Waiting for Sunrise

Backpack from 37signals is getting a feature bump. While Backpack is a great product and well deserving of a little feature love, this news makes Sunrise a little more conspicuous by its absence.

Sunrise was announced as “a CRM-ish tool for small businesses“, and is the next generation of 37signals applications. It aims to bring the simplicity and elegance of their other apps to customer management which arguably the most important piece of software a small business uses.

The current generation of 37signals apps, which includes products like Backpack, Campfire and Basecamp, were created with 37signals’s philosophy of “Getting Real“, which is similar to Agile methods of software development. It suggests an approach to building software that emphasizes building the simplest form of an application now, and then continually improving and changing it until it’s ready. This approach has let them create great apps very quickly.

Now, while these apps have been pretty successful, to date they have been pretty simple. Which is kinda the point, but perhaps there’s a limit to the complexity of the applications that Getting Real can build. And it’s with Sunrise that I think 37signals has reached this limit. There is a minimum level of functionality a CRM needs, and I reckon this level is significatly higher that the level of functionality in current 37signals apps. Even more difficult, each business’s needs require a different subset of a CRM’s functionality.

Their current apps excel at building all their functionality into the user interface, which equates to having only one level of abstraction, the UI represents reality. What I haven’t seen is more than one level of abstraction, and this a the key weakness of Getting Real.

While being a rapid development method, I don’t Getting Real can reach the escape velocity required to make it to the next level of functionality, ironic as that may be.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no love for the monsters that most CRM apps are, and I have no wish to build any application that would sit at the “Enterprise” level of functionality. But I do think that Getting Real has limits, and becuase of these limits it won’t scale to build a CRM.