Sparrow’s acquisition is a success story. Indie devs make a great product,
build a customer-base, and are rewarded with a buy-out from a big company
and they get new jobs with that company. It might not be what your
particular goal or end-game is, but it is a success.
From an end-user perspective, having software you use and rely on on a daily basis completely abandoned is not a successful outcome. The Sparrow devs may have won, but Sparrow users have lost.
How have they lost? Sparrow doesn't work any less well than it did before the acquisition. This is not a product that relied on a service that has been shut down. It still has the same utility it did before.
I guess my feeling on it is that I paid for an app on Mac on iOS that works fine, has no showstopping bugs and I have more than gotten my money's worth. Sure, push would have been nice on iOS, but to put it bluntly, the Sparrow team don't owe anybody anything. Esecpailly for Mac users, as it was pretty feature complete as is.
The whole of the author's argument, and its weakness, in four words:
> It’s fine. It’s business.
Why is this inadequate? Because whether something is 'business' is not the beginning and the end of whether it is a good thing to do. It is merely one aspect.
The market is not a perfectly accurate and complete representation for all of human wishes and behaviour. So we cannot delegate to it as the final arbiter on questions of what should or should not be done.
No, the whole issue is really the other way around. What currently happen to be the rules of the business game are not grounds for telling people what they should or should not want. What people want is grounds for examining how the market and business are failing to work well -- and then pondering how that could be improved. That seems the more reasonable, just, and interesting avenue to pursue.
The "It's business" attitude has been popping up a lot. Nobody seems to be making the distinction between good business and bad business. Everything I've seen around the Sparrow sale has been bad business. The told users they were working on push notifications and an iPad app. They had a half price sale last weekend! And even though they were charging a premium price and clearly had a sustainable business (they were one of the top grossing apps and were highly rated and publisised) they still screwed their customers.
There was a good way to do this. Finish push notification and iPad support before discontinuing development (i.e. keep your promises). Don't have a half price sale days before you are acquired without informing the users the product will be discontinued.
This doesn't address the OP's post but here's a quote from Iain M. Banks along your line of thinking:
The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.
So are you suggesting there should be some arbiter other than the market of what a business can or cannot do with regards to product decisions, or acquisition opportunities? Who might do that?
Would you even consider developing a product if your hands were then somehow tied to supporting it and even improving it forever? Would your company be attractive to potential buyers if they were obligated to support your product line indefinitely after an acquisition?
On top of all that I mean we're talking about TEN DOLLARS. I often spend more than that on lunch. If you bought a $10 hair dryer on Amazon and later discovered that the manufacturer had been acquired and was no longer producing hair dryers would you feel ripped off? Betrayed? Offended?
"What currently happen to be the rules of the business game are not grounds for telling people what they should or should not want"
I've not ever heard anyone say that. OP included.
There are no "rules of the business game", other than an obligation to make money. And other than abiding by the law, there are no rules on how that money should be made.
Whether you consider the process moral or not makes no difference. The metric is $.
And cue predictable anti-squawking squawking on the internet. The internet is a place for communication and people are allowed to express themselves. It's not entitlement. The entire goal of a software company is to make software people love so much they will complain when you take it away.
Congrats to Google for a smart talent buy, and the Sparrow team for catching the notice of Google and building something people will miss.
Now there is a clear market gap for someone else to reinvent email clients. Again.
He's got a point, but it feels like nutpicking to me, and a bit of attacking a straw man.
I don't think sensible people are arguing that the Sparrow team don't have a legal right to shut down or sell their company as they please. The discussion is over something subtler.
When I'm building something for my users, I see myself as in collaboration with them. And it feels the same to me on the user side. I'm not legally obligated to take an hour to write up a good bug report for a product I like. And I'm certainly not entitled to my usual hourly rate when I file the bug report. I do it because we're up to something together; capitalism is just the mechanism by which we make that sustainable and equitable.
