When it comes to acquisitions, there are only two things worth buying: products and customers. When you buy either, you’re buying a solid stream of revenue. All you have to do is not fuck it up. That’s harder than you think, but the good news is that there is room for error. Fuck it up a little and only a few will leave. You still have the entrenched rest to make the purchase pay.

Not so with ideas or talent. These are the purchases of aspiration: Imagine if we took that scrappy idea with those underpaid, hungry champions, and we gave them all the resources in the world. They could paint all the colors of the rainbow and still have pixie dust left to spare!

Turns out that good ideas and strong talent is as fickle as it is seducing. As soon as you start making big-company compromises, the good idea turns average, and the average turns into a write-off.

Same goes with strong talent. As soon as they have to deal with three layers of reporting, quarterly budget cycles, and swing-door managers, they turn off the creativity and head for the exit. The latter part might take from three months to two years, but it will happen.

That leaves the acquisition with nothing but a dusty footnote in the P&L, but don’t worry, nothing will have been learned, so the cycle can repeat next year. There’s always a fresh crop of shiny ideas and sassy talent available to try that-which-does-not-work once more.

Some screenshots we’ve discussed recently in Campfire:

Wopata “takes your temperature” in order to identify urgency on its web form.

Interesting approach in the new Google Chrome menu. Edit and Zoom are compacted to a single menu item.

Billings lets you play with this table to see how much you could save with better time tracking.

Every time a young, promising start-up is bought out by a stodgy, old incumbent, the world is flush with congratulations. Congratulations to the team, island mojitos now await them. Congratulations to the venture capitalist, their past nine flops can fade in the background for a week. Congratulations to the acquisition team, who can celebrate the win on their lawyer’s expense account.

But all the hoopla and excitement quickly dies down and the fresh-for-a-moment old incumbent goes back to doing what old incumbents do best: thwart new ideas.

As soon as Monday rolls around, it’ll be time for another management rotation, and the new guy surely has no interest in playing with the old guy’s toys. That’s not how you make a name for yourself and move up the ladder. Oh no.

Take Dopplr, for example. Nokia picked them up in 2009 for the going price of Web 2.0 vanity purchases without a business model: $20,000,000. The Guardian is running a rare where-are-they-now story on how predictably that turned out: “We have decided to bring it into a maintenance mode… but will not develop it further at this stage”.

Or what about Bloglines. IAC picked them up in 2005, did little to advance the application, and then dragged out the inevitable. It’s being shut down on October 1st.

The acquisition graveyard is full of tombstones for the wasted efforts of bright minds. Minds that could have gone into building lasting companies with a shot at significance.

Next time a vanity purchase is announced, maybe we shouldn’t be so quick with the champagne.

Good news: REWORK is back on the NYT Hardcover Business Best Sellers list (#12 currently). Some of the reviews of the book from around the web offer up interesting tangents:

In “Books about very specific things that double as manuals for living a good life,” writer/filmmaker John Pavlus talks about REWORK and his other favorite “self-help book in disguise.”

True and False, by David Mamet: This is supposedly a book about how to become a good actor. Actual actors tend to think it’s full of shit, because Mamet doesn’t really care about process, or Method, or “acting” at all in the sense of “how to become better at pretending.” He cares about acting in the sense of “how to become better at doing.” Like, “man of action”-type acting – which, of course, translates just as well to real life as the stage. Putting up or shutting up. Taking action even when you’re scared or uncertain. Just doing it – not because of what “it symbolizes” or because you think you understand your “motivation” – because it needs doing. Like in an “or else I don’t eat today” kind of way. If you want straight talk on how to act – or, in other words, live – with purpose and integrity, Mamet’s your man.

(He also thinks grad school is for pussies, which is an entertaining point of view.)

Business law attorney Frederic R. Abramson discusses how the book applies to the practice of law for small firms.

If you think a competitor sucks, say so. If you are a solo, tell the world that you hate big law firms. It is a great way to differentiate yourself. Hell, I do. I especially hate them when I go to court. They have no clue how to draft a simple order. They love to make useless motions so that they can bill the fuck out of their clients. Sitting through a deposition with a newly minted big law associate is torture. “When you started your first company at the age of 12, was your mother working as a waitress or a podiatrist?”

Geoff Dutton wrote to tell us about a personal experience related to the essay in the book about apologizing.

