This is a really good example of how to write a shutter letter. But it's not appropriate to criticize companies that shutter free services (i.e. Google) for not doing every single checkmark on this list (especially if they only miss one of them[1]).
Google has a lot of free products. Notably, Google's shut down of Reader comes under a lot of flak for how it was delivered to the public. But 37signals sold Breeze for $10. Google Reader was free. And yet, Google did everything 37signals did here except recommend alternatives. They even gave a longer sunset.
37Signals had customers - Google only had users. There is a world of difference in the utility and obligations in the company-user relationship there. Google could shutter any product it wants without telling anyone. It would be bad press, but doing anything more is a kindness and respect for users in imitation of how companies should treat customers. You didn't earn that kind of respect or attention from Google, they gave blog posts and announcements and free data and sunsets because they care. In most cases you would only get that kind of attention because companies don't want to burn paying customers from using their other products.
This in no way criticizes 37signals. It's a great discontinuation announcement. But stop deifying them and demonizing Google when Google actually went above and beyond in letting you know. Those comments aren't productive, they're just angry.
It's not shutting down Google Reader, but rather a pattern of behavior where products built on open standards are replaced by walled gardens. Google+ hasn't taken off either, but Google is doubling down on it rather than shutting it off.
Google+ has taken off. It's just not a booming social network for friends like Facebook is. In that regard, Twitter hasn't taken off either.
I'm not trying to build a strawman here, but people judge Plus and Twitter by the wrong metric. Facebook is not the only model of how to run a social network. Google+ is a website for professional connections with selectivity based on who will see what, precisely because there are so many different types of relationships available. Facebook is literally just for friends (and should be). They're doubling down on it because users are using it, it's showing itself to be a better product. And - it's gaining traction without Google having to resort to the sort of advertising that Microsoft is doing with Bing. It's much more organic.
But I digress - my comment here was specifically in response to the many comments I've read disparaging Google for its handling of Reader. I agree with you that Google has a tendency to merge products into semi-androgyny. But I also think this is a good thing. Google is slowly limiting its product selection while maximizing effort into each product. There may be some kinks to work out, but I believe that the basic philosophy of quality over quantity is there.
And, honestly, products like Reader and Feedburner are so multifarious and down the pipeline that without a solid base of paying customers Google could never hope to improve them substantially. In fact, they haven't really been improved substantially.
I believe that while Google could improve the way they're doing it, it will be a net win for them to consolidate services into more feature-rich products they can devote exponentially more attention to.
I don't disagree with your distinction between Google+ and FB, but I disagree with the conclusion that its taking off. There's no doubt that Google+ is trying to occupy a different space than facebook, but I see no proof (I think any of the 'active users' stats Google touts around are more or less fraudulent) that they're doing any better than their two biggest competitors on either side of the spectrum: LinkedIn and Twitter.
it's showing itself to be a better product
How? Because in my mind the #1 feature of a social network, regardless of domain, are the social interactions it enables -- and right now Google+ is losing to the likes of Branch and Quora in that department.
I noticed that pretty much the people who criticize Google for shutting down products are the same people who criticize Google for having too many products.
In my opinion, this is not because they expect Google+ to be a true competitor to Facebook.
The addition of information in Google+ user profiles allows them to compete with Facebook advertising in a key arena -- targeting ads based on self-volunteered user information which is more valuable and trustworthy rather than trying to derive this information based on browsing\searching patterns.
Google+ serves to enhance Google's ad products more than it does to provide value to customers.
Having said that, Hangouts (which most people consider a part of Google+) is a succesful product.
I would question the notion that self-volunteered information is more accurate. It's easy to "like" or "follow" something. It's quite another to buy it or make search queries that seem to lead to a purchasing decision. Which data is better for advertising?
Well, in my experience people don't "like" or "follow" things they wouldn't mind seeing frequent (borderline annoying) updates for as a direct consequence. So while the act of liking and following might not lead to a direct sale, it's a reasonable argument to suggest that the people who do that are a good, receptive audience for a targeted ad campaign.
