is Solo and if you are a product manager there is my product Aha! - http://www.aha.io. These alternatives specialize by taking the common elements of project management software (like todo lists, calendars and comments) and tailoring them towards a particular job function.
Totally depends what you're trying to accomplish. Basecamp can be great for managing a whole project in all its complexity. But often times that's overkill, and too many features get in the way.
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.
Execution is somewhat hard, but there needs to be durable competitive advantage: user base, brand, IP, talent, etc. All other things being more-less equal, a few apps will inevitably dominate. (I would acquire Asana and Rally Software which owns FlowDock.)
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.