Unfortunately, this is what you get when you pay $10 for an app.
There is a huge disparity when it comes to the cost of apps these days vs the salaries required to sustain the engineers who make those apps. Even at $10/pop, you need to sell a lot of apps just to sustain the salaries of very good engineers, and THIS is what makes great products vulnerable to acqui-hires.
The problem is that the $0.99 model of the App Store makes a $10 app look ridiculously expensive, especially when there are free alternatives out there, even though it's only 2 Starbucks coffees. And even though $10 is worth it.
It's the price of the apps that have drastically lowered the expectations of what people need to pay for software, and this goes in direct conflict to the rising costs of great engineers' salaries.
I'm not sure what the exact price point is, but my guess is that people need to start getting used to the idea of spending $30-50 PER YEAR in a subscription model for a great app in order to create enough monetary incentive for the developers to keep their products alive. Otherwise Google and Facebook will continue to drop the bills and pick off the best teams who eventually get tired of the smaller comparative payoffs that these apps bring in.
I don't understand this argument at all. None of it. It's odd and quite frankly silly. It doesn't matter if the app was $10. Enterprise software companies, that sell for 5, 6 and 7 figures get acquired all the time. Their offerings then get EOL'ed many times. Free doesn't help you. $30 doesn't help you. $1 million doesn't help you. If a larger company believes that acquiring smaller company is attractive and writes a big check then that's what happens. The only determinant I can see is if you want a lifestyle business where you're always the master of your own domain. That seems to be the only reasons folks won't sell (Marco won't move a family to the Valley - at least not unless he gets a LOT of money)
When did we all start pining for everything to be the same forever?
This is very very true. Their overall top grossing US rank (on iPhone) was stabilizing in the 500-700 range (after generally declining for months[1]), which equates to tens of thousands of dollars per month from my understanding. I'm sure they made some from their Mac app as well. This is GOOD MONEY, don't get me wrong. But you'd have to really love self-employment to take this over a $2M payout and a $200k comp package (stock, benefits, etc).
If I were to guess, these guys were also buried in support from paying customers who felt entitled to it. What are the economics of technical support for a $2.99 app?
This is spot on. Thanks to the App Store, the days of paying $30+ for boxed software and paying again every year or so for version n+1 (assuming it comes out at all) are pretty far back in the rear view mirror now.
I paid $10 for Sparrow and got far more than $10 in value from it. So while I am disappointed that the best email app I have seen is EOL'd now I did get a decent value and I can't complain a whole lot. I am no worse off than had I bought a boxed copy of software with no promise for updates ever.
I would have paid $30 up front for Sparrow and purchased a large feature release for that price later down the line. Happily. That is a price far more in line with the value delivered.
How do we recalibrate people's expectations about the value of software back to pre-2008 levels? Not everything can or should cost a buck.
Many users actually think everything should be free.
And they even claim they are 'ripped off' because the free version of software does not do 'X'. And they post bad reviews and send hate emails. (First hand experience).
Somehow, thanks for Facebook and Google, people feel entitled to free software and service.
How much would Sparrow have had to sell for in order to make a $25mil offer from Google not seem attractive? Would you have still bought Sparrow at that price?
It's easy to blame the app store and focus on Apple here, because Sparrow runs on Apple products, but it's not Apple's fault. Developers have given away software products for less than $0.99 since long before Apple conceived of an app store.
Open source software is free. Firefox is free. Thunderbird is free. That anyone would pay for an email client at all is exceptional.
The funny thing is, they probably should have priced lower. If you look at their rank history on Mac and iOS, they saw big grossing rank bumps the few times they dropped the price.
Maybe that's just a short-term effect (yay, sale!), but based on the week they sold Sparrow for $4.99, there's a good chance they would have made more long term.
I always thought, or at least hoped, that the economy of scale will allow $0.99 software to be profitable. That software would be so cheap, that you don't think even twice. But because millions do the same, the developers can still become rich.
Right now, there might be a few dozen million clients on the app store. What if someday there will be a few billions?
We (most in this discussion) seem to forget that the advent of $10 or $0.99 app actually expanded the market. As in, more people paid money for software than before, thus paying for more indy/non-indy developers.
So let me say this again. The App store, with its $1-5 apps, is a good thing for the developers as well as the users.
It is 2012, and when I purchase software, I don't buy into the premise that this software is going to be static for perpetuity, and this is because of the fast-paced nature of OS, platform and web evolution.
I "marry" the software I love, and I am very happy to pay for upgrades. I upgrade my Mac the day after a new OS X version is released, not only that, but I use non-large company software every day for years: Panic, Bjango, Made@Gloria, etc.
When I buy software, I don't only buy into the software I get, but I support it because I think it has a bright and better future. If I knew the developer was to stop development going forward, I would simply not support it.