I'm not a Mac user, so I've never even seen Sparrow, much less used it. But in their shoes, I wouldn't have just left my users in the lurch. I would have tried to find somebody to take over the product, or open-sourced it. Not because I was obligated, but because service to the users was the spirit in which I would have started the project.
I think the sparrow team did what was best for them, and congratulations to them for a successful exit. Goodness knows I'd do the same if I were in there position.
I think what's most disheartening about these types of situations is that as a consumer they make me less and less likely to support startups. Sure, a team like this doesn't "owe" you anything -- you purchase their software and that's the end of the transaction... but if you're going to invest your time and energy into learning, adopting, and loving their product/ecosystem you want to believe that it's got a future. It's a shame that the frequency of these acquisitions (and subsequent shutdowns) erodes consumer confidence in small companies that make great products. Why bother getting yourself hooked on a new product if there's a decent chance it won't be around in another year?
To be fair, Google's current culling of its products shows that this isn't just a small company problem. But I have confidence that GMail will still be around for the foreseeable future. Same for Apple Mail. Same for Outlook. They might not be as good, but at least you can be confident that if you learn their ins and outs it they'll probably still be around in two years.
I think people are frustrated about this and feel betrayed because they were a great indie dev team that made a great product and the users loved them and their product and supported them by purchasing and recommending their product from the beginning, despite the lack of features. Customers trusted them because they thought that the indie dev team will continue to be focused on improving the app and creating versions for other platforms (iPad, Windows etc) and now, boom, it's over.
The author of the blog post focuses too much on the money. It's not really about the 10 or 3 bucks. I was an early adopter of Sparrow and I literally jumped out of my chair when I read that the iPhone Sparrow app was released, because that almost completed my email workflow. Now Sparrow plays a big part in my workflow and I KNOW that the iPad app will never come out and that they won't release any new features or improvements for new iOS and OSX versions. I'm not frustrated about paying those 13 bucks or so but because I will have to stop using an app that fits so well in my workflow and start looking again for alternatives. Which is not a tragedy in the end and as a developer and startup enthusiast I'm actually pretty happy for the Sparrow team.
We tend to get too attached to these startups and it's painful to see them get acquired by the big players but it looks like it's a trend. It's getting harder and harder to be an early-adopter, to support a product/startup with money, data and feedback, to see it be awesome and then to watch it die.
Quick survey: Who paid for TextMate? Who also feels indignant about TextMate 2’s as-yet non-existence?
It’s intriguing to see the difference in reaction between Sparrow’s decisive EoL and the drawn-out, de facto EoL that TextMate experienced.
I'd just like to remind you all: Sublime Text 2 came along, and most of you who were using TextMate switched to that, right? You’ll survive. Just stop claiming a non-existent right to the productive output of another human, because once upon a time you bought something from them. You still have the version of Sparrow that you bought, and that’s what you paid for, whether you thought that’s what you were buying or not.
N.B.: I was tele-raised by Judge Judy, I don’t take kindly to irrational sentiment or feelings of indignation.
I bought TextMate because it was a capable editor in the midst of many to choose from. I don't use Sparrow but it seems much more like it's filling a niche that's not quite filled yet and people are buying it because it's worth it, but also because they see the potential.
A de facto EOL happens, developers get busy and projects get backburnered. But a acquisition a lot of time means the developers are hitting their stride and have a lot of potential.
Sentiment? Maybe. But come on....they coulda been a contenda. No one is claiming a right. It's just a shame that the potential for this is wasted. (Not the teams' talents, but their development investment in Sparrow.)
I bought TextMate (multiple licenses). Still using it with no issues on all my Macs. If and when TextMate 2 is released, I will happily pay for an upgrade. If and ever, TextMate stops being an effective tool, I will look into purchasing another program (or use emacs).
For what it's worth, I paid for TextMate, and I'm quite happily still using it. I've been very unimpressed by Sublime Text 2, and I'm not even 100% convinced I'd switch to TextMate 2 if it ever does come out.
Software breaks, sometimes very easily. Who knows if the next OS update or 3rd party add-on will screw something up? Maintenance is important, and unlike some other products you can't just look around your city and choose from 10 or 20 businesses to do a repair. With a lot of software you're screwed unless one person, the author, can keep it working.