I’m reading through REWORK right now and am really enjoying it. I especially loved the section on customer service, specifically addressing ‘apologizing’. I recently had an issue with DirecTV where I wasn’t notified that I still owed them money. The only reason I found out is because I checked my credit report and saw a collection item on it. After explaining the situation and how it is a hassle to have to deal with this six months after I cancelled my account (in the politest way possible mind you), I received multiple forms of this:

“I understand this has been a frustrating experience for you. We respect your time and I appreciate that you’ve given me the opportunity to personally address your concerns.”

Okay great, that doesn’t solve my problem though. Plus, the most ridiculous thing is they wanted me to write a letter and MAIL it to their collections department to find out more information. Just ridiculous.

Also, Unshelved offered up a comic strip look at the book — which is a good reminder that you can actually view all 88 illustrations from REWORK in a Flickr set.

Brett Miller’s review notes that the book gets right to the meat.

The design of the book is also a lesson in the unusual; about the only typical aspect are the inside flaps on the book jacket. For example, when I started reading the book, I immediately had a feeling that something wasn’t quite right. It was only when I finished the book and saw, on the last printed page, the copyright page that I realized the source of that feeling.

Fried and Hansson have pulled a George Lucas, dispensing with all the upfront crap that you usually have to get through to get to the good stuff. Two pages of praise, and then the Table of Contents. Not even a title page. Talk about getting right to the point!

This is something we actually pushed for with our publisher. We asked them why every book has to start with so much noise upfront. They weren’t sure. So we axed everything we could and got right to the good stuff.

Big thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to write about the book!

A few of this week’s 37signals staff posts at Twitter.

@mattlinderman: It’s a fine line between preparation and stalling.

@jasonfried: Where’s the double bounce prosperity?

@dhh: Wow, this is promising. Apple backs down from dev tool restrictions and promises to make review process transparent: http://bit.ly/aFCxOw

@sstephenson: Really enjoying http://longform.org/ for idle reading.

@jasonfried: Notes from today’s Q&A at the 37signals HQ w/ Tony Hsieh, CEO of @zappos: http://bit.ly/9pjLXs (via @timschraeder)

@dhh: I’ll be keynoting at http://rubyconf.org/ this year. Nov 11 – 13 in New Orleans. It’s been too long.

@asianmack: Sometimes it feels as though the lame townspeople from “Footloose” are close to taking over America.

@longstride: One of @Instapaper’s best, secret features? Time. It’s amazing how many articles I DON’T want to read a few days after saving them.

Below: Q&A with Petr Palas, CEO and Co-Founder of Kentico Software (based in The Czech Republic). He also answered reader questions in the comments. This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles profitable companies that didn’t take VC and have over $1 million in annual revenues.

What does your company do?
We help web developers have more fun creating websites. We have a single product called Kentico CMS for ASP.NET. Now you may think it’s just another boring CMS. Well, it may be. But we believe it’s different. Most CMS systems are either very simple and thus easy to use or they are extremely flexible and complex. We decided not to make decissions between simplicity and flexibility and mix both of them in a single product. So we built a CMS that makes web developers much more productive, but also allows them to design the website in the way they need.

How did the business get started?
I was building some websites and web applications and realized there’s a lot of routine work I hated. I believed there must be an easier way to do things. I worked in a company that created several .NET components for developers and then I saw there was no good CMS for ASP.NET developers. I suggested that to the employer, but they didn’t see that as an opportunity since there were many web agencies selling their own simple CMS products. So I decided to start my own company in 2004, just with my savings. I gave up my master studies of computer science and put all my efforts and time into my company.

And I was actually lucky, since my first client was Gibson Guitars who decided to use Kentico CMS for their website, although the product was very immature (and they’re still our client!). At that time, I didn’t have any strategy or big vision. I didn’t watch the market and competitors. I just followed what our clients were asking for and tried to add those features as quickly as possible. Thanks to that, we’ve had some features, such as friendly URLs and SEO optimized pages, years ahead of big CMS companies. As we implemented what the clients wanted, we were growing rapidly with every new release.

I didn’t have any strategy or big vision. I didn’t watch the market and competitors. I just followed what our clients were asking for and tried to add those features as quickly as possible.

Then I was lucky again and got a contract for some development based on Kentico CMS for T-Systems, a division of T-Mobile. It gave me some extra money and I immediately invested it into further growth of the company.