Going forward, if I find that a small/medium developer has received capital from an angel or VC, I am going to stay away from it (I already decided not to use Foursquare, Path, Highlight, Kik and many other mobile apps for this reason) - the investor will have the need to flip the company, whatever the outcome for the software is.
> When I buy software, I don't only buy into the software I get, but I support it because I think it has a bright and better future.
Eric S Raymond made this point in "The Manufacturing Delusion" (http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/magic-cauldron...). The value of software to a user lies more in the expected future value of updates than in the immediate value of using the software. This is true regardless of whether you pay for the software up front, and regardless of whether you expect to pay for the updates.
I would add this: the cost to a user of software is also much more than its price. To use software means investing time and effort into it, regardless of whether you paid any money for it. Then, as time goes on, you come to rely on the software's presence--you build your habits around the assumption that it is available, and bear the risk of disruption if it suddenly isn't. These hidden, non-monetary costs can be far larger than the monetary price paid, if any.
The problem is that the implicit non-monetary costs on the user side do not represent any benefits for the developer. That the user invested time and took risk doesn't give the developer anything--they only gain the explicit monetary price. But the implicit future benefits expected by the user DO translate directly into future costs for the developer--just as much as the present benefit corresponds to past developer costs!
So there is a big mismatch between what people intuitively feel they are exchanging. On the developer side, Matt Gemmell's comment quoted in the article feels right: "you paid, you got software." But on the user side, the story feels like "I spent time and wrapped my habits around this software, in expectation of its continued improvement, then found out to my surprise that no improvement is coming."
That said, I don't have any new shiny ideas on how to solve this problem. In the end, I agree that the developers of Sparrow owe the users nothing. But I also see why the users are reacting as if somebody took something away from them that they thought they had.
I upgrade my Mac the day after a new OS X version is released
I used to do that—until I realized that 10.7 (and now probably 10.8) don't offer any substantial improvements to things I care about (as discussed here: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/mac-os-10-7-is-out...). In other words, I've probably reached "peak operating system," in that marginal improvements to OSes are really quite marginal. That's also true, at least for me, of a program like Word. Have we really seen substantial improvements since, say, 2002? Maybe in stability, but not much else.
I'm not arguing that software itself isn't improving—a lot of software has a huge amount of search space left. But some doesn't, and we get diminishing marginal returns. Maybe I'll upgrade to 10.8 or its successor—Textmate 2.0 or iMovie 12 could be the inciting factors—but there's a solid chance I won't.
FWIW, I was an early employee at a startup that was acquired around 1998 for around this amount of money.
In those days this wasn't considered an "acquihire" but a "successful exit" or a "base hit". (e.g.: not a failure but not the success that pays for all the other companies in the VC firms cohort that year.)
The VCs got about 5X on their money and because of liquidation preferences and other shenanigans, I, and the other employees, pretty much got screwed.
Also, frankly, I think people chose Sparrow because they weren't happy with the big boy's applications (Apple's Mail.app on Mac OS X, Apple and Gmail's apps on iOS).
It's a case of "We don't like Google or Apple's apps, so we're going to _pay extra money_ to get something we like."
So when the Sparrow team gets picked up by Google _and_ we hear that Sparrow.app is becoming abandonware, many people think "the bad guys win again."
Of course, I hope the hue and cry about this will suggest to google that Sparrow might be worth maintaining after all. A mail app that people like? That can't possibly be a bad thing, can it?
This posting is very true, and this is exactly why I prefer Free Software when it comes to sustainability.
Even if the developers' revenue plan (services, merchandising, whatever) turns out to not be sustainable, at least the remaining software is free (in the sense of freedom) such that others can fork it and can take care of it.
In that sense, Sparrow could have made a great move, since they don't plan to make any more money with their product: publishing their latest code base under GPL.
However, in that case Google might have hesitated to acquire them in the first place. On the other hand, MySQL has been acquired by Oracle despite being Free Software, and despite having existing forks such as MariaDB.
That's exactly what I had in my mind immediately after reading the article. I'm no Mac user, but seeing loyal users let down, I just wish the app was free software.
I don't think Google will release it as free software, but if they made it open from the start, maintaining it would be a possibility.
Obviously, those arguments are somewhat metaphorical. Paying $2.99 (or even $2,999) for software doesn't guarantee its sustainability. It doesn't move the needle. It's more like voting where your individual vote doesn't count but you still feel that its important to vote. Especially if you voice an opinion and try to convince others (something that probably has more effect than voting).
I think we are talking about more abstract things. We want this software to exist. We want these business models (small, profitable development companies) to exist. It's not just "I want to use this software."
I think a reason for these kind of reactions to acquisitions is that we feel or suspect that they are destroying rather than creating value. But, it's kind of hard to tell so we don't usually make that claim. For small companies, we know what they make and how many people use it so its easy to get a feel for the value they create. When Google acquires a great team, its hard to know what, if any value they create. Google obviously create enormous amounts of value but its hard to tell what a new team ads or subtracts from that. Much more nebulous are the effects that the existence of such acquisitions have on founder and investor motivation to start and fund these companies in the first place.