I'm not sure this is entirely clear to the average person buying software. The problems that software can solve may not "stay solved"; they depend on their entire ecosystem to be stable solutions. You aren't paying $10 to obtain something. You are paying $10 to temporarily solve a problem.
That's a little unusual among products that are sold. For instance, if you buy a toaster, the infrastructure dependencies are pretty low; there isn't much risk that the voltage in your wall will change and prevent the toaster from behaving the way it was designed. Not only that but there are many regulations governing how such a product can be made, minimizing the chance that people buying toasters will have to replace them every 4 days. If you buy an appliance, it tends to last. But the reasons for appliances lasting don't really apply to software. It's bad for consumers to pretend that it's the same type of purchase.
Either you buy disposable software, or you buy software that comes with a maintenance guarantee. But to buy the former and pretend it's the latter is bizarre.
You are still taking a risk when you buy the toaster. If a toaster malfunction burns your kitchen and the shop or manufacturer go bankrupt you might not receive compensation.
He fails to address the point, which I have mentioned on HN before, that aqui-hires gradually erode the confidence of future customers.
True, there will be no shortage of indie developers. True, Sparrow didn't owe anyone updates for life.
The problem is that each acquisition reduces trust in the minds of potential customers. It's more the fault of Google and Facebook but I still believe its the core problem.
This is a silly developer-centric point-of-view. I will repeat as I have said before - people for the most part invest in an app for the service it provides. In Sparrow's case it was mostly Gmail. If sparrow won't provide it anymore, users will eventually switch to another shiny app. I have never ever come across a person who was hesitant to buy an app just for the fear that it would be shelved by aqui-hire some day.
Some incredibly valid points in here, but I think there's a middle ground.
While Matt is perfectly correct that when you pay for an app, you get the app you paid for. But there's a very well known unwritten suggestion that you'll get updates for 1-2 years. At which point probably they'll release a new version, and you'll pay the upgrade fee. It's how most software seems to work. So, people technically don't have the right to complain - there is a lot of sense in why people are upset. And there's no real explanation from the developers that buying their software wasn't going to lead down that route.
I think the biggest issue about the acquisition for me is the fact Sparrow bled the product dry a week ago by having a sale and then doing this. It seems underhanded.
And for the record, I also find it a shame that they've been acquired. I'm happy for them to be given big wads of cash, but in a selfish way I would have wished to seen them tackle more problems in their way - producing quality results. I have a bad feeling as we've seen again and again, we won't be seeing anything from Google with the calibre that they did with Sparrow.
When I pay more than $100 for an app, I might expect 1 year of support, but for a $10 or $3 app, I don't. Unless you live in the third world, $10 is disposable software.
The contention about the sale last week is just overwrought angst, as it's still a pretty good app, and one that easily pays for itself after a couple of weeks of use, even at full price. From the messaging on the sparrow app store pages, they're still going to be providing bug fixes.
Sparrow bled the product dry a week ago by having a sale and then doing this. It seems underhanded.
This is implies that either (1) the profit made from selling the app a week ago was distributed to the old shareholders before the sale went through or (2) the profit made was a factor in Google deciding to acquire. Otherwise, how could this benefit the Sparrow guys in any way?
Neither of those seems likely. I would guess the Sparrow guys did what everyone advises in this situation: Assume the sale will fall through, until they sign on the dotted line. In the meantime, do what you were going to do anyway.
I don't think most people are outright antagonising Sparrow (except perhaps for the fire sale last weekend, which seems a bit scummy.)
Most of the posts regarding this issue seem more to bemoan the landscape of the software industry at this point, where even if you have a well-selling, consumer-facing, high-quality app with critical phrase, it's still a rational decision to take a buyout from a tech giant even if it means shuttering your app.
"It’d be a shitty, reduced, pale imitation of what Sparrow actually was, because the developers would have had to take so much time off to attend the funerals of their families who had died from starvation."