Ad targeting might not only be more effective, but it could also save money by not spending money futilely throwing a product in the face of users who are just not interested.
It's essentially not just a way to opt-in to advertising, it's a way to opt-out of all the other things you might not want. Whether this works 100% of the time is another debate entirely.
I know it's anecdotal, but I read way more Google+ related content than Facebook.
I say this as someone who doesn't have an account with either service. The quality content with Google+ is there, Facebook is clearly just useless tripe.
Reader used to be a fantastic way to share great content with your friends. When the sharing was replaced with +1 it indicated the Google wanted the sharing to happen on Google+ [1]. Which means content creators have to get on G+ to syndicate, despite every CMS having RSS output already.
I think what makes this shutdown different from Reader is that 37signals did this as soon as they realized it wasn't a profitable venture.
I can't actually say how it went down at Google, but I suspect they knew they weren't going to be making money with Reader very quickly, yet still allowed it to become the dominant RSS player.
The 37signals shutdown seems practical, the Google one reeks of greed.
This is an odd announcement considering the last I heard, 37signals would prevent new signups to phased out services, not abandon them entirely [0]. I can't imagine that Breeze was all that resource intensive to maintain, but I don't really know what goes into such a service.
David: We stopped offering to new people. Ta-Da List and Writeboard. The critical thing, I feel like, we did right was to say, “No new people could sign up for this. Everybody who’s still on it, we’re still going to support it.” We’re just going to continue to support it.
Jason C: So what was the thinking there? It doesn’t cost us that much.
David: It doesn’t cost that much to support it. What’s really expensive in running these services is you have to keep scale as your growing. You have to buy new hardware and manage the ops. You have to deal with the bugs that invariably will spill out from launching new features and all that stuff. If you stop launching new features and you stop growing then it becomes a non issue in many ways.
Jason C: Set it and forget it.
David: Exactly. Set it and forget it. It’s going to be there till… I don’t necessarily want to say the last guy closes the lights or whatever… but there’s no imperative for us to close it down. I think it’s a much more humane way to deal with…
This conversation is in direct reference to Google's decision and management of shutting down Reader
I can't imagine that Breeze was all that resource intensive to maintain, but I don't really know what goes into such a service.
As far as I understand it, they send the e-mail directly from their own servers. Maintaining a system to do this reliably is quite labor intensive as you need to try and get (and stay!) whitelisted with the larger providers and constantly put out 'abuse' fires. Dealing with e-mail is a labor intensive pain in the ass at the best of times..
Maybe there was so few people who joined Breezer, and it's such a new service, that it doesn't make sense to have the product running for years if they made their mind already about not wanting to keep investing in it.
Great point, it does look like a shift in how they're sunseting their products. I agree with David's approach to ta-da list, writeboard, backpack, but not with breeze.
Wasn't Breeze sold as "Pay once - use forever"? It's a joke that they now just cop out via "yeah we'll refund your money".
Compare this to Backpack that was also discontinued but since it's paid for monthly, 37signals decided to let existing customers continue to pay and receive their service.
So Backpack stays alive (albeit without new signups) since it continues to make them money, but Breeze gets closed and all customers get shafted. Even thought Breeze was sold as "forever" while Backpack was sold as "monthly".
And let's not forget that Backpack needs a lot more (security) updates and maintenance than a simple mail server for mailing lists.
How is that a cop out? You get your money back so whatever use you got from it was effectively free apart from the minor inconvenience of moving over to another service (which they are kind enough to make suggestions for).
Because it was sold as "just pay once and get your mailing list", not as "just pay once and get your mailing list for a few months then no more mailing list"
I think that's exactly right, the transaction pitched to customers is not what it turned out to be, and that's never good, no matter how it's communicated.
