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Google takes aim at 37 Signals!

April 11, 2008

Jason Fried, of 37Signals, was livid when Google (or their proxies) developed a chat application called HuddleChat.  He felt it was wrong for Google to make an application that was similar to his company’s Campfire application.  Google immediately took down the application.  Mike Arrington and others suggested that by taking it down Google was engaging in censorship setting a bad precedent.  Today Mike revealed that Google might be launching a ToDo list application.  Um, 37Signals has a ToDo list application too (http://www.tadalist.com/).  I suspect that Jason won’t be too happy about this either.  Perhaps Google should start checking with the 37Signal guys before they begin developing applications ~ might save everyone some time.  Just for the record, 37Signals owns the following application areas:

  • Project Management and Collaboration (Basecamp)
  • Online contact management and simple CRM (Highrise)
  • Intranet, group calendar, organizer (Backpack)
  • Real-time group chat for business (Compfire)
  • ToDo Lists (TaDaList)
  • Collaborative writing (Writeboard)
  • Open-source web-app framework (Ruby on Rails)

FYI - we are a satisfied 37 Signals customer (just having some fun, so don’t turn off our Basecamp sites, please).

Written by Alexander Muse · Filed Under Blog, Personal 

Comments

6 Responses to “Google takes aim at 37 Signals!”

  1. Ravi Says:
    April 11th, 2008 at 2:07 pm

    I think the bigger issue was HuddleChat copying Campfire’s inteface, features, and all — it was basically a knockoff, not just another chat app.

    I trust they won’t be directly copying TaDaList for their to-do app, so all should be fine in the world again.

  2. Zoli Erdos Says:
    April 11th, 2008 at 3:14 pm

    Alex, nobody owns any particular market. When the next better mousetrap comes along, customers will have a choice.

    Now, it the new product is a copycat, i.e. has the look and feel of a 37Signals product, that’s not very nice, agreed. But nobody can claim a domain, be it to-dos, databases, editors, games … you-name-it as “reserved” space. They just have to out-innovate the newcomer. :-)

  3. Alexander Muse Says:
    April 11th, 2008 at 10:35 pm

    Actually, I was just having a bit of fun. Google isn’t even really considering a to-do list application. Mike’s rumor was just a mistake by someone at Google who accidentally posted their OWN to-do list.

  4. Michael Kariv Says:
    April 12th, 2008 at 1:08 pm

    I am, just for fun and for my own use, developing a Gantt viewer for Google Spreadsheets. I am very much in favor of Google complementing their Office like applications to create a full suite. If they had, they’d spare me writing a pile of Silverlight code.
    I think it is inevitable that Goolge, alone or through partners, will have a full suite of complemeting applications. Every single app they have is worlds behind an MS Office counterpart in functionality, with the only exception of collaboration / online availability. So the real value of Writely (now google docs) is not its awesome left ident feature, but an integration with everyhting else online.
    So Google PM is imminent. In the meantime I have my own, gganttic. Will serve me well until Google Project comes.

  5. Dave McCrory Says:
    April 12th, 2008 at 3:47 pm

    Actually Alex, Google does now have a to-do-list application (it is a widget that is part of iGoogle) allowing a user to share their to-do-list with people in their contacts list.

    http://www.google.com/ig/adde?moduleurl=www.google.com/ig/modules/todo.xml

    the link above is what I’m referring to…

  6. Scott Says:
    April 29th, 2008 at 5:12 pm

    Actually, if someone were to make another app, and it had the same features as one of the 37signals apps, what’s wrong with that? I mean, it’s not like the “brash boys” of 37signals has the market cornered with the tab interface - only so much you can do.

    Obviously, an exact duplicate is different. Barring that, I see no problem with it. It’s what the free market is about. Nobody cried and bitched and moaned when Ford’s model - T was copied by the next automotive company… it’s the way of business and anyone who doesn’t believe so isn’t living in the real world. It will happen and Jason and company can cry all they want, but it won’t stop anything.

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