I think thats it at the core. A suspicion that such acquisitions are value destroying activities resulting in less/worse software being available to the world.
I guess the problem with this is that in the days of app stores, internet everywhere , automatic updates and 0 day vulnerabilities software suddenly looks very fragile and susceptible to bit rot.
I remember in the late 90s there were still plenty of people around using Word 6.0 which was old at the time but still usable since MS allowed recent versions of Word to create docs compatible with it.
Now, if your favourite app gets pulled from the store (that your device is locked to), gets broken by an OS update or the developers simply release a non reversible update that you don't like you're in trouble. Not to mention the consequences of the vendor going bust or getting bought by a rival.
There seems to be a strong "C'mon just use an iPad and the cloud already!"
voice on HN, I guess I can understand why people are somewhat conservative about it.
Yes, the Sparrow acquisition is a great illustration of how the whole "you're the product" cult was broken from the start.
No matter how much you are (or aren't) paying you are always both the customer and the product. Even Apple, who gets plenty of money from their customers directly, is willing to pimp out their customers as "400 million active credit cards" in the right context. At the other extreme, Google devotes an immense amount of effort to continuously improving search. They know that they live and die based on how happy you are as a search customer, even though they aren't paid even a nickel from searches directly.
I'll say it again: we're always both the customer and the product. There's no escaping that. Our only option is to decide which vendors' tradeoffs we are and aren't willing to live with. And black-and-white moralizing about whether or not "you're the product" gets in the way of picking the shades of gray that work for you.
I don't believe that changes the situation at all.
An example of this is Quicksilver on the Mac. It's considered to be one of the best Mac apps ever and the developer who made it, decided to open source it after he decided to take a job at Google. Quicksilver development fell apart afterwards.
My point is that people who used the app did so because of the talent of the developer. A community can't always make up for that hole.
I don't use Sparrow so please correct me if I am wrong.
The applications are still fully functional and are working perfectly fine until Apple changes anything they heavily depend on or something replaces imap.
You own your copy of Sparrow and it still works.
Imagine you buy a BMW and in 10 years you cannot get the required fuel anymore. Does this mean you only pay for a new car when you get all plans for the engine and the whole construction or do you just buy another car?
(I know that the comparison doesn't work 100%)
This makes me wonder if you could open source a project like this and still sell it through the App Store. Then there would be a paid version (that's easy to acquire and pay for) as well as the code being shared with the community. Anyone could still get the app for free, but I'd be willing to bet most people would financially support the project if given such an easy and integrated means to do so.
It's a fair point, but I'd suggest the main reason people get upset is it feels like they've somehow wasted time getting attached to it.
People such as the OP get excited about having this pleasant thing in their life and the implicit relationship in that as long as you buy it, it will continue to improve.
For me it's the same reason early adopters back certain tech products, why fans will follow film directors and why we sometimes get disappointed when they don't follow the path we hope they would take.
This feels to me very much like the argument that "it's not worth voting unless my vote is specifically the one that changes the outcome". You are but one little person. You can do all the right things in the world and the universe can still stomp on your face. The right things are not "the right things" because they guarantee success, but because they maximize the odds of it. There are no actions that guarantee success.
This isn't a disproof of the "don't be a free user" philosophy; it's a disproof of the idea that it's a guarantee of success, which it never was, and never could be. The argument still holds.
> "it's not worth voting unless my vote is specifically the one that changes the outcome"
I think that's a bad comparison - it implies the outcome would have been different if everyone voted with their wallets. Yet a saturated market would increase the odds of an acquihire.
If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
I don't think it has 'failed', as the article states. Paying for the software is necessary but no guarantee. If we slide back to everything being free, things will be worse. But even if we do pay, we cannot forget one very important thing: We are dealing with very small companies and all of the volatility that comes with them. The situation is simply exacerbated when the employees of that company are highly sought after.
It doesn't take Google to buy out a little company. They can just choose to get other jobs or spend their time other ways, get bored with the product, have a falling out, anything. Sparrow could have just as well said, "We're stopping all development on the email client today. 100% of future effort will be on games". And that's why boring enterprise software from MegaCorp still generates huge revenue, because they can go tell a GE, Chase, Honda or McDonalds something LittleCo can't. They can tell the customer that they can expect a specific level of support and life from the product, and here's 20 years of history to prove it, and that they're signing on with a $5 billion company that's not easily bought out. The cool stuff on the bleeding edge may also be fleeting. Large companies want stability, and I guess people using certain software do too.
Side-note: FOSS is a very different animal with interesting characteristics.
