(Almost) Introducing 37signals Accounts

[jakestein]

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1862-almost-introducing-37signals-accounts

[samlittlewood]

I'm curious - how did they wound up with per product user accounts in the first place? I would have imagined that as soon as you had >1 product, there would be a strong desire for single sign on - amongst othr things - to help cross selling, and to avoid multiple invoices.

[antonovka → samlittlewood]

37signals specializes in "punt to later" problem solving.

It's why I tear my hear out while using other company's basecamp installations and continually run into bizarre failure modes and lore-based work-arounds.

Accordingly, I think there's room for a 37signals that works. I'd sign up -- although I'd probably want to host it locally for our 3rd party partners to use -- so perhaps you should consider my opinion on web-hosted services slightly suspect.

[tptacek → antonovka]

Can you name a couple? I use pretty much the whole suite for our product work, and I haven't run into any of these yet.

[antonovka → tptacek]

Here's two, off the top of my head:

- HTTP requests regularly fail. Page loads, resource loading, uploads -- all of them. Sometimes the page renders without any CSS, sometimes it doesn't load at all, and sometimes my uploads just timeout.

- UTF-8 causes ... issues. For instance, I've run into truncation of comments at UTF-8 characters.

[jpwagner → samlittlewood]

  if( userpain > effort) {

    fixProblem(problem);

  }

  else{}

[jlangenauer → jpwagner]

It's 37signals we're talking about. It'd be in Ruby:

  user.complain do |problem|
    37Signals.fix_problem(problem) unless user.pain < effort
  end

[henning]

I have to change my username and pass for my $7/month Backpack account just so 37s can bundle their underfeatured software? This sounds like a good excuse to learn a new web framework by building a Backpack clone.

[trafficlight → henning]

Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.

[adharmad]

reinventing single sign-on. woot!

[tptacek → adharmad]

Every mainstream web application suite ever built appears to have "reinvented" single sign-on.