I hired three university students as developers to speed up the development. We used students a lot since they were much cheaper and easier to hire for a start up company. At some point, we had 25 employees, 20 of which were students. We still have students in our team, but the ratio is much lower, it’s about 15% now.

As they graduate, they continue as full-time employees. The stability of our team is actually something I’m proud of – we’ve never lost an employee who was excellent and for which the job was a good fit. Now, after 6 years, we have 62 employess, 4 of them in our U.S. office.

That leads me to one important part of the story: We’re not an American company. We’re not even in Western Europe. We are located in the Czech Republic, a former communist country in Central Europe. Still, we managed to grow our client base to 2,000 clients in 84 countries without ever meeting most of them.

At the beginning, I decided I wanted to make the product for the global market since the market size was enormous in comparison to our local market. So I started to sell the CMS online, without any sales staff and with a very small marketing budget that I spent mostly on Google Adwords. We ranked very high at Google because most of our big competitors didn’t bother with SEO at that time. It gave us lots of traffic. We’re constantly trying different approaches to marketing, but it seems to me that the return for every extra marketing dollar is smaller and smaller.

We just launched a new feature in Basecamp that allows you to move messages, to-do lists, milestones and files from one Basecamp project to another. You can read the full announcement on our product blog.

The UI we designed makes it simple to do. Just edit any message, milestone, to-do list or file in Basecamp, select the project you want to move it to, and click a button. Done.

It’s so simple that it’s easy to assume that adding the feature would be simple, too. Customers make this assumption and so do developers.

To put things in perspective here’s what you see after you click Move…

…and here’s what is happening behind the scenes:

• Is the item being moved a message? We’ll need to move any attached files with it. Does it have any comments? Move those, too.
• Do any of the comments being moved have their own attachments? Better move those as well.
• Are any of the files images? If so, we’ll need to move the image’s thumbnail, too.
• Are there multiple versions of the file? Bring those along.
• Does the message or any of the files have a category? Create the category if it doesn’t exist in the destination project.
• Is the moved file backed up on S3? We need to rename it there. If it’s not, we need to make sure it doesn’t get backed up with its old filename.
• Is the item being moved a milestone? Moving a milestone needs to move any associated to-do lists and messages. And of course those to-do lists can have to-do items with comments, and attached files, and multiple versions of those files. Move all of that.
• Is it a to-do list? It may contain to-do items that have associated time tracking entries. Move those time entries to the destination project too.
• Was anyone subscribed to email notification for the message? We’ll need to make sure they still get them on the new project.
• Similarly we need to make sure that when you follow a URL in an email notification for a moved message, comment or files, you are redirected to its new location.
• Ok, we gathered everything up and it’s moving. Is it done yet? Did it fail? We’ll need to roll it back if somthing goes wrong.

Oh and we need to show the user what’s going on…

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
New in Basecamp: Move between projects
We just launched a new feature in Basecamp that allows you to move messages, to-do lists, milestones and files from one Basecamp project to another. Have you ever wished you could move a message that someone posted to the wrong project? Or split a to-do list and a couple of milestones into a brand new project? Now you can.

Spootnik synchronizes OmniFocus and Basecamp
“OmniFocus’ online synchronization feature gave me a broad hint to build a web application that connects these two worlds. You neither have to run a computer nor to install anything. If you, for example, update a task on your iPhone, it flows directly into your Basecamp account and your Mac’s OmniFocus database. Simple like that.”

Start using bcToolkit for Basecamp reporting and get a free copy of REWORK
“Here’s the deal, sign up for bcToolkit and you will automatically get a 30 day free trial to let you see how easy to use bcToolkit is for Basecamp reporting and the business-changing Basecamp reports you can get…As soon as we receive your first month’s payment we will post you a FREE paperback copy of REWORK from 37signals.”

International PR agency EIDO uses Basecamp to show progress to clients from around the world
“This system report (below) shows an example of a real-time report generated on demand from our admin system and delivered to the client via Basecamp. Clients never need to ask us for an update on any particular project because it is generated for them automatically from the data we ourselves are using.”

You can now upload larger files to Basecamp
Want to upload large files to Basecamp? Good news: We recently increased the maximum file size that you can upload to Basecamp from 100MB to 2GB.