For some reason, I don't imagine BaseCamp's use is really exploding like some other startups might in terms of database usage.
It could very well be a case of their growth is scaling in-line with Moore's law, so it just happens to work out well.
It could very well be a case of their growth is scaling in-line with Moore's law, so it just happens to work out well.
I mean, go through a list of YC companies or other startups you respect, winnow it down to the ones that exited or otherwise achieved some level of success, and play guess-the-size. How many terabytes of storage do you think e.g. Airbnb needs?
Also, don't underestimate how large log files can grow in a data-driven business (like AirBNB seems to be). I could easily believe that they have many terabytes of data just from logging actions their customers have taken.
Logs don't have remotely the same access requirements as the databases used to serve a product.
That said, the blog post talks about enormous growth and it still fits inside Moore's Law's growth. I guess my gut is just saying it's not really that enormous in terms of startup scaling if it's still within those limits. Not to take anything away from 37Signal's success, but it feels like nothing of value was really added by this post. I present the post of a picture of 864GB of ram as supplementary evidence that is near the top of HN right now.
More so, if devs spent as much time tuning the performance of their apps as they did fantasizing about "web scale" architectural pivots they would typically be farther ahead. StackOverflow.com is a perfect example of this. They run on tiny handful of windows machines, support gobs and gobs of traffic, and have absolutely fantastic performance. And as much of that is due to paying attention to performance and making sure to find and remove the bottlenecks where they exist as it is to using cutting-edge architectures like database sharding, map+reduce, eventual consistency models, etc.
The point of the post is that in many/most cases, it's still easier and cheaper to throw hardware at a performance problem than to devote scarce engineering effort to optimization. And it's only getting more and more so. If you are a startup and you can throw $10,000 of hardware at a problem you can then keep your $100K engineers working on things that hardware alone can't solve.
I don't think so. Maybe we just have a different opinion on ordinary, but I come across people all the time that would think Excel is the normal thing to use for this (and pretty much any other task...). Using web applications for day to day workflow is still alien to a lot of "ordinary" business types.
I think this might be the tech bubble showing. I've never heard of any non-tech, non-startup companies using Basecamp. I'm not saying that they don't, of course, but I'd be interested to hear some case studies in its use outside of tech-savvy crowds.
Most programmers probably work at either BigCo enterprises (banks, insurance companies, telcos etc) or at "startup" type tech businesses or freelance agencies.
There are other industries that contain a lot of small businesses and probably employ very few programmers, think restaurants , local shops , small law or accountancy practices etc.
These guys probably aren't using sharepoint, most of them are probably using excel spreadsheets combined with paper.
I'm not sure how many of these guys are using things like basecamp but they a lot of them probably should be.
But yes, we're still tiny compared to behemoths like Sharepoint. All the more reason to be excited about the next 20 years!
And there was a great press quote for you in the comments: "$50 is peanuts for what you get in Basecamp. Any business doing $1000 a month should find huge leverage from it."
They've got logos for a few non-tech, non-startup companies on the Basecamp homepage: http://basecamphq.com
That doesn't always mean those companies actually use it. It just means someone with a @foocorp.com email address signed up.