Whining sucks more than Basecamp
Yesterday I read an article in my reader, by DHH I think, it prompted me to take a look at the Basecamp homepage. I’ve never used Basecamp so I tried basecamp.com which was totally wrong, that in turn made me Google for “basecamp 37signals” which gave me the proper link to basecamphq.com as the first result, the second result however leads to whybasecampsux.org. Intriguing, so I clicked it.
The first thing that meets you are 3 massive paid for ads by competitors of Basecamp, that in itself is simply hilarious. Small tip to all whiners out there: If you start a whine site, never ever put ads on it to competitors of the product you are whining about, only a moron would do that and expect to be taken seriously.
The whine itself is about how Jason Fried treats people badly through curt replies when they are asking for features to be implemented. But when I read the Basecamp homepage I got the impression that the lack of features is a feature, that the product caters to people who hate overdone and bloated software.
In fact, these curt replies is the only option for Jason. He can’t very well tell people to fuck off, that would be over the top. Neither can he pull white lies in order to placate them, that might just stoke them further. This situation would at least have me resorting to the same rhetoric as Jason’s.
I mean if you were handling customers at Coca Cola, how would you react to something like: “I really love your product but I’d like it to taste a little bit of bananas after 5 minutes drinking, and after 10 minutes I want that taste to morph into something more vanilla like, can you do that?”.
Or a Nike equivalent: “It would be great if I could wear my Nikes at the Nobel Price dinner, therefore it would be cool if you could create a slick black leather model with low profile hard rubber soles, can you do that?”.
Sometimes you simply choose the wrong product, sometimes it’s because of misinformation from the producer but most often it’s because you didn’t make an informed purchase. If you make a bad purchase due to the fact that you didn’t do your research properly, take it like a man. Whatever you do please don’t go start some whine site that will only make you look even more stupid.