I think people are choosing to see this from 37S (or any other software co's) perspective. Fine, whatever 37S's expectations were to begin with didn't work out, so 37S is closing the service. Makes perfect sense, and godspeed, 37S. But the other side of a transaction is a customer that put money, time and effort into this product. Even if 37S gives back the money, the customer isn't made completely whole; I don't think it's illogical to think folks wouldn't be completely happy with this outcome, no matter how great of a job 37S did communicating the closing.
yeah, but the customer didn't want the money, they wanted the service. That's why they gave the money in the first place.
Obviously it's a very good showing that 37S is refunding customers their money, but I wouldn't be completely happy if I were a customer since what I was promised (the service) is no longer being delivered. I would feel a little burned.
Do this often enough, and customer trust is eroded. How many folks are going to think twice before signing up for 37S next new product? I would.
They gave a full refund without being asked, exported data, and gave their customers suggestion so I don't think that they could have handled this any better.
The economics are different, backpack customers I assume still pay to use the service so there's a revenue stream to maintain a small customer base. Breeze customers already paid, so if they kept supporting existing breeze customers they'd be doing it for free (no new breeze money coming in). This is another reason why I never understood the pay once, use forever pricing scheme for saas products, it just doesn't match up with how the product is delivered.
For as long as they agreed to do so. They shouldn't have promised what they couldn't deliver. It's wrong when ISPs do it ("unlimited!") and it's just as wrong when small "fun" tech companies to it.
Then you make it less likely that they will consider offering the service in the first place.
Sometimes things just don't make business sense and you kill them.
I have killed stuff in the past that has literally had 1 user , it wouldn't seem sensible at all to keep it running simply for that one person (unless they were paying me significantly).
The best way to judge a company in my opinion is how they handle it when they do. In this case distribution to customers was minimized.
I don't see why "not promising to keep services running forever" makes them less likely to offer them. I'm not asking anything but "don't overpromise". Doesn't seem particularly onerous to me.
I don't remember the original launch, but I doubt that they made a promise to keep this running forever. I'm sure they had T&C with the standard "we can discontinue this whenever we want with no notice or refund".
It ran for only 4 months. I had at the time considered suggesting it to my workplace as they are constantly 5-6 years behind in IT and don't really have the staffing to provide extra IT services anyways.
Now I'm glad I didn't recommend it, though I wish the circumstances had been different.
Then they shouldn't promise 'unlimited'. Why not pay as you go. If I pay monthly I expect to have the product for the month. If I pay forever I expect to have the product for forever.
That's a fairly unrealistic expectation. I doubt that many of the products we use today will exist in 50 years time for example.
It's like going to an all you can eat, eating the entire buffet yourself and then demanding they go out and find you more to satisfy your limitless hunger.
That's a bad analogy; eating the entire buffet is truly unrealistic (and by that I mean a biological near-impossibility).
37S promised the product "forever", and provided it for 4 months - even if you didn't think "forever" actually meant until the end of time, I think it is reasonable to assume it meant more than a year.
But not only is your partial month being completely refunded, so are all your prior full months. That absolves them of responsibility for your expectation, because you're no longer a customer.
You do understand it was sold as a one-time payment for perpetual use, not a month to month service. Those are very different expectations, regardless how the math works out.
To be fair, they were the ones that took the gamble of a one-off payment rather than a subscription, so should really have stuck to their guns and supported it. At least longer than 4 months.
Yes, you could take the wording literally, but it's physically impossible to continue a service forever. When I pay $5 or whatever to use it forever, I don't expect to be sitting at my computer at 95 doing so.
Of course, still I think the common meaning of "forever" is closer to "until 37signals doesn't exist any more" than "until 37signals decides they don't like it any more".
In any case I think we can agree that "forever" is longer than January to August.
For free + the setup time for an alternative solution you wanted to avoid the first place + the migration work.
