| Since 37signals has been having challenges hosting SaaS and hiring for dev/ops roles, it naturally makes sense that they'd be looking to shift that operational burden to their customers :) I'm being extra snarky. But I must admit that I've grown a lot more skeptical of this company in recent years. Their marketing about their products as well as about their open-source components has too much bravado. They can't just say that administering their own Kubernetes control planes and network stacks feels like more trouble than its worth for a smallish organization like their own -- they have to announce that the status quo is wrong and their new solution is right. HTML-over-the-wire makes sense for some use-cases and not for others, but according to 37signals there are exactly zero situations where it makes sense to transport JSON or PB between a back-end and a front-end. It's been a few years since I evaluated Basecamp for my employer — at the time, the functionality was fine, but limited compared to other options for project management on the market and included some very opinionated portions that couldn't be customized. Integrations and client apps were also more limited compared to other options. It was the same story back when they offered Highrise CRM. Nothing wrong with their software, but there's a reason that larger players are able to satisfy a wider range of customers for business productivity and project planning software. I was excited to try Hey, and found it similarly opinionated and underwhelming in terms of actual functionality. Maybe this has changed in the meantime, but I didn't see enough movement in the product at the time to want to commit to using it personally. And while others can interpret their leadership team's management decisions however they wish, what I saw was them needlessly alienating some key long-term staff members and contributors to their open-source components. What a waste of talent and good will. All this to say that I don't doubt that some of 37signals's products and some of their open-source components are indeed useful and valuable to some folks and some use-cases. At the same time, their approach to self-promotion and marketing has just started to leave an off taste in my own mouth, making me skeptical of a substance-free announcement like this. |
I don't use their products. They shifted to hosting from the cloud to on-prem. It seems to be they what they're doing.
Their salaries are in the top 10% of the market for non FAANG companies.