I read the news in my Sparrow client, then immediately closed it, and uninstalled it.
Sparrow acquired by Google
171–180 of 393 posts
Re: Sparrow acquired by Google
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who bought Sparrow on the day it was released - and is in love with it - this feels like a big middle finger to the customers who have been supporting them. The core of my disappointment is the expectation of future development that comes with buying into a relatively new piece of software. I didn't buy Sparrow thinking I was paying for a piece of software that was feature-complete. I bought Sparrow mail a…
Well said. We're seeing a lot of "ship and dump" from startups these days. I'm to the point now where I don't recommend a startup to friends and family or use for business purposes unless their product is self-hostable(and release of source code upon an acquisition or corporate dissolution) or open-source. As you can imagine, the number of products I recommend has dwindled to almost nothing since I've been burned so…
Can you give examples of what you didn't recommend for the reasons stated?
Re: Sparrow acquired by Google
#173Re: Sparrow acquired by Google
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
GMail has changed A LOT since its early days. What are you talking about? Gmail is pretty much perfect and the Labs additions can basically give you a "Sparrow-like" window and viewing pane already. APPLE needs these improvements, not google.
> Gmail is pretty much perfect There isn't any room for improvement in Gmail? Really? It's still using the same basic design of every email client since forever (labels/mailboxes at the left, inbox shows a time-sorted list of messages, click through a message to read). Meanwhile Sparrow showed what was possible if you sit down and at least tried to rethink the email interface -- with things like gestures, or by shift…
Google invented the entire notion of email streams. Did you forget that?
People weren't used to seeing emails that followed like IM conversations.
Re: Sparrow acquired by Google
#175Conflicted. I'm happy for the guys who worked hard and clearly got what they wanted out of this deal, but as a loyal Sparrow user, I feel some sense of betrayal that they're simply going to abandon their products beyond security updates.
Re: Sparrow acquired by Google
#176Sparrow had a $4.99 (half-off) sale last weekend ( https://twitter.com/lifehacker/statuses/223750237490126849 ). Borders on fraud, if you ask me - scamming people into buying what they had to have known by then they were planning on turning into abandonware a week later.
It's very unrealistic to expect a company to suspend normal operations because of the possibility, however likely, of a merger closing in a short time. With mergers, the deal is not done until it closes, and there are tons of things that can derail that or at least delay it. Imagine if Sparrow completely stopped doing business as usual, and the merger fell through. How much revenue might they have lost due to skippin…
Come on. They could have held the sale for one week. If the deal goes sour, you run it as you'd planned, and essentially everyone who last week bought it for $4.99 would have bought it this week.
This was a dick move. Well within their legal rights, and it's not like they really have to worry about negative PR when they're dissolving the company, but ethically it looks pretty sleazy.
Re: Sparrow acquired by Google
#177First Thunderbird then this, what's a native-email-app user to do? I wonder what ever happened to that Letters email app for OS X that people were wanting to build? There was a flurry of activity and complaints about Mail.app and then nothing.
At least Thunderbird is open source, so it doesn't have to die.
Re: Sparrow acquired by Google
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Timing a sale right before an announcement you're well aware will drop sales numbers off a steep cliff looks pretty deceptive to me.
It's a standalone app, it's not going to stop functioning. $4.99 is a deal, regardless of whether there would be future versions or not.
> $4.99 is a deal, regardless of whether there would be future versions or not.
Then they should've put it on sale for $4.99 today, after the announcement, with a note in the description that it will no longer receive new features.
If it's indeed a deal, surely all the people who bought last week would've bought this week.
Re: Sparrow acquired by Google
#179Google recently acquired QuickOffice too. So now Google owns native clients for GMail and Docs. In addition, they're continuing to build native apps for GDrive, Google Plus, and probably others. This is similar to GitHub and Twitter. Both grew out of the web, but have increasingly acquired or built desktop clients, not to mention mobile ones. And Facebook has made an about-turn on HTML5 everywhere and focusing heavil…
There's always the possibility that these app acquisitions are not to strengthen gmail and docs, but to strengthen Android. Google has just bought the maker of the best email client on iPhone, and announced that they're stopping development of it. To me, that sounds more like a direct attack on the iPhone than a vote of confidence for native apps.
Re: Sparrow acquired by Google
#1801) They sold because they were a funded company and funded companies have to sell. That's how investors make money. http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/09/sparrow-mac-mail-app/
2) I highly doubt Sparrow will work with upcoming iOS versions, which means the people that bought it recently have been ripped off.