CHICAGO – While blogs and discussion boards were filling up with complaints of the availability of their 37Signals Basecamp accounts the management team at 37Signals launched a publicity campaign to head of the criticisms by touting the vaulted "six 9’s" availability of their book Getting Real.
 

"Sure we have a few days when the application is unavailable" said 37Signals and Basecamp CEO Stan Wilson "but you have to look at the big picture.  We also sell millions of copies of Getting Real which is available 99.999999% of the time!  Accept for the time we couldn't find it when someone used it to prop up their computer monitor."  When Stan was asked if 37Signals was upset to loose 100% availability of the book he reasoned, "Have you read this drivel?  Honestly, it was nice to uncover a positive use for the book after all."

37Signals VP of Operations Steven Bradley tried to explain the Basecamp server outages “Our venture capital funding from Amazon has been drying up and we had the great idea to expand the definition of datacenter to include the basement of a nearby fraternity house.  The morale of the staff has gone through the roof with all the co-eds, beer funnels, and card games. Now if we could just tape down some of the power cords and plug the disco ball in at a different outlet we will be back in business!”

Customers weren't as forgiving.  "First they convinced our boss that this thing could do project management", said Carol Zimmerman, a project manager at Emerson Electric.  "I guess as long as your definition of project management doesn't include task end dates, workplans with dependencies, resource management, risks, issues, or changes - I guess you would be right.  Then we heard of other companies complaining that Basecamp was completely down again, which would have been a huge big problem for us, if we actually used it for anything."

Industry analysts were more forgiving when discussing the news.  "SaaS is still in it's infancy and data center operations are not front and center at the ones like 37Signals that are completely controlled by venture capitalists", said SaaS project management analyst for Garner, Victoria Parker.  "These VCs don't get rich spending money on infrastructure, security, or availability.  They get rich by spending millions of dollars advertising with us so that we can pimp their products to unsuspecting customers who think we actually evaluate this garbage and are independent."
 

©2008 VCSonline. All rights reserved. This PMS blog is a satire. None of the details in this blog are real. All names are made up, except in cases when public figures are being satirized. All quotes are fictional and any similarity to actual quotes is coincidental.

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