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Sparrow acquired by Google

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Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#211

Post by archildress »

atourgates wrote: post #67
kyleslattery wrote: post #35

The email Sparrow is sending out, looks like there won't be any future feature additions: Hello, We're excited to let you know that Sparrow has been acquired by Google! You can view our public announcement here, but I wanted to reach out directly to make sure you were aware of the news. We will continue to make available our existing products, and we will provide support and critical updates to our users. However, as…

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…

I completely agree, and I suppose this is also the end to the iPad client they've been hinting around.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#212

Post by rglover »

joe-mccann wrote: post #198
rglover wrote: post #46

This is getting extremely frustrating. Sparrow is a fabulous email client both for iOS and Mac. I love and use both daily and this is fairly devastating. I was really looking forward to the products development, growth, and future releases. To read this announcement and hear that they won't be working on their apps but on Google projects is sad. To bigger companies: chill out with the "acquihires." If anything, do wh…

> To bigger companies: chill out with the "acquihires." Easy for someone to say whom doesn't run the M&A and Strategy department for a multi-nation corporate conglomerate engaged in one of the most competitive spaces for talent acquisition and retention.

You're right, I don't. But at this point, it seems like gluttony. Eating for the sake of eating. Sure they'll gain some value out of the team and their insights into email, but is their contribution going to be more so within Google than outside of it?

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#213

Post by lloeki »

rglover wrote: post #199
w1ntermute wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is getting extremely frustrating. Sparrow is a fabulous email client both for iOS and Mac. I love and use both daily and this is fairly devastating. I was really looking forward to the products development, growth, and future releases. To read this announcement and hear that they won't be working on their apps but on Google projects is sad. I think it's a matter of perspective. As someone who doesn't use and h…

A great point. But still no excuse to have their existing customers left behind. All of their customers (myself included) invested in the product because it was good, because it worked extremely well, and because it solved problems. I didn't invest in their work at Google. Where does that leave me? The biggest concern I have with this is the same thing that happened to Tweetie: the one company that should have scoope…

> All of their customers (myself included) invested in the product because it was good, because it worked extremely well, and because it solved problems. I didn't invest in their work at Google

Even worse, I invested in Sparrow because I vastly prefer desktop apps like Sparrow to web apps like GMail. That's sad.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#214

Post by archildress »

Lot of talk here about their lack of recurring revenue models; the interesting thing I think is that they were developing a recurring revenue facet.

If you missed it, the problem on iOS is that they couldn't get push email support working (they tried to use the VOIP exception but Apple caught it while review), so the talk was that they would offer a yearly subscription type thing that would somehow enable push email.

I'm not sure how much that would have been, but I would have almost certainly subscribed.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#215

Post by samstave »

rglover wrote: post #46

This is getting extremely frustrating. Sparrow is a fabulous email client both for iOS and Mac. I love and use both daily and this is fairly devastating. I was really looking forward to the products development, growth, and future releases. To read this announcement and hear that they won't be working on their apps but on Google projects is sad. To bigger companies: chill out with the "acquihires." If anything, do wh…

All these aquisitions are more insidious, they are being done by the big players to stifle diversity in the market and continue to solidify their leads on online services under the guise of talent acquisition to better their companies - rather its an effort to prevent that talent from building something that would be a detriment to their positions.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#216

Post by falling »

jcurbo wrote: post #77

First 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.

Lion’s Mail is the first desktop client that got me back from webmail since April 1st, 2004.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#217

Post by gurkendoktor »

danielpal wrote: post #98
kyleslattery wrote: post #35

The email Sparrow is sending out, looks like there won't be any future feature additions: Hello, We're excited to let you know that Sparrow has been acquired by Google! You can view our public announcement here, but I wanted to reach out directly to make sure you were aware of the news. We will continue to make available our existing products, and we will provide support and critical updates to our users. However, as…

This pisses me off. It's irresponsible to the current customers. I hope other startups don't follow. Its OK to sell, but they should have pushed Google to maintain an support Sparrow for at least 2 more years.

Alternatively, open-source Sparrow. I don't think it's the source code that Google bought them for.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#218

Post by angrow »

w1ntermute wrote: post #184
rglover wrote: post #46

This is getting extremely frustrating. Sparrow is a fabulous email client both for iOS and Mac. I love and use both daily and this is fairly devastating. I was really looking forward to the products development, growth, and future releases. To read this announcement and hear that they won't be working on their apps but on Google projects is sad. To bigger companies: chill out with the "acquihires." If anything, do wh…

> This is getting extremely frustrating. Sparrow is a fabulous email client both for iOS and Mac. I love and use both daily and this is fairly devastating. I was really looking forward to the products development, growth, and future releases. To read this announcement and hear that they won't be working on their apps but on Google projects is sad. I think it's a matter of perspective. As someone who doesn't use and h…

> Now, there's a very good chance that some of Sparrow's UI features will be incorporated into the Gmail web UI and into the Gmail apps for Android phones and tablets.

Why acquire a whole company if all you want is to re-use some of their good UX ideas? You get those for free with the app.

Presumably the talent was another draw for Google, but will breaking up/subsuming the team defeat that purpose?

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#219

Post by benatkin »

dannyr wrote: post #196
ceejayoz wrote: post #72

Sparrow 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.

Wow. Pretty harsh words for an app that costs less than $10. Is the app unusable after it was bought by Google? If it is still usable, are the features of the app not worth what users paid for?

Well, that's $10 times a large number of people. Remember the scam from The Office Space where they were stealing fractions of cents? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing

I don't think it's fair to call it fraud, but it isn't because of the numbers, but because it was sold as a computer program, not a service contract.

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