The second part was going to happen without Breeze in any case. But getting all the data out of Breeze and somwhere else properly is a problem created by Breeze closing down so early.
37signals sell to business customers. For them, having someone blocked for a day to get all that set up somewhere else costs quite a bit of money.
Still, I think 37signals handles that the best they can. There isn't much more to do then to grind your teeth and say sorry to current customers.
But they are causing very real inconvenience for existing customers, so all complaints are valid.
The fact remains that 37S persists as a company. Inasmuch as that is true, they are entirely capable of offering this product in perpetuity to those who bought it, as they've done with other products produced by them.
If people pay for indefinite use, the company has an obligation to provide for such use so long as they are capable of doing so.
Right in Google's announcement:
"Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months." http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cl...
So them saving users a Google Search for the alternatives was all it took to clear them? Damn, if only big G had known, they could have saved themselves a lot of flak.
(Actually, it wouldn't have mattered. Don't kid yourself.)
Yes, but that's not really Google's responsibility.
They deliberately gave a three month sunset for users to find another solution. That's entirely the point of a sunset.
Their product is also free, so it's not like they're hurting businesses or real customers by not helping them find alternatives. They're not really obligated to even do anything at all - it was a free service. If they were being paid it would make more sense.
I believe we can reasonably hold them to it. You can't just shut off the lights to a product that people pay for (well, you could, but that's a liability).
Precisely correct -- the real issue is that Google _didn't_ kill Reader in this manner. They subsidized its existence with their other products, undermining the support of other feed readers on the market, until they decided not to.
So the obvious solution is to let it continue to limp along then?
Google did the right thing. They didn't want to invest anymore into it. They shut it down. They gave everyone on the planet TONS of notice. They provided the data.
Now we have fun things like Feedly to take its place.
RSS was already on its way out -- on a steady decline since 2006. Google Reader peaked in 2011 and was on a decline since then, too. Though I generally stopped using RSS a few years ago, I do think it's the best reader out there. But the perception that RSS and all of the competitors were killed off by Google is, at best, hyperbole.
But 37signals closed Breeze because it didn't hit a critical mass of customers. Google can't say the same thing about many cough Reader cough of the products they close down. That's why Google gets ripped to shreds.
I believe the number of customers necessary for reaching "critical mass" is different for Google than for 37signals than for a new SaaS company that just started out.
Also Breeze had customers (that paid for it) while Google Reader had users that got it for free.
That's not necessarily true for either company. Remember when 37signals sold Sortfolio to focus more on core products? Sortfolio made over $200K in profit in a years time[1]. And Google made no attempt to monetize Reader at all so they can't say it was only about profitability.
Companies make strategic decisions all the time even at the expense of profit when warranted.
Yes, but profitability also delineates users from customers. One will naturally get more attention than another.
Comparing Google Reader to 37signals' Breeze is comparing apples to oranges, and it's not fair to subsequently conclude Google didn't do everything it could when it gave a longer sunset, but no alternatives. That's the one thing they didn't do, and their users were free.
Google keeping Reader free wasn't an act of altruism, at least not as far as I'm concerned. I think it gave them the kind of cover they needed to shutter it when Reader ceased to be useful. G even resisted monetizing after large numbers of users begged them to take their money and make a viable business out of it. Reader was never a product, it was a strategy.
37S saw Breeze only as a product to live and die on it's own merits (even if some customers really loved it). Google saw Reader as a product to manipulate the market (if you subscribe to that theory). This is why I think Google deserves to get ripped while 37signals shouldn't, even if Reader only had "users" and not "customers".