"This is the core of the disappointment that many of us feel with the Sparrow acquisition. It’s not about the $15 or less we spent on the apps. It’s not about the team’s well-deserved payout. It’s about the loss of faith in a philosophy that we thought was a sustainable way to ensure a healthy future for independent software development, where most innovation happens."
I seriously laughed out loud.
Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily think his idea is silly, and I think he may in fact have a point. However, let's not pretend all those people who complained about the acquisition were doing this because they lost faith in this philosophy. That part is silly. Those people were just being slightly dramatic because they liked a product and it would no longer get updated.
I think part of the problem in all the hubbub around the Sparrow acquisition is the attempt to represent people's apprehension as a single entity. The reality seems to be more complicated than that.
Some people are probably just upset because of an irrational sense of entitlement ("I paid for X, and now I won't get free updates forever as the product is being abandoned")
But there's lots of other reasons that people can be bothered by this.
I use the Mac version of Sparrow (without using Gmail), and the entirety of my reaction when reading about the acquisition was "Oh well, I guess at some point I'll have to find a new desktop email client. That sucks, I liked Sparrow."
I do wonder what the community reaction would be if it was a different product though.
If Sublime Text (which seems to be attracting a good following) announced tomorrow that they were being acquired, and that the product was being abandoned, would people complaining about it really be that surprising?
Even assume that they were also going to continue with maintenance on it, but stop active development of new features. People would be upset. People on here would say "You should never have assumed that Sublime was going to get new features before buying it, if it didn't do what you wanted now, you shouldn't have paid money for it" (I've found myself actually giving similar advice in the past regarding buying smartphones).
People would write asshole-ish blog posts saying that those people were whining.
I don't think this is actually an indictment on the "paid vs. ad supported" dichotomy. Other people have rightfully pointed out that companies get acquired like this all the time, regardless of whether their products are free, cheap, or expensive.
The reactions across the board are quite disappointing, to be honest.
All you can do as a customer (or as anything, for that matter) is give up the illusion of control.
This is the Sparrow story: A fantastic product was built, and exchanged for money. The people behind the product were recognized, and were acquired for a significant amount.
Everyone is a winner, and customers move on to the next thing.
What's more worrying is our reaction to an email client going under: it's clearly a sign that we don't have enough well designed products for a system that's been in mass use for more than a decade.
"If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold."
This statement is complete nonesense and I do not understand why it keeps appearing everywhere.
You are almost always paying for apps and services, and you are never the product being sold. Sometimes you pay with cash, sometimes you pay with ad impressions. But you always pay and you are always the customer that needs to be satisfied.
Facebook is not free. You pay for it with your willingness to have Facebook show you ads. Ad impressions are as good as money for Google, because they can exchange them for USD.
Google Search/Gmail/Maps are the products. And Google has to make them as good as they can. Otherwise you, the customer, will stop paying for them.
"If it's not being bought, it must mean that it is sold" is just bad logic, plain and simple. It's just a nonsensical retort to an attempt to pigeonhole technology facilitating transactions into stupid categories that were made for a paradigm of classical economics, but still falls within the confines of the paradigm.
It's all about value creation. Assuming every party here is rational: Google decides to pay for the Sparrow team only because the potential value of these developers is much higher than the price they pay. And Sparrow team accepted the offer only because the big pay check exceeds the value all their own customers combined.
If we hate this, we can either make such talent acquisitions less attractive, or increase the value of software customers.
Talent acquisitions become less attractive when:
- The number of talents available increases significantly
- Economies of scale in software business is less substantial
- There's ethical pressure from online communities
- The act of "selling customers" (through data collection or ads) becomes less profitable or costs more (with things like DNT or ad blockers)
The value of customers increases when:
- More people are willing to spend more money on independent software development
- Access to software market is easier (with things like app stores)
- More revenue streams with higher payouts (like high-quality ad networks such as Deck and Carbon)
- Higher potential to get big (with VC money and building platforms/ecosystems)
The sad truth is, independent software developers tend to be less entrepreneurial than startup founders (but I don't think the line can be drawn clearly). They are only a little bit more entrepreneurial than consulting developers (which are even more likely to be hired by big companies, but we don't care much about them). Therefore they may not be willing to actively improve their revenue by taking risks, and hence the acquisitions happen.
The whole argument seems backwards to me. If your dream was that good software could be supported by users alone (not ads or a giant corporate checkbook), and by your own admission they were selling the software at a price-point below the value you were getting from it ("I'd have given them more money if I could")...
It sounds like you got exactly what you want. You got software that worked great, that avoided the traps of "you're the product" and produced a positive result for everyone. Then they got bought. But you know what? A thousand teams of engineers are ready to take their place, since a big payout at the end means there's considerable draw, and you really can sell an app at a bit above costs, be comfortable, and that allure of a _maybe_ payout at the end is enough to get over the hurdle of starting.