I mean, throwing hypothetical come backs was bad enough but mixing uncalled for low blows to GPL really tops it off for me. This clueless person believes GPL is "shitty" by definition... what a lovely special snow flake intelect we got here, moving on. Make sure to miss the contribute button on his about page, he probably put it on there for sarcastic stance.
I think the guy is pretty spot on. There is a difference between feeling bad ("man this is an awesome app, it sucks I might have to find a replacement and port all my data") and the very real sense that a lot of the more vocal complainers seem to think their 10 dollars purchase earned them the indentured servitude of the Sparrow team.
He addresses just that. Feeling bad is one reaction, feeling betrayed and entitled to limitless updates of an app that you like is something totally different.
Dude, I could barely read the whole post through. It feels like he just HAD to respond to the rage against his tweet. I suppose he felt his manhood was at stake. He couldn't sound more of a douchebag with this phrasing really. Go on, phrase titles and respond to yourself then.
This is not the quality of posts I usually find on the front page of Hacker News.
Google beat us, the users, and Sparrow let them. Google is better at aggregating wealth than either we or Sparrow was.
That's the problem. Now, a solution.
What I think would have been interesting was an auction. Us against Google. Google bids first. $25MM. Then, in a Kickstarter fashion, we could bid against that, within a certain timeframe. I think this kind of "end user buy-out protection clause" should be a standard for startups like Sparrow, looking to both assure the userbase that they will not be pulled out from under them, and their own team that they'll get a comfortable payout no matter what.
Granted, a weakness of this plan is that if the consumers win the auction, what is to prevent someone else from making another offer immediately? The auction becomes something like an extortion scheme at that point. To deal with this the consumer side of the auction is time-limited - if the consumers win the auction, then product improvements are assured for, oh, 3 years.
The fact is that there are still rather obvious error modes. What if the developers sit on their hands? What recourse would the consumer bidders have? The simple answer to this, of course, is "very little." The burden will be on the team to show that they would like to continue to work on the project if the consumer side makes it make financial sense.
You're saying that there's a chance that a company who's total sales EVER are maybe 1/10 of that $25MM offer is going to get every one of its users, who ALREADY PAID once for the app, to pay 10X as much to keep them from being acquired?
I don't normally do this, but I'm replying to my own post, because I think it's fucking brilliant.
There's so much hand-wringing about the sparrow acquisition, and there are many words and few to the point. My first line, "Google beat us, and Sparrow let them," gets to the heart of it, with, I'd argue, the fewest possible words.
Any argument that involves the word "should" should be ascribed an extra helping of skepticism. What does "should" even mean? At it's heart, it's an expression of what we'd prefer. That is, it's an expression of preference. But it's a preference given the patina of: "truth, justice, and the American way". "Should" is a dirty word.
The connection between "should" and "regulation" is an important one. We connect these when we believe that a behavior requires the brutality of force behind it. The behavior is so important that we cannot accept an exception. There are some, but very few, such cases of valid "shoulds".
Hence the auction idea. And this auction idea is more of a brand, or a label, that can be applied to any startup. And the only reason why it wouldn't work is that the market is too small for the brand, that there aren't enough people for whom that brand would make much sense. And yet, a "startup compatible" brand makes sense to me, and I think the argument could be made cogently to others, such that a startup without such a guarantee of the option of longevity would suffer compared to those that have it.
And so a novel business model is born. I am proposing a company who's customers are software startups that offers a guarantee along the lines of a buyout auction. If the startup is the target of an acquisition, the users will be given the right of first refusal.
The one by Cole Peters is the most ridiculous. People work to make money, among other reasons. There is nothing wrong with that. We don't begrudge the accountant, lawyer, or other people in other fields for making money. There is this group of people in our world that looks down on the notion of making money or have no desire to make anymore money than is required to live very modestly in a third world country. Once I was on a thread on HN debating wheher like $75K a year was "FU money."
It's fine to have these views but it is very much out of the mainstream and I think it makes technical people in our field look silly to the public or technical people in other fields.