I agree that this is the ideal of how to shut down a product, but I don't believe you're being fair with Google. They provided everything you could ask for in their announcement of Google Reader's retirement[1]:
1. Sympathy with users who still use Reader.
2. A simple way to save all data to transition to another product.
3. A three month sunset, which they are not obligated to give.
You're right in that this announcement is missing one little line about alternatives to Reader. But there's two reasons why I don't think that matters - first, the explosion of alternatives mainly happened after that announcement, when alternatives like NewsBlur really came into mainstream knowledge. Secondly, Google doesn't really need to suggest alternatives when there's a sunset. Sure they could, but you could also just google it (no humor intended). You have three months to find it on your own, I think I can forgive them for not suggesting alternatives that in my opinion weren't even as mature as Reader yet (with the possible exception of Feedly).
What I find interesting is how quickly they made the decision. It was launched less than 4 months ago.
It looked like a good service, I heard good reviews, and while I'm not against the "shut things down that don't get traction" idea, 4 months seems quite tight for something that was at least making some money. A lot of the most successful products take much longer to find their feet (although I appreciate this was just a side line and not the next Skype or Facebook).
There's a game theory element to this as well. If customers know that the product is likely to get discontinued shortly unless the product reaches an arbitrary and invisible (to the user) goal, then only early adopters are going to use it because it's too risky to rely on something that might die in 4 months. Early adopters are a very small section of a large bell curve of potential users. This could lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy where their new products all die due to customer fear, not lack of customer interest.
I'm a bit confused about this as well. Was the expectation that they'd launch a paid version of an email distro, send a few tweets, and BOOM! they'd have a multimillion-dollar business? I understand that at their scale a few users paying a one-time $25 fee isn't going to register, but why launch a product as an experiment?
Customers are going to become less and less open to trying products from a company that uses them as guinea pigs to test out product-market fit.
Sounds like they may not have had a high enough viral coefficient as they would have wanted. So they felt like it was not worth investing more in product development or marketing.
Definitely impressed that they had the discipline to shut it down in 4 months.
I guess one difference between 37signals and many others who launch products is that they have a huge audience on which to promote the product out of the gate. It'd be crazy to tell someone with a small audience to quit on a product in 4 months but if you had 100,000 people hit a homepage and only 10 people buy.. maybe that's a clearer signal.
One of their replacement service suggestions is https://fiesta.cc. It looks nice but it's totally free -- I get nervous when there is not a clear business model. (It was almost shut down a year ago according to their blog: http://blog.fiesta.cc.)
Another suggestion is http://www.mail-list.com. They charge around $1/user/year, which seems pretty reasonable to me (one reason I didn't sign up for Breeze is that $25 seemed like a lot for a lot of use cases, like a list for a season-long sports team). But in the fine print, it says the minimum is a $99 purchase per organization per year.
Their final suggestion is http://www.emaildodo.com. Call me a snob, but the late 90s design scared me off.
So none of these seem like great options -- I'd rather use http://librelist.com, which is run as a free for-the-good-of-the-internet service from what I can tell.
Assuming Google and Yahoo Groups are too heavy-handed for a simple mailing list, what do you use? Any experience with these?
If you're looking for another alternative, we're building http://zeromailer.com . It's still in active development, but the core "just let me make a simple mailing list" is there.
Pricing model is that lists with fewer than 1000 messages[1] per month are free, and higher traffic lists basically pay by volume. We also have a couple of premium features (e.g. custom domains) that we're upcharging for.
I'd love to hear what you think of it, and what you think we can do better.
Oh, and I've always liked being able to administer mailing lists from the command line, so we've got a command line interface in testing, ping me if you'd like to check it out.
[1] messages = total volume of mail, so basically (emails * list members)
Re: Fiesta.cc - we're on it. Ping me (alexey at username dot com) if you'd like to be in the beta for paid corporate email accounts, and I'd be happy to help you out!
Yesterday I read a Reddit post about a guy being depressed because he started a new project each month for the past 9 or so months and none of them became business. He gave each one a month before declaring it a failure.
This provides two great reminders:
1) Even really smart and accomplished folks can't always predict what's going to be successful. But they got something delivered, gave it a good effort, and then decided to move on.
2) Declaring failure after a day or a month is far too short sighted. Breeze launched in January. So about 6 months of lots of data and customers (or lack of) to make decisions like this with.
