5 ms·

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

by kylec 14y ago

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.

rogerchucker 14y ago
Does Sparrow's shelving completely block your access to your favorite email service?
- mattmanser 14y ago
  What does that have to do with his point? It's totally irrelevant. People love Sparrow, I can only assume because it made their lives better. A tiny few are benefiting from the Sparrow acquisition, lots are realizing they're going to suffer in the long run by having to degrade, or at least Sparrow eventually falling behind other products in some areas. But obviously the product wasn't generating enough revenue to protect it from a predatory acquisition. This is no different from the 80s days of people buying companies to dismantle them so they can sell the assets. It's just that the assets are developers. So people are lamenting that something, somewhere in the equation is wrong. And it's probably down to the low prices they're charging in the app store. Cheer on the cash out all you like, but it's never good for the customers. Time and time and time again the customers always suffer in these kind of acquisitions.
  - rogerchucker 14y ago
    The email service is more important than a fucking app that makes one's life better. This kind of hysteria should be reserved for the day that email service shuts down. BTW low pricing of apps is essentially (or at least was at the beginning) because without that Apple would not have been successful in persuading consumers to adopt paid apps on a tiny device - in most consumers' mind (even today), a software is worth paying if it is on a "real computer" and does something "big" (like statistics or anti-virus or the OS). Everything else is taken for granted and to change that mindset low prices were a necessity. And it still is thanks to the gazillion apps out there.
huhtenberg 14y ago
Since when does "put in maintenance mode" equal to "completely abandoned"?
- OmegaHN 14y ago
  It's like the word "indefinitely". It may mean "we can start it back up anytime!" from a dictionary sense, but it's actual use is that "it's probably not coming back". "Maintenance" means that they will fix major issues that the paying customers are legally entitled to (such as bugs that make the app unusable). They will do nothing beyond that.
  - emeltzer 14y ago
    What law entitles users to bug fixes for major issues?
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - repsilat 14y ago
      Nobody is arguing this is a legal problem, they're arguing that this is a moral problem. Users did buy into the Sparrow thing because they expected updates/maintenance etc etc. Their purchase was contingent on the ongoing support of the service, they would not have bought a product they thought would be discontinued. Now, you can argue that they should have known that the service might disappear without warning, that they should never have used it if there was the possibility of them being bought, but where does that leave us? Should people just stop buying popular apps created by small companies? Should people insist on a legally binding "community promise" to open-source a product if active development stops? This also neglects the fact that users are statistically credulous - as a group they're simply not rational enough to seriously consider the possibility of the developer being acquired. The Sparrow guys had to have known this, so they either did something unethical when they sold the app or they did something unethical when they sold the company. The blog post says that it is fine to take advantage of them for their credulity, but that's not an ethical position, that's just Ayn Rand.
ChrisLTD 14y ago
Exactly. It's a success story for those acquired. Whether or not wider society benefits depends on what they create while at Google.
ok_craig 14y ago
Alternatively, Gmail users potentially gain from the talent acquisition. Arguably, the win could be greater than the loss.
- c0nfused 14y ago
  As a non sparrow user, this is exactly how I read this whole story. Google buys up 3rd party gmail mac developers group. This seems like an obvious case of products/teams that should work well together. Something about synergies and all that.
cgomez 14y ago
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.
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  I wonder if the Mac Sparrow userbase is a very "early adopter"ish user base that has never really thought about abandonware on the desktop before. (There is no abandonware in web services, they just disappear.) TextMate 1, NewsFire and Photoshop CS3 are still very much alive on my computer. I have friends on 10.6 and Skype 2.8 (as far as I know), and family using software that came with their decade old Windows XP machine. No big deal. The iOS userbase I can understand, as the devs apparently teased them with iPad screenshots.
  - cgomez 14y ago
    Textmate is a terrific example.

by kylec 14y ago

rogerchucker 14y ago

Does Sparrow's shelving completely block your access to your favorite email service?

mattmanser 14y ago
What does that have to do with his point? It's totally irrelevant. People love Sparrow, I can only assume because it made their lives better. A tiny few are benefiting from the Sparrow acquisition, lots are realizing they're going to suffer in the long run by having to degrade, or at least Sparrow eventually falling behind other products in some areas. But obviously the product wasn't generating enough revenue to protect it from a predatory acquisition. This is no different from the 80s days of people buying companies to dismantle them so they can sell the assets. It's just that the assets are developers. So people are lamenting that something, somewhere in the equation is wrong. And it's probably down to the low prices they're charging in the app store. Cheer on the cash out all you like, but it's never good for the customers. Time and time and time again the customers always suffer in these kind of acquisitions.
- rogerchucker 14y ago
  The email service is more important than a fucking app that makes one's life better. This kind of hysteria should be reserved for the day that email service shuts down. BTW low pricing of apps is essentially (or at least was at the beginning) because without that Apple would not have been successful in persuading consumers to adopt paid apps on a tiny device - in most consumers' mind (even today), a software is worth paying if it is on a "real computer" and does something "big" (like statistics or anti-virus or the OS). Everything else is taken for granted and to change that mindset low prices were a necessity. And it still is thanks to the gazillion apps out there.

huhtenberg 14y ago

Since when does "put in maintenance mode" equal to "completely abandoned"?

OmegaHN 14y ago
It's like the word "indefinitely". It may mean "we can start it back up anytime!" from a dictionary sense, but it's actual use is that "it's probably not coming back". "Maintenance" means that they will fix major issues that the paying customers are legally entitled to (such as bugs that make the app unusable). They will do nothing beyond that.
- emeltzer 14y ago
  What law entitles users to bug fixes for major issues?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - repsilat 14y ago
    Nobody is arguing this is a legal problem, they're arguing that this is a moral problem. Users did buy into the Sparrow thing because they expected updates/maintenance etc etc. Their purchase was contingent on the ongoing support of the service, they would not have bought a product they thought would be discontinued. Now, you can argue that they should have known that the service might disappear without warning, that they should never have used it if there was the possibility of them being bought, but where does that leave us? Should people just stop buying popular apps created by small companies? Should people insist on a legally binding "community promise" to open-source a product if active development stops? This also neglects the fact that users are statistically credulous - as a group they're simply not rational enough to seriously consider the possibility of the developer being acquired. The Sparrow guys had to have known this, so they either did something unethical when they sold the app or they did something unethical when they sold the company. The blog post says that it is fine to take advantage of them for their credulity, but that's not an ethical position, that's just Ayn Rand.

ChrisLTD 14y ago

Exactly. It's a success story for those acquired. Whether or not wider society benefits depends on what they create while at Google.

ok_craig 14y ago

Alternatively, Gmail users potentially gain from the talent acquisition. Arguably, the win could be greater than the loss.

c0nfused 14y ago
As a non sparrow user, this is exactly how I read this whole story. Google buys up 3rd party gmail mac developers group. This seems like an obvious case of products/teams that should work well together. Something about synergies and all that.

cgomez 14y ago

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.

gurkendoktor 14y ago
I wonder if the Mac Sparrow userbase is a very "early adopter"ish user base that has never really thought about abandonware on the desktop before. (There is no abandonware in web services, they just disappear.) TextMate 1, NewsFire and Photoshop CS3 are still very much alive on my computer. I have friends on 10.6 and Skype 2.8 (as far as I know), and family using software that came with their decade old Windows XP machine. No big deal. The iOS userbase I can understand, as the devs apparently teased them with iPad screenshots.
- cgomez 14y ago
  Textmate is a terrific example.