Now yes there are good and bad ways to conduct business, perhaps it's not good for Google to essentially abandon the software but I don't feel anyone should begrudge the Sparrow team for going for a payday they thought was worthwhile. Someone says there was a "firesale" last weekend, I would say if they knew they were about to strike a deal and made an aggressive marketing strategy, there probably is something a bit wrong about that but I don't know any of the facts regarding that issue.
The reason we are angry is that the Sparrow founders (and investors and board) failed to give enough of a damn about their customers, placing shareholders before customers.
They have damaged their personal reputations forever with this decision.
They placed money over karma, dollars over doing awesomeness, cash over changing the world.
I feel they just missed an opportunity to grow Sparrow to dominate email across all platforms - an opportunity worth a lot more in both karma and dollars, and an amazing journey as well.
In short a poor decision made for the wrong reasons.
They may help Googke change the world of email. But they have messed up a beautiful opportunity to do so themselves and will now disappear into the anonymous Borg.
This is probably the smuggest smug piece of smug literature that ever smugged. Like I couldn't read through this properly; the smug was hurting my brain and making me forget how to read. The whole blogpost read like he just got in an imaginary argument in the shower and won it by being as condescending as possible and throwing down those putdowns as he did just then.
The only way that this could have been better if it was a facebook screenshot of him replying to someone who's upset with acquisition by writing a large essay about how "GPL will literally kill your family" and other ad-hominems, and then top it off by liking his own comment.
"Sparrow’s acquisition is a success story. Indie devs make a great product, build a customer-base, and are rewarded with a buy-out from a big company and they get new jobs with that company. It might not be what your particular goal or end-game is, but it is a success."
So when you boil it down "mak[ing] a great product, build a customer-base, ... are rewarded" with a job at google.
Therefore building the product was, essentially, like a job interview.
Using your vast and deep pockets to terminate a threat vs. competing against it simply doesn't sit right for many HN readers. There are some parallels here to the outcry against patents-as-business-strategy.
Definitely some odd responses to this acquisition.
1. The sparrow developers decided to accept a buyout offer. That's their business (literally). Should they accept less money to keep their users happy?
2. Yes, Google bought them and is killing off their product because of strategic reasons. That's how huge corporations work, if Google/Microsoft/Facebook/etc. didn't do that they would be at higher risk.
[+] [-] kylec|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ok_craig|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cgomez|13 years ago|reply
I guess my feeling on it is that I paid for an app on Mac on iOS that works fine, has no showstopping bugs and I have more than gotten my money's worth. Sure, push would have been nice on iOS, but to put it bluntly, the Sparrow team don't owe anybody anything. Esecpailly for Mac users, as it was pretty feature complete as is.
[+] [-] ChrisLTD|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huhtenberg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rogerchucker|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hxa7241|13 years ago|reply
> It’s fine. It’s business.
Why is this inadequate? Because whether something is 'business' is not the beginning and the end of whether it is a good thing to do. It is merely one aspect.
The market is not a perfectly accurate and complete representation for all of human wishes and behaviour. So we cannot delegate to it as the final arbiter on questions of what should or should not be done.
No, the whole issue is really the other way around. What currently happen to be the rules of the business game are not grounds for telling people what they should or should not want. What people want is grounds for examining how the market and business are failing to work well -- and then pondering how that could be improved. That seems the more reasonable, just, and interesting avenue to pursue.
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|13 years ago|reply
There was a good way to do this. Finish push notification and iPad support before discontinuing development (i.e. keep your promises). Don't have a half price sale days before you are acquired without informing the users the product will be discontinued.
[+] [-] JabavuAdams|13 years ago|reply
The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.
[+] [-] ams6110|13 years ago|reply
Would you even consider developing a product if your hands were then somehow tied to supporting it and even improving it forever? Would your company be attractive to potential buyers if they were obligated to support your product line indefinitely after an acquisition?
On top of all that I mean we're talking about TEN DOLLARS. I often spend more than that on lunch. If you bought a $10 hair dryer on Amazon and later discovered that the manufacturer had been acquired and was no longer producing hair dryers would you feel ripped off? Betrayed? Offended?