"Young musicians believe they should be able to throw a band together and be famous, and anything that’s in their way is unfair and evil. What are you, in your 20s, you picked up a guitar? Give it a minute"
Point #1 is a recent lesson learned for me. I remember seeing Robert De Niro on Inside The Actor's Studio saying essentially the same thing. He can't tell anymore while filming a movie how good it will be based on how the shoot is going, since he's been on well-run productions that flopped and chaotic stressful ones that came out great. Now he just concentrates on giving a great performance no matter what and doing a lot of work.
It's funny, I just set up a mailing list this weekend. Being a customer of 37signals' other products, the first thing I thought of was Basecamp Breeze. So, I went to their site to check it out.
Their site had a "Why use Breeze" page. I looked at the page, and it compared itself (and introduced me) to competitors. The only thing Breeze itself said was better about Breeze compared to Google Groups was that it was easy to set up. So I went with Google Groups and spent an extra 10 minutes configuring it to save $25.
When I first heard the launch of this product I was a bit skeptic. 37 Signals sells good to techies (and where techies are in charge of the order) but this particular product was specially geared towards non-techies, hence it would be really hard to make it work.
My guess would be that the system didn't organically acquired enough users, I might be wrong, and they simply cut their loses. Maybe they'll post something in the upcoming days to enlighten us.
Considering they constantly and harshly criticizing everyone else's business model and they literally wrote a book on how to run a business like this, a blog post with details is expected of them.
> 37 Signals sells good to techies (and where techies are in charge of the order) but this particular product was specially geared towards non-techies, hence it would be really hard to make it work.
Based on what? I've always assumed they focused on non-techies as a target market, based on they way they sell simplicity and fewer features.
I imagined Breeze as something like a really fancy version of MajorDomo or mailman, and maybe some people would want that for nostalgia. I always thought that web forums and Google Groups took over for that particular niche, so in that regard, 37signals had a tough hill to climb to make Breeze relevant.
I had a similar idea to this about a year back and didn't get out of the feasibility stage. After crunching the numbers I just couldn't make it work as a free service. Maybe I wasn't doing it right, but the bandwidth of attachments becomes the killer. Mail-list.com seems to have the pricing in just about the right spot, and I'm not sure that is something the common user is going to go use.
It appears that Fiesta.cc had this issue as well. From their blog they were going to shut down about a year ago but managed to figure out how to keep it running. Their site is a little short on details - I'm not sure what the limits on the mailing lists are.
"So put a price on it and put it up for sale. If people buy
that’s a yes. Change the price. If people buy, that’s a
yes. If people stop buying, that’s a no. Crude? Maybe. But
it’s real."
I think Breeze was just an experiment for 37 Signals, which might explain the unusual pricing strategy of a one off payment.
I'd bet they always intended to refund all users if they didn't meet a critical mass. If they had charged a subscription, then it would have been less simple than just giving each user their ten dollars back.
Can't say I'm against it. It's certainly an interesting way of testing an idea, and backing out if it doesn't gain enough traction. I guess everyone is happy.
Having said that, I'd be slightly sceptical the next time they launch a product. Are they just testing the water and is that too going to be discontinued in a few months time?
Something I've wondered about shut-downs like this: why don't they sell the whole product off as an independent business? That's what brick and mortar places usually try to do before closing (if they didn't go bankrupt). I could imagine an enterpreneur wanting to take over a working product with an existing brand and a customer base instead of building it from scratch.
Seems like this business could be run by a 1- or 2-person team, which would be ideal for an independent developer with the right skills. A running product that doesn't take off and limps along might just be what these people are looking for. Manage 3-5 part-time projects like this, and a couple could live comfortably in whatever location they choose.
