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.