Comments
Organisational Tools to Help you and Your Business
The name 37Signals is so widely recognised in the web community that it seems a waste to bother mentioning it at all, that is why I've held off. However, with great fame comes great 'attacks' and there are a lot of people out there who think 37Signals products should be directly copied and flogged off for free, just because it's possible. I'm not too sure what products they mean, because virtually everything they have produced, aside from their unrivaled project management system, has got competition, it's just that 37Signals do a lot of things better.
Doing things Differently
While I was looking around wikis a while back (we are yet to settle on one, or decide to stick with Writely for our 'intranet'), I came across Stikipad. I signed up for a free account and really enjoyed the to do lists, discussions and ease of use. Tim said 'this is kind of like Backpack', and sure enough, a lot of people shared this thought. What made me go from liking this product, to really loving it, was that Stikipad tackles the same organisation problems as Backpack does, but it does things differently. In an area where it seems to be more about jumping on the bandwagon and following a leader, it's nice to see two awsome tools for the same problem, but with different ways of attacking it.
I must admit that it's been a while since I looked at Backpack, so the features may have raced ahead, but from the looks of the Stikipad website, they're no snails either. If you want to organise, collaborate, plan, and stay on top of what you're doing, suss them both out and see which one is best for you.
Hello, my name is Natalie, I have a business called 
April 6th, 2006 at 7:38 pm
Yeah, I definately don't think 37Signals offer the pinnacle of web office tools, I just think it's good to see people who don't accept their way as the right way and providing similar solutions from another angle. We only really use basecamp from 37Signals, because, your right, a lot of the time, their competition provide slightly better solutions that are more closely aligned with what we need.
I think, even if there are a few 'leaders' in the web 2.0 space, it's important for other companies to not follow, but to change what's on offer.
April 6th, 2006 at 5:10 pm
You know, the main reason writely won out, is that it imports and exports in .doc, .pdf, .rtf, and most importantly for me, .odt.
Sometimes it’s just easier to open a tab and log into writely (and it uses a lot less ram) than OpenOffice, but ultimately I like my source docs in .odt.
In that way, 37signals products just don’t cut the mustard. I’ll bet it’s primarily the HTML translation layer between the multiple document formats that made google buy writely.
I’ll have to check out stikipad though. Thanks for the link.
April 2nd, 2008 at 8:00 pm
you haven’t helped me one bit your website sucks
kitty
June 16th, 2010 at 10:24 pm
Yes, I agree with Kitty. This was a pointless article. Please update it!
grr. stupid internet