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Sparrow acquired by Google

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Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#241

Post by dave5104 »

crag wrote: post #228
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…

Yeah we got screwed. They just dropped the app. They are promising "big fixes" but that's about it. Lovely. This is the bad side of "trusting" startups and their apps. Pisses me off. I mean (to all you startup guys out there), if you have no intention of continuing your work, AT LEAST OPEN SOURCE THE CODE so some of us can jump in and maintain it!

I would argue that just open sourcing the code could have even worse effects on the app/brand than a simple end of life. Clearly if the app in question had a good following, it was a decent product created by folks who knew what they were doing. By open sourcing it, anyone could jump in and that anyone may not be qualified to make the best product decisions. Maybe I'm just being too sentimental here, but I'd rather the product go out in a nice light rather than watching it slowly creep downhill to death.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#242

Post by cpeterso »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #170
carsongross wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't have a recurring revenue model.

This. Like everyone else I think the App Store lost a great app today. However, I also couldn't figure out how Sparrow would be able to grow on $10 one time purchases. Having been a big fan of Eudora back when it was sekrit hacker group at Qualcomm (well not so sekrit but certainly not part of Qualcomm's core business) I talked with their VP of product at some conference and he basically lamented that once you sold i…

> I also couldn't figure out how Sparrow would be able to grow on $10 one time purchases.

Can a small company survive on one-time purchases of desktop applications? If Sparrow charged $100, they might have more time to scale up their customers, but they would have fewer customers.

Has Y Combinator invested in startups whose primary product was a desktop application?

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#243

Post by benatkin »

OmegaHN wrote: post #109
mmahemoff wrote: post #61

Google 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…

This is one thing that I've thought about Web 2.0 (now that it is in full swing). Countless dollars seem to be going to trying to reinvent the desktop inside the browser, when really the internet should supplement it as an expansion to its capabilities. Dropbox is the best example of this: there is a web client, but Dropbox truly shines as a simple folder that is the same across your devices. It takes the folder syst…

DropBox isn't so simple, with Mountain Lion coming. http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-not-on-the-Mac-A...

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#244

Post by crag »

backspace wrote: post #226
rglover wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Simply put: that's a risk you take for being an early adopter. Deal with it, there's a good chance it will happen with any/all early adoption startup products out there.

"... an early adopter" Hardly. Sparrow has been out for a few years.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#246

Post by crag »

dave5104 wrote: post #241
crag wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah we got screwed. They just dropped the app. They are promising "big fixes" but that's about it. Lovely. This is the bad side of "trusting" startups and their apps. Pisses me off. I mean (to all you startup guys out there), if you have no intention of continuing your work, AT LEAST OPEN SOURCE THE CODE so some of us can jump in and maintain it!

I would argue that just open sourcing the code could have even worse effects on the app/brand than a simple end of life. Clearly if the app in question had a good following, it was a decent product created by folks who knew what they were doing. By open sourcing it, anyone could jump in and that anyone may not be qualified to make the best product decisions. Maybe I'm just being too sentimental here, but I'd rather t…

I guess it would depend on who jumped in to maintain it. I mean, look around. There are many high quality open source apps.

Just saying.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#247

Post by crag »

mattmaroon wrote: post #197
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.

I think you're being a little melodramatic here. When you buy an app, you're buying it at that point. You're not buying the developer's soul. If they continue to work on it and improve it, it's pure gravy for the users. If they don't then you've already gotten what you've paid for. It doesn't border on fraud at all.

Bull crap.

Having a half-off sale a week before dropping the app isn't honest in any way. What... Google approached them yesterday and they agreed this morning? I doubt that.

More likely they've been in negotiations with Google for weeks. But it's in their best interests to move (in other words squeeze) as much product as possible before dropping the ball. Sleazy.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#248

Post by Lockyy »

wyclif wrote: post #116
tvon wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good app has been EOL'd so the developer(s) can go work on a known crappy app. We've gone from "known good" to "hopefully this will work out and the gmail iOS app will be good"... how is that not frustrating if you're a fan of the iOS apps? As for the Sparrow desktop app, well, obviously Google isn't going to be developing a native desktop app for Gmail...

Sorry, but Gmail isn't a crappy app in my way of thinking. It was the best webmail in 2004, and it still is. You may not like it, but that doesn't extrapolate to crappiness. Although I'm sorry that Sparrow is being end-of-lifed, Gmail is a best of breed web app. well, obviously Google isn't going to be developing a native desktop app for Gmail. Sounds like a feature to me, not a bug. Desktop software is going out. Wh…

I don't understand this assertion that desktop software is going out. My desktop mail client is almost completely superior as a single unified place to read all my mail over various different services to log into.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#249

Post by mindcrime »

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…

And now you've gotten lesson #1 on why F/OSS solutions have one huge advantage over their proprietary counterparts: If the original developers of a F/OSS app decide to drop it, you have choices. In the best case, another group of devs may simply fork the project and keep it going, or you ('you' in the general sense here) may choose to bring development in-house, or contract with a 3rd party to maintain and upgrade the app.

Now you might argue that some of those choices aren't that appealing, or that it's not guaranteed that someone else will pick up the app and run with it... but look at the scenarios with a closed-source, proprietary app: If the devs drop it, you're f%!#d, end of story.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#250

Post by rhizome »

ralfn wrote: post #229
samstave wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It baffles my mind, anyone would actually believe this. This whole, Google, is evil for hiring the authors of an app you like. Either they will put them to good use, or make less money.

You're saying that they will make more money through being acquired by Google than by owning their own company that sells a popular product?
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