I suppose in this case, there were factors such as a shared backend with other in-house products, so it couldn't be extracted and switched to someone else's server. Still, seems like a shame it wasn't even considered. It would even be a great learning project for a budding entrepreneur (run servers, add features, do marketing, deal with customers).
Used it for some small group communication when planning a bike race. It was a great alternative to 20-deep CC lists and Reply-All, and I think would have worked for our cycling club's internal mailing list if there had not been a cap of 50 members. It was nice to have a simple interface for managing list members (compared to, say, our web host-provided ezmlm lists), but its closing won't hinder our future event-related communication.
There is a little schadenfreude for me. When they launched, there was a significant air of pompous righteousness from 37S about how poor existing offerings were, and how this was the way things should be.
This is a great shutter letter, but I'll play devil's advocate:
When someone starts something from scratch, there is a clear message of "We're trying to make this work, join us in the experiment." Anyone with half a brain understands the possibility that the idea could fail and either languish or die. Thoughtful users assess how they will participate on that basis.
37signals is not a startup. When they announce they are launching something, people are less likely to think that it could fail, and more likely to jump in. 37signals benefits from that good will, and has presumably a better chance of success, or at least a higher rate of guaranteed sampling, than some random startup.
As such, 37signals is potentially in a position where they should be more committed than the average startup, and more graceful in their handling of failure. In short, they should be held to a higher standard.
Am I the only one that notices the strange paradox of the valley's (speaking loosely) celebration of failure, and the often intensely negative reactions people have to a service being shut down? Doesn't one go with the other?
It would be a bit like eating humble pie for them to recommend Google Groups. They did little hit pieces against Google and Yahoos services, to talk about how Breeze was orders of magnitude better.
Seems like 37S really are a one-hit wonder. Love the guys and the team, but seems they can't get anything launched that stays launched, and since they waited far too long to redo Basecamp, I'm positive they lost some business in the past 3-5. I'm curious to see what's next.
It's still the same product, just a redesign. Basecamp is great, and it set the standard for many in the industry, but I was much more excited about their future when they had a diverse product offering.
According to them it's not the same product (remember listening to a Mixergy interview where it was stressed that they were different - different code, solving the PM problem in a different way).
Edit: just found the product page for Basecamp Classic (http://basecamp.com/classic), man it looks pretty ugly!
haha yes, it is ugly. One of the reasons my team left it behind a few years back. Tried a bunch of pm systems and strangely enough, the two we loved most were free (Asana and Trello).
I post this not for the troll above, but for well-meaning folks who might share similar schadenfreude. This type of mentality will set you to fail in life. Time and time again. You might have a laugh at their expense now, but it might be the only thing you have. Meanwhile they have success and millions of dollars. A failure is just a temporary set back to them. The best attitude when you see people succeed is to say "Good for them", and not envy their success. Learn from it. In fact, learn from their failures as well, so that you are less likely to make the same mistakes.</troll-feeding>
Actually, last laugh goes to them as they make more money and enjoy more success than you ever will. They also have the balls to discontinue a product that they for whatever reason find out is not worth their time. Go home, troll.
Google has a lot of free products. Notably, Google's shut down of Reader comes under a lot of flak for how it was delivered to the public. But 37signals sold Breeze for $10. Google Reader was free. And yet, Google did everything 37signals did here except recommend alternatives. They even gave a longer sunset.
37Signals had customers - Google only had users. There is a world of difference in the utility and obligations in the company-user relationship there. Google could shutter any product it wants without telling anyone. It would be bad press, but doing anything more is a kindness and respect for users in imitation of how companies should treat customers. You didn't earn that kind of respect or attention from Google, they gave blog posts and announcements and free data and sunsets because they care. In most cases you would only get that kind of attention because companies don't want to burn paying customers from using their other products.
This in no way criticizes 37signals. It's a great discontinuation announcement. But stop deifying them and demonizing Google when Google actually went above and beyond in letting you know. Those comments aren't productive, they're just angry.
[1]: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2013/03/powering-down-googl...