I guess it baffles the mind. It's like saying that big paychecks have ruined sports, because strong athletes are only in it for the money. Perhaps they are, but you get people who would otherwise do something else being willing to give sports a try because that potential paycheck is enough of a draw.
After residing in unix-land for almost a year I decided to come back to Mac OSX just 2 days ago, and after re-downloading my purchased apps, the announcement by the Sparrow team was the second mail I picked up. Fuck.
Thinking back, in unix-land no such jokes were pulled. Something abandoned? another trooper taking over. How the $#&% can you charge money for something _non-open-source_ and then just leave it to rot?
I would pay a hundred bucks for a similar app (or a monthly fee) if I'd be assured that the developers were dedicated to ME and THEIR PRODUCT.
Sparrow is above average. Congrats, I loved you for that. But you sinked your goddamn ship before it got half way. I'm only this pissed off because it could have been so much more. I will wait and see what glorious work you do for Google. I (and all the people who paid you money) await your work with great anticipation. Good luck.
Oddly enough, this is exactly what Stallman is on about. Without the source code and the ability to upload that code on to your devices, your programs longevity are subject to the whims of other people.
Even ignoring the whole "code wants to be free thing", the source is important for the longevity of the code. If the software really mattered to you, you would negociate a license that gave you source. Even if you weren't allowed to resell or redistribute, having source that you could hire others to work on if you needed it is important.
In fact, I'd love to see a shift to make proprietary software include the code without license to redistribute the original code; Maybe just patches, maybe nothing. But I'd love to be able to peek beneath the covers and learn, fix things, and/or make sure it runs on new platforms.
That seems pointless, because then patches could not be distributed. Seldom are patches economically viable for exactly one person to create, one at a time, for themselves. That's the same burden of being a proprietary software company without any potential upside.
Maybe for an organization, and in those cases a source-code escrow is not unheard of. But really it's just a lifeboat so you can move on gracefully.
[+] [-] steve8918|13 years ago|reply
There is a huge disparity when it comes to the cost of apps these days vs the salaries required to sustain the engineers who make those apps. Even at $10/pop, you need to sell a lot of apps just to sustain the salaries of very good engineers, and THIS is what makes great products vulnerable to acqui-hires.
The problem is that the $0.99 model of the App Store makes a $10 app look ridiculously expensive, especially when there are free alternatives out there, even though it's only 2 Starbucks coffees. And even though $10 is worth it.
It's the price of the apps that have drastically lowered the expectations of what people need to pay for software, and this goes in direct conflict to the rising costs of great engineers' salaries.
I'm not sure what the exact price point is, but my guess is that people need to start getting used to the idea of spending $30-50 PER YEAR in a subscription model for a great app in order to create enough monetary incentive for the developers to keep their products alive. Otherwise Google and Facebook will continue to drop the bills and pick off the best teams who eventually get tired of the smaller comparative payoffs that these apps bring in.
[+] [-] jusben1369|13 years ago|reply
When did we all start pining for everything to be the same forever?
[+] [-] webwright|13 years ago|reply
If I were to guess, these guys were also buried in support from paying customers who felt entitled to it. What are the economics of technical support for a $2.99 app?
[1] Source of the rank data-- requires an account but worth it if you're interested in this stuff: http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/492573565/ranking/history/#v...
Here's a screenshot if you don't want to create an account: https://skitch.com/webwright/eenji/sparrow-rank-history-app-...
[+] [-] ben1040|13 years ago|reply
I paid $10 for Sparrow and got far more than $10 in value from it. So while I am disappointed that the best email app I have seen is EOL'd now I did get a decent value and I can't complain a whole lot. I am no worse off than had I bought a boxed copy of software with no promise for updates ever.
I would have paid $30 up front for Sparrow and purchased a large feature release for that price later down the line. Happily. That is a price far more in line with the value delivered.
How do we recalibrate people's expectations about the value of software back to pre-2008 levels? Not everything can or should cost a buck.
[+] [-] tlogan|13 years ago|reply
And they even claim they are 'ripped off' because the free version of software does not do 'X'. And they post bad reviews and send hate emails. (First hand experience).
Somehow, thanks for Facebook and Google, people feel entitled to free software and service.
[+] [-] dhugiaskmak|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chimi|13 years ago|reply
Open source software is free. Firefox is free. Thunderbird is free. That anyone would pay for an email client at all is exceptional.
It's not Apple who is at fault here -- it's us.
[+] [-] phil|13 years ago|reply
Maybe that's just a short-term effect (yay, sale!), but based on the week they sold Sparrow for $4.99, there's a good chance they would have made more long term.
App store economics are weird.
[+] [-] FrojoS|13 years ago|reply
Right now, there might be a few dozen million clients on the app store. What if someday there will be a few billions?
[+] [-] ksolanki|13 years ago|reply
So let me say this again. The App store, with its $1-5 apps, is a good thing for the developers as well as the users.