[+] [-] Spearchucker|13 years ago|reply
I've not ever heard anyone say that. OP included.
There are no "rules of the business game", other than an obligation to make money. And other than abiding by the law, there are no rules on how that money should be made.
Whether you consider the process moral or not makes no difference. The metric is $.
[+] [-] ryanisinallofus|13 years ago|reply
And cue predictable anti-squawking squawking on the internet. The internet is a place for communication and people are allowed to express themselves. It's not entitlement. The entire goal of a software company is to make software people love so much they will complain when you take it away.
Congrats to Google for a smart talent buy, and the Sparrow team for catching the notice of Google and building something people will miss.
Now there is a clear market gap for someone else to reinvent email clients. Again.
[+] [-] wpietri|13 years ago|reply
I don't think sensible people are arguing that the Sparrow team don't have a legal right to shut down or sell their company as they please. The discussion is over something subtler.
When I'm building something for my users, I see myself as in collaboration with them. And it feels the same to me on the user side. I'm not legally obligated to take an hour to write up a good bug report for a product I like. And I'm certainly not entitled to my usual hourly rate when I file the bug report. I do it because we're up to something together; capitalism is just the mechanism by which we make that sustainable and equitable.
I'm not a Mac user, so I've never even seen Sparrow, much less used it. But in their shoes, I wouldn't have just left my users in the lurch. I would have tried to find somebody to take over the product, or open-sourced it. Not because I was obligated, but because service to the users was the spirit in which I would have started the project.
[+] [-] gfodor|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigfrakkinghero|13 years ago|reply
I think the sparrow team did what was best for them, and congratulations to them for a successful exit. Goodness knows I'd do the same if I were in there position.
I think what's most disheartening about these types of situations is that as a consumer they make me less and less likely to support startups. Sure, a team like this doesn't "owe" you anything -- you purchase their software and that's the end of the transaction... but if you're going to invest your time and energy into learning, adopting, and loving their product/ecosystem you want to believe that it's got a future. It's a shame that the frequency of these acquisitions (and subsequent shutdowns) erodes consumer confidence in small companies that make great products. Why bother getting yourself hooked on a new product if there's a decent chance it won't be around in another year?
To be fair, Google's current culling of its products shows that this isn't just a small company problem. But I have confidence that GMail will still be around for the foreseeable future. Same for Apple Mail. Same for Outlook. They might not be as good, but at least you can be confident that if you learn their ins and outs it they'll probably still be around in two years.
[+] [-] creativityhurts|13 years ago|reply
The author of the blog post focuses too much on the money. It's not really about the 10 or 3 bucks. I was an early adopter of Sparrow and I literally jumped out of my chair when I read that the iPhone Sparrow app was released, because that almost completed my email workflow. Now Sparrow plays a big part in my workflow and I KNOW that the iPad app will never come out and that they won't release any new features or improvements for new iOS and OSX versions. I'm not frustrated about paying those 13 bucks or so but because I will have to stop using an app that fits so well in my workflow and start looking again for alternatives. Which is not a tragedy in the end and as a developer and startup enthusiast I'm actually pretty happy for the Sparrow team.
We tend to get too attached to these startups and it's painful to see them get acquired by the big players but it looks like it's a trend. It's getting harder and harder to be an early-adopter, to support a product/startup with money, data and feedback, to see it be awesome and then to watch it die.
[+] [-] zacharyvoase|13 years ago|reply
It’s intriguing to see the difference in reaction between Sparrow’s decisive EoL and the drawn-out, de facto EoL that TextMate experienced.
I'd just like to remind you all: Sublime Text 2 came along, and most of you who were using TextMate switched to that, right? You’ll survive. Just stop claiming a non-existent right to the productive output of another human, because once upon a time you bought something from them. You still have the version of Sparrow that you bought, and that’s what you paid for, whether you thought that’s what you were buying or not.
