Basecamp: Blinded by Ideology
I’m currently in last year of EPITA, a Software Engineering school in Paris. Our main projects include Management courses in order to produce GANTT charts. Since Basecamp doesn’t offer the possibility to create GANTT charts, we recently had to switch from this great tool to Collabtive, a free solution so buggy that we usually have to spend time to fix bugs ourselves before we can actually use it.
The more I use Collabtive, the more I think the switch wasn’t worth it. I Googled some random “Basecamp” and “GANTT” associations and stumbled upon this public complaint from Mike Schinkel:
It’s a damn shame to find a product like BaseCamp that does 90% of what I need but, because of IMO blind ideology, its owner Jason Fried won’t even consider adding a feature for which arguably 65% of people would benefit. Jason’s last comment to me was: “Look at it this way… Go use another tool, get the Gantt charts, but miss the other 90%. Which tradeoff is worth more to you?“
Here’s the thing: the projects I’m working on are simulations of industrial engineering. We’re talking about Microsoft-size projects, where there are tens of middle-managers between the CEO and the employees, where the whole project is outsourced, where you have regular physical meetings… The kind of projects where you build a plane, a train, a nuclear submarine. Where GANTT charts may actually be useful for security reasons, but certainly not for productivity.
I’m convinced that “4999500 of the Fortune 5000000 companies” (as Jason Fried says) don’t need GANTT charts to produce good work. I stay convinced that Basecamp was the most useful tool for my workgroup but, since it doesn’t correspond to our project management requirements anymore, we had to switch. I don’t think I’ll ever work for a company that needs me to use this kind of heavy management methods.
If you look at Schinkel’s article, you’ll find Jason Fried in the comments, arguing that Basecamp won’t support GANTT charts because almost all of its users don’t. I’m glad I’m paying for a service that Jason Fried assures is going for the quality and not for the features quantity. What if Apple had kept floppy drive ten years ago because some people were convinced they couldn’t lived without?