[+] [-] jinushaun|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antr|13 years ago|reply
It is 2012, and when I purchase software, I don't buy into the premise that this software is going to be static for perpetuity, and this is because of the fast-paced nature of OS, platform and web evolution.
I "marry" the software I love, and I am very happy to pay for upgrades. I upgrade my Mac the day after a new OS X version is released, not only that, but I use non-large company software every day for years: Panic, Bjango, Made@Gloria, etc.
When I buy software, I don't only buy into the software I get, but I support it because I think it has a bright and better future. If I knew the developer was to stop development going forward, I would simply not support it.
Going forward, if I find that a small/medium developer has received capital from an angel or VC, I am going to stay away from it (I already decided not to use Foursquare, Path, Highlight, Kik and many other mobile apps for this reason) - the investor will have the need to flip the company, whatever the outcome for the software is.
[+] [-] ChemicalHarm|13 years ago|reply
Eric S Raymond made this point in "The Manufacturing Delusion" (http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/magic-cauldron...). The value of software to a user lies more in the expected future value of updates than in the immediate value of using the software. This is true regardless of whether you pay for the software up front, and regardless of whether you expect to pay for the updates.
I would add this: the cost to a user of software is also much more than its price. To use software means investing time and effort into it, regardless of whether you paid any money for it. Then, as time goes on, you come to rely on the software's presence--you build your habits around the assumption that it is available, and bear the risk of disruption if it suddenly isn't. These hidden, non-monetary costs can be far larger than the monetary price paid, if any.
The problem is that the implicit non-monetary costs on the user side do not represent any benefits for the developer. That the user invested time and took risk doesn't give the developer anything--they only gain the explicit monetary price. But the implicit future benefits expected by the user DO translate directly into future costs for the developer--just as much as the present benefit corresponds to past developer costs!
So there is a big mismatch between what people intuitively feel they are exchanging. On the developer side, Matt Gemmell's comment quoted in the article feels right: "you paid, you got software." But on the user side, the story feels like "I spent time and wrapped my habits around this software, in expectation of its continued improvement, then found out to my surprise that no improvement is coming."
That said, I don't have any new shiny ideas on how to solve this problem. In the end, I agree that the developers of Sparrow owe the users nothing. But I also see why the users are reacting as if somebody took something away from them that they thought they had.
[+] [-] jseliger|13 years ago|reply
I used to do that—until I realized that 10.7 (and now probably 10.8) don't offer any substantial improvements to things I care about (as discussed here: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/mac-os-10-7-is-out...). In other words, I've probably reached "peak operating system," in that marginal improvements to OSes are really quite marginal. That's also true, at least for me, of a program like Word. Have we really seen substantial improvements since, say, 2002? Maybe in stability, but not much else.
I'm not arguing that software itself isn't improving—a lot of software has a huge amount of search space left. But some doesn't, and we get diminishing marginal returns. Maybe I'll upgrade to 10.8 or its successor—Textmate 2.0 or iMovie 12 could be the inciting factors—but there's a solid chance I won't.
[+] [-] hboon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nirvana|13 years ago|reply
In those days this wasn't considered an "acquihire" but a "successful exit" or a "base hit". (e.g.: not a failure but not the success that pays for all the other companies in the VC firms cohort that year.)
The VCs got about 5X on their money and because of liquidation preferences and other shenanigans, I, and the other employees, pretty much got screwed.
[+] [-] officemonkey|13 years ago|reply
It's a case of "We don't like Google or Apple's apps, so we're going to _pay extra money_ to get something we like."
So when the Sparrow team gets picked up by Google _and_ we hear that Sparrow.app is becoming abandonware, many people think "the bad guys win again."
Of course, I hope the hue and cry about this will suggest to google that Sparrow might be worth maintaining after all. A mail app that people like? That can't possibly be a bad thing, can it?
[+] [-] keithpeter|13 years ago|reply
Or open source the app code? c.f Intellicad when Microsoft bought Visio
[+] [-] rogerchucker|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vog|13 years ago|reply
Even if the developers' revenue plan (services, merchandising, whatever) turns out to not be sustainable, at least the remaining software is free (in the sense of freedom) such that others can fork it and can take care of it.
In that sense, Sparrow could have made a great move, since they don't plan to make any more money with their product: publishing their latest code base under GPL.
However, in that case Google might have hesitated to acquire them in the first place. On the other hand, MySQL has been acquired by Oracle despite being Free Software, and despite having existing forks such as MariaDB.
[+] [-] frontsideair|13 years ago|reply
I don't think Google will release it as free software, but if they made it open from the start, maintaining it would be a possibility.
[+] [-] rmc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netcan|13 years ago|reply
I think we are talking about more abstract things. We want this software to exist. We want these business models (small, profitable development companies) to exist. It's not just "I want to use this software."