N.B.: I was tele-raised by Judge Judy, I don’t take kindly to irrational sentiment or feelings of indignation.
[+] [-] brianpan|13 years ago|reply
A de facto EOL happens, developers get busy and projects get backburnered. But a acquisition a lot of time means the developers are hitting their stride and have a lot of potential.
Sentiment? Maybe. But come on....they coulda been a contenda. No one is claiming a right. It's just a shame that the potential for this is wasted. (Not the teams' talents, but their development investment in Sparrow.)
[+] [-] pirateking|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colomon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makecheck|13 years ago|reply
I'm not sure this is entirely clear to the average person buying software. The problems that software can solve may not "stay solved"; they depend on their entire ecosystem to be stable solutions. You aren't paying $10 to obtain something. You are paying $10 to temporarily solve a problem.
That's a little unusual among products that are sold. For instance, if you buy a toaster, the infrastructure dependencies are pretty low; there isn't much risk that the voltage in your wall will change and prevent the toaster from behaving the way it was designed. Not only that but there are many regulations governing how such a product can be made, minimizing the chance that people buying toasters will have to replace them every 4 days. If you buy an appliance, it tends to last. But the reasons for appliances lasting don't really apply to software. It's bad for consumers to pretend that it's the same type of purchase.
[+] [-] mikeash|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opminion|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callmeed|13 years ago|reply
True, there will be no shortage of indie developers. True, Sparrow didn't owe anyone updates for life.
The problem is that each acquisition reduces trust in the minds of potential customers. It's more the fault of Google and Facebook but I still believe its the core problem.
[+] [-] rogerchucker|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zachinglis|13 years ago|reply
While Matt is perfectly correct that when you pay for an app, you get the app you paid for. But there's a very well known unwritten suggestion that you'll get updates for 1-2 years. At which point probably they'll release a new version, and you'll pay the upgrade fee. It's how most software seems to work. So, people technically don't have the right to complain - there is a lot of sense in why people are upset. And there's no real explanation from the developers that buying their software wasn't going to lead down that route.
I think the biggest issue about the acquisition for me is the fact Sparrow bled the product dry a week ago by having a sale and then doing this. It seems underhanded.
And for the record, I also find it a shame that they've been acquired. I'm happy for them to be given big wads of cash, but in a selfish way I would have wished to seen them tackle more problems in their way - producing quality results. I have a bad feeling as we've seen again and again, we won't be seeing anything from Google with the calibre that they did with Sparrow.
[+] [-] slantyyz|13 years ago|reply
The contention about the sale last week is just overwrought angst, as it's still a pretty good app, and one that easily pays for itself after a couple of weeks of use, even at full price. From the messaging on the sparrow app store pages, they're still going to be providing bug fixes.
[+] [-] andrewf|13 years ago|reply
Neither of those seems likely. I would guess the Sparrow guys did what everyone advises in this situation: Assume the sale will fall through, until they sign on the dotted line. In the meantime, do what you were going to do anyway.
[+] [-] jmduke|13 years ago|reply
Most of the posts regarding this issue seem more to bemoan the landscape of the software industry at this point, where even if you have a well-selling, consumer-facing, high-quality app with critical phrase, it's still a rational decision to take a buyout from a tech giant even if it means shuttering your app.
[+] [-] rogerchucker|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ta12121|13 years ago|reply
Why in the world is it wrong for people to feel bad when something they like is cancelled?
[+] [-] novalis|13 years ago|reply
I mean, throwing hypothetical come backs was bad enough but mixing uncalled for low blows to GPL really tops it off for me. This clueless person believes GPL is "shitty" by definition... what a lovely special snow flake intelect we got here, moving on. Make sure to miss the contribute button on his about page, he probably put it on there for sarcastic stance.
[+] [-] jbigelow76|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leftnode|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrkeyboard|13 years ago|reply
This is not the quality of posts I usually find on the front page of Hacker News.
[+] [-] javajosh|13 years ago|reply
That's the problem. Now, a solution.
