Month: August 2006

In the past year or so as I started to think about working as a web designer, and then actually started working as a web designer, I have taken a keen interest in improving my knowledge and skill. In doing so I have found some websites that while they are quite well known are run by small groups of people or individuals more as a labour of love than anything else.

In the past week I have come across two specific instances where these sites were recognized and recommended not by some individual web designer like me but by multi-million dollar corporations. These two examples are QuirksMode, (recommended in the Google Maps API Documentation), and Position Is Everything is quoted in the IE Blog post on CSS changes in IE 7.

I was happily surprised when I came across these two links. It’s nice to see folks getting credit where credit is due, especially when it’s coming from huge corporations some of whom usually pay very little attention to the little guy.

For a while now, at least in internet terms, 37signals has been somewhat of a poster child of the Web 2.0 era that we are living in, but with the lauch of Zoho‘s ZohoProjects imminent, activeCollab in development and the many offerings from Google how long can they maintain their current level of success?

ZohoProjects appears to be the first of what will likely be a long line of challengers to Basecamp challengers. Admittedly they are going after a slightly different market by planning to make ZohoProjects feature rich, (via Techcrunch), in stark contrast to Basecamp’s “less software.” While these two products do appear to be headed for something less serious than a head-on collision the enormous success of Basecamp has made project management a trendy field and I’m sure more launches are just over the horizon.

ZohoProjects isn’t the only product from Zoho that competes with something from 37Signals either, Zoho Chat takes on 37Signals’ Campfire and 37Signals’ Backpack appears to have a lot in common with Zoho Planner. If you add the rest of the calendaring apps, organizing apps, and other such offerings on the net together it’s looking pretty bleak for 37Signals.

37Signals, however, does have a couple of magic arrows in its quiver. First, 37Signals is the birthplace of Ruby on Rails, the framework that is revolutionizing the web and making it so easy for many of these other companies to bring excellent web-enabled applications to us and second, the team over at 37Signals has incredible attention to detail and dedicate countless hours to making sure that the features their products have are absolutely necessary and implemented as near perfectly as possible, (check out this blog post about making a tiny dialog box). These two things will keep them in business, and in the spotlight, for a long time to come.