I think a reason for these kind of reactions to acquisitions is that we feel or suspect that they are destroying rather than creating value. But, it's kind of hard to tell so we don't usually make that claim. For small companies, we know what they make and how many people use it so its easy to get a feel for the value they create. When Google acquires a great team, its hard to know what, if any value they create. Google obviously create enormous amounts of value but its hard to tell what a new team ads or subtracts from that. Much more nebulous are the effects that the existence of such acquisitions have on founder and investor motivation to start and fund these companies in the first place.
I think thats it at the core. A suspicion that such acquisitions are value destroying activities resulting in less/worse software being available to the world.
[+] [-] Evbn|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jiggy2011|13 years ago|reply
I remember in the late 90s there were still plenty of people around using Word 6.0 which was old at the time but still usable since MS allowed recent versions of Word to create docs compatible with it.
Now, if your favourite app gets pulled from the store (that your device is locked to), gets broken by an OS update or the developers simply release a non reversible update that you don't like you're in trouble. Not to mention the consequences of the vendor going bust or getting bought by a rival.
There seems to be a strong "C'mon just use an iPad and the cloud already!" voice on HN, I guess I can understand why people are somewhat conservative about it.
[+] [-] fpgeek|13 years ago|reply
No matter how much you are (or aren't) paying you are always both the customer and the product. Even Apple, who gets plenty of money from their customers directly, is willing to pimp out their customers as "400 million active credit cards" in the right context. At the other extreme, Google devotes an immense amount of effort to continuously improving search. They know that they live and die based on how happy you are as a search customer, even though they aren't paid even a nickel from searches directly.
I'll say it again: we're always both the customer and the product. There's no escaping that. Our only option is to decide which vendors' tradeoffs we are and aren't willing to live with. And black-and-white moralizing about whether or not "you're the product" gets in the way of picking the shades of gray that work for you.
[+] [-] antihero|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] technoslut|13 years ago|reply
An example of this is Quicksilver on the Mac. It's considered to be one of the best Mac apps ever and the developer who made it, decided to open source it after he decided to take a job at Google. Quicksilver development fell apart afterwards.
My point is that people who used the app did so because of the talent of the developer. A community can't always make up for that hole.
[+] [-] jiggy2011|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbq|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fallenhitokiri|13 years ago|reply
The applications are still fully functional and are working perfectly fine until Apple changes anything they heavily depend on or something replaces imap.
You own your copy of Sparrow and it still works.
Imagine you buy a BMW and in 10 years you cannot get the required fuel anymore. Does this mean you only pay for a new car when you get all plans for the engine and the whole construction or do you just buy another car? (I know that the comparison doesn't work 100%)
[+] [-] toddmorey|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helipad|13 years ago|reply
People such as the OP get excited about having this pleasant thing in their life and the implicit relationship in that as long as you buy it, it will continue to improve.
For me it's the same reason early adopters back certain tech products, why fans will follow film directors and why we sometimes get disappointed when they don't follow the path we hope they would take.
[+] [-] jerf|13 years ago|reply
This isn't a disproof of the "don't be a free user" philosophy; it's a disproof of the idea that it's a guarantee of success, which it never was, and never could be. The argument still holds.
[+] [-] gurkendoktor|13 years ago|reply
I think that's a bad comparison - it implies the outcome would have been different if everyone voted with their wallets. Yet a saturated market would increase the odds of an acquihire.
[+] [-] LVB|13 years ago|reply
I don't think it has 'failed', as the article states. Paying for the software is necessary but no guarantee. If we slide back to everything being free, things will be worse. But even if we do pay, we cannot forget one very important thing: We are dealing with very small companies and all of the volatility that comes with them. The situation is simply exacerbated when the employees of that company are highly sought after.
It doesn't take Google to buy out a little company. They can just choose to get other jobs or spend their time other ways, get bored with the product, have a falling out, anything. Sparrow could have just as well said, "We're stopping all development on the email client today. 100% of future effort will be on games". And that's why boring enterprise software from MegaCorp still generates huge revenue, because they can go tell a GE, Chase, Honda or McDonalds something LittleCo can't. They can tell the customer that they can expect a specific level of support and life from the product, and here's 20 years of history to prove it, and that they're signing on with a $5 billion company that's not easily bought out. The cool stuff on the bleeding edge may also be fleeting. Large companies want stability, and I guess people using certain software do too.
Side-note: FOSS is a very different animal with interesting characteristics.
[+] [-] hobin|13 years ago|reply
I seriously laughed out loud.
Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily think his idea is silly, and I think he may in fact have a point. However, let's not pretend all those people who complained about the acquisition were doing this because they lost faith in this philosophy. That part is silly. Those people were just being slightly dramatic because they liked a product and it would no longer get updated.