What I think would have been interesting was an auction. Us against Google. Google bids first. $25MM. Then, in a Kickstarter fashion, we could bid against that, within a certain timeframe. I think this kind of "end user buy-out protection clause" should be a standard for startups like Sparrow, looking to both assure the userbase that they will not be pulled out from under them, and their own team that they'll get a comfortable payout no matter what.
Granted, a weakness of this plan is that if the consumers win the auction, what is to prevent someone else from making another offer immediately? The auction becomes something like an extortion scheme at that point. To deal with this the consumer side of the auction is time-limited - if the consumers win the auction, then product improvements are assured for, oh, 3 years.
The fact is that there are still rather obvious error modes. What if the developers sit on their hands? What recourse would the consumer bidders have? The simple answer to this, of course, is "very little." The burden will be on the team to show that they would like to continue to work on the project if the consumer side makes it make financial sense.
[+] [-] ams6110|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javajosh|13 years ago|reply
There's so much hand-wringing about the sparrow acquisition, and there are many words and few to the point. My first line, "Google beat us, and Sparrow let them," gets to the heart of it, with, I'd argue, the fewest possible words.
Any argument that involves the word "should" should be ascribed an extra helping of skepticism. What does "should" even mean? At it's heart, it's an expression of what we'd prefer. That is, it's an expression of preference. But it's a preference given the patina of: "truth, justice, and the American way". "Should" is a dirty word.
The connection between "should" and "regulation" is an important one. We connect these when we believe that a behavior requires the brutality of force behind it. The behavior is so important that we cannot accept an exception. There are some, but very few, such cases of valid "shoulds".
Hence the auction idea. And this auction idea is more of a brand, or a label, that can be applied to any startup. And the only reason why it wouldn't work is that the market is too small for the brand, that there aren't enough people for whom that brand would make much sense. And yet, a "startup compatible" brand makes sense to me, and I think the argument could be made cogently to others, such that a startup without such a guarantee of the option of longevity would suffer compared to those that have it.
And so a novel business model is born. I am proposing a company who's customers are software startups that offers a guarantee along the lines of a buyout auction. If the startup is the target of an acquisition, the users will be given the right of first refusal.
Fund me, pg.
[+] [-] dinkumthinkum|13 years ago|reply
It's fine to have these views but it is very much out of the mainstream and I think it makes technical people in our field look silly to the public or technical people in other fields.
Now yes there are good and bad ways to conduct business, perhaps it's not good for Google to essentially abandon the software but I don't feel anyone should begrudge the Sparrow team for going for a payday they thought was worthwhile. Someone says there was a "firesale" last weekend, I would say if they knew they were about to strike a deal and made an aggressive marketing strategy, there probably is something a bit wrong about that but I don't know any of the facts regarding that issue.
[+] [-] sskates|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lancewiggs|13 years ago|reply
They have damaged their personal reputations forever with this decision.
They placed money over karma, dollars over doing awesomeness, cash over changing the world.
I feel they just missed an opportunity to grow Sparrow to dominate email across all platforms - an opportunity worth a lot more in both karma and dollars, and an amazing journey as well.
In short a poor decision made for the wrong reasons.
They may help Googke change the world of email. But they have messed up a beautiful opportunity to do so themselves and will now disappear into the anonymous Borg.
[+] [-] Afal|13 years ago|reply
The only way that this could have been better if it was a facebook screenshot of him replying to someone who's upset with acquisition by writing a large essay about how "GPL will literally kill your family" and other ad-hominems, and then top it off by liking his own comment.
[+] [-] larrys|13 years ago|reply
So when you boil it down "mak[ing] a great product, build a customer-base, ... are rewarded" with a job at google.
Therefore building the product was, essentially, like a job interview.
[+] [-] DominikR|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scott_meade|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azakai|13 years ago|reply
1. The sparrow developers decided to accept a buyout offer. That's their business (literally). Should they accept less money to keep their users happy?
2. Yes, Google bought them and is killing off their product because of strategic reasons. That's how huge corporations work, if Google/Microsoft/Facebook/etc. didn't do that they would be at higher risk.