Reading, watching, or listening to anything coming from 37signals sparks many emotions: Anger, envy, respect, disgust, regret, and a general feeling of bewilderment.

I’ve heard many developers claim that they could build Basecamp in a weekend. That’s not entirely true – I’ve built one and getting things simple is not as easy as it looks and there is much more involved than just programming.

You could, however, produce something that resembles it in fairly short amount of time. I didn’t realize this but during Jason’s talk at SXSWi he claimed it didn’t even have files sharing at the time of launch, which according to my calculations made it little more than a message board with categories. The anger comes back.

Still, this could be said for other successful web projects like Flickr, Twitter, early MySpace, and others. Most developers could create these applications in short order. Their success is not determined by programming innovation but rather concept and timing.

There needs to be some credit given to 37 Signals for recognizing that fewer features would create happier customers. In their case they created a new type of market category based on simplistic project management for the average user and then dominated this empty category. Now entrenched it’s difficult to topple them especially given that their success is based on simplicity. I said difficult but not impossible.

There is a sensibility in Jason’s insistence that 37signals not abandon the formula that made them successful. “Being good at one thing does not make you good at everything”. That’s good advice.

Still, listing to Jason’s talk in a packed room in Texas you can’t quite shake the feeling that some of their success was due to being in the right place at the right time. Not just because Basecamp is such as simple product (as I’ve already explained), but in the manner of his advice. I could paraphrase a lot of what he said with: just do something really easy, don’t plan too much, don’t try too much, hell you don’t even need a finished product just put it out there and people will come to it.

What I picked up from across the audience (in little snickers and laughs) was it sounds to us like a man who grew up in a biosphere. Just walk down the garden path to get your morning mango – all you need is just hanging on a branch in front of your face. It’s good advice to never carry an umbrella – if you live in a biosphere.

It’s funny because it’s true in his case and he presents this advice with such sincerity he makes you feel that he believes that it must be true for you as well.

I believe that the relative easy path to success has given 37signals a distorted view of the young emerging web. People will continue to want simple but begin to expect more power. More than this they will want the simple to be even simpler and easy to be easier and faster.

The concepts and file metaphors used by Basecamp are entrenched in traditional models that will fall away. 37signals’ refusal to innovate will eventually allow superior products to emerge. It will take one modern innovative powerful free product with an automatic import from Basecamp feature to bring them down.

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