[+] [-] m0nastic|13 years ago|reply
Some people are probably just upset because of an irrational sense of entitlement ("I paid for X, and now I won't get free updates forever as the product is being abandoned")
But there's lots of other reasons that people can be bothered by this.
I use the Mac version of Sparrow (without using Gmail), and the entirety of my reaction when reading about the acquisition was "Oh well, I guess at some point I'll have to find a new desktop email client. That sucks, I liked Sparrow."
I do wonder what the community reaction would be if it was a different product though.
If Sublime Text (which seems to be attracting a good following) announced tomorrow that they were being acquired, and that the product was being abandoned, would people complaining about it really be that surprising?
Even assume that they were also going to continue with maintenance on it, but stop active development of new features. People would be upset. People on here would say "You should never have assumed that Sublime was going to get new features before buying it, if it didn't do what you wanted now, you shouldn't have paid money for it" (I've found myself actually giving similar advice in the past regarding buying smartphones).
People would write asshole-ish blog posts saying that those people were whining.
I don't think this is actually an indictment on the "paid vs. ad supported" dichotomy. Other people have rightfully pointed out that companies get acquired like this all the time, regardless of whether their products are free, cheap, or expensive.
[+] [-] aayush|13 years ago|reply
All you can do as a customer (or as anything, for that matter) is give up the illusion of control.
This is the Sparrow story: A fantastic product was built, and exchanged for money. The people behind the product were recognized, and were acquired for a significant amount.
Everyone is a winner, and customers move on to the next thing.
What's more worrying is our reaction to an email client going under: it's clearly a sign that we don't have enough well designed products for a system that's been in mass use for more than a decade.
[+] [-] bookwormAT|13 years ago|reply
This statement is complete nonesense and I do not understand why it keeps appearing everywhere.
You are almost always paying for apps and services, and you are never the product being sold. Sometimes you pay with cash, sometimes you pay with ad impressions. But you always pay and you are always the customer that needs to be satisfied.
Facebook is not free. You pay for it with your willingness to have Facebook show you ads. Ad impressions are as good as money for Google, because they can exchange them for USD.
Google Search/Gmail/Maps are the products. And Google has to make them as good as they can. Otherwise you, the customer, will stop paying for them.
[+] [-] notthemessiah|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zhoutong|13 years ago|reply
If we hate this, we can either make such talent acquisitions less attractive, or increase the value of software customers.
Talent acquisitions become less attractive when:
The value of customers increases when: The sad truth is, independent software developers tend to be less entrepreneurial than startup founders (but I don't think the line can be drawn clearly). They are only a little bit more entrepreneurial than consulting developers (which are even more likely to be hired by big companies, but we don't care much about them). Therefore they may not be willing to actively improve their revenue by taking risks, and hence the acquisitions happen.[+] [-] chmike|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ams6110|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] franzus|13 years ago|reply
Why is that? Because they have a working monetization model when they launch?
[+] [-] calciphus|13 years ago|reply
It sounds like you got exactly what you want. You got software that worked great, that avoided the traps of "you're the product" and produced a positive result for everyone. Then they got bought. But you know what? A thousand teams of engineers are ready to take their place, since a big payout at the end means there's considerable draw, and you really can sell an app at a bit above costs, be comfortable, and that allure of a _maybe_ payout at the end is enough to get over the hurdle of starting.
I guess it baffles the mind. It's like saying that big paychecks have ruined sports, because strong athletes are only in it for the money. Perhaps they are, but you get people who would otherwise do something else being willing to give sports a try because that potential paycheck is enough of a draw.
[+] [-] BasDirks|13 years ago|reply
Thinking back, in unix-land no such jokes were pulled. Something abandoned? another trooper taking over. How the $#&% can you charge money for something _non-open-source_ and then just leave it to rot?
I would pay a hundred bucks for a similar app (or a monthly fee) if I'd be assured that the developers were dedicated to ME and THEIR PRODUCT.
Sparrow is above average. Congrats, I loved you for that. But you sinked your goddamn ship before it got half way. I'm only this pissed off because it could have been so much more. I will wait and see what glorious work you do for Google. I (and all the people who paid you money) await your work with great anticipation. Good luck.
[+] [-] ori_b|13 years ago|reply
Even ignoring the whole "code wants to be free thing", the source is important for the longevity of the code. If the software really mattered to you, you would negociate a license that gave you source. Even if you weren't allowed to resell or redistribute, having source that you could hire others to work on if you needed it is important.
In fact, I'd love to see a shift to make proprietary software include the code without license to redistribute the original code; Maybe just patches, maybe nothing. But I'd love to be able to peek beneath the covers and learn, fix things, and/or make sure it runs on new platforms.
[+] [-] fdr|13 years ago|reply
Maybe for an organization, and in those cases a source-code escrow is not unheard of. But really it's just a lifeboat so you can move on gracefully.
[+] [-] awicklander|13 years ago|reply
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/09/sparrow-mac-mail-app/