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Sparrow acquired by Google

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Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#261

Post by kyro »

While I certainly understand the frustration being felt (I purchased the app and was hoping for push notifications), I'm sure most people here would've accepted the offer. With all that's been written on how little developers are making on the App and Mac Stores, I highly doubt they were making enough to sustain a team of 5. I'm assuming they're an ambitious group and selling an email app would just have not provided them with the capital and resources to achieve what they want. So they perfect their app and then what? You've pretty much hit the end of that road.

Sparrow was up against the native OSX/iOS mail clients, the GMail native and web apps, with the App/Mac Stores as their main distribution channels, which make it nigh impossible to get your app any visibility save the smash hits.

All that considered, it makes perfect sense, to me, why they'd accept a Google offer.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#262

Post by justauser »

tptacek wrote: post #239
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…

You really feel OK asking big companies not to outbid you for other people's work? Why is it OK to demand a ceiling to a developer's compensation?

Who was demanding a ceiling on the compensation? By expanding into a Windows userbase(size and subset of customers willing to pay presumed to be larger than the Apple userbase), the ceiling potentially could have been of cathedral proportions. If Sparrow lacked the desire or skill to expand to Windows, nothing limited them from creating other Appleland products. They already had a great reputation which would have lowered the hurdle for the potential success of product number two.

If my paying $9 for a widget is not good enough isn't it ok to tell me things are not going as well as expected and you're looking for solutions? If you leave me in the dust and come back next week as Parentco Widget Version 2 then at the very least you'll cause me to raise my eyebrows.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#263

Post by AceJohnny2 »

mindcrime wrote: post #249
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…

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 th…

Yes, F/OSS has that huge advantage... but even though I'm an F/OSS advocate, I think it's naive to ignore the economics of such projects. They have a much harder time getting off the ground, especially those aimed at a mass market to which you'll have trouble selling a support plan. There are business models, but they're more complicated and don't provide as much income.

I do wish companies that abandon projects would OSS them more often though.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#264

Post by awicklander »

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…

The free market is a bitch.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#265

Post by nickpresta »

bsg75 wrote: post #235
gurkendoktor wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Would be wonderful if it happened, but Google seems to be a place where good acquisitions go to die.

Really?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/23/googles-david-lawee-one-thi...

So really, Google seems to be the place where 1/3 of acquisitions (in which not 100% are "good", per se) go to die.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#266

Post by tptacek »

justauser wrote: post #262
tptacek wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really feel OK asking big companies not to outbid you for other people's work? Why is it OK to demand a ceiling to a developer's compensation?

Who was demanding a ceiling on the compensation? By expanding into a Windows userbase(size and subset of customers willing to pay presumed to be larger than the Apple userbase), the ceiling potentially could have been of cathedral proportions. If Sparrow lacked the desire or skill to expand to Windows, nothing limited them from creating other Appleland products. They already had a great reputation which would have lo…

You are, when you say "hey big companies, stop waving money at these guys". However much you think you're offering to Sparrow's developers, it's presumably less than Google was offering.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#267

Post by brk »

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.

An alternate perspective is that they knew the product was going to be mothballed, or maybe even removed from the store entirely. For the late-adopters with bad timing they didn't want to charge full price for an app that wasn't going to see continued enhancements.

Either way, we're not talking about major dollars here. I'll bet most people purchased it with a credit card, and could file a claim for a refund with their card if they really felt so financially raped over the price of a beer.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#268

Post by brk »

rglover wrote: post #212
joe-mccann wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

At $10 a license I'm going to guess that the Sparrow guys weren't rolling in Ferrarri's and Brazillian models.

It's quite possible that this was actually a way for them to continue doing something they love (coding) without financial stress hanging over their heads.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#269

Post by justauser »

tptacek wrote: post #266
justauser wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who was demanding a ceiling on the compensation? By expanding into a Windows userbase(size and subset of customers willing to pay presumed to be larger than the Apple userbase), the ceiling potentially could have been of cathedral proportions. If Sparrow lacked the desire or skill to expand to Windows, nothing limited them from creating other Appleland products. They already had a great reputation which would have lo…

You are, when you say "hey big companies, stop waving money at these guys". However much you think you're offering to Sparrow's developers, it's presumably less than Google was offering.

Can you point to me where I said that? My posts have been to the effect of "hey little companies, if you're open to being waved to by big companies then let me know before I buy into your company's offerings."

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#270

Post by rglover »

tptacek wrote: post #239
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…

You really feel OK asking big companies not to outbid you for other people's work? Why is it OK to demand a ceiling to a developer's compensation?

To answer both of your questions: I'm not asking companies to "outbid" me for people's work and I'm not demanding a ceiling for their compensation.

Rather, I'm asking the developer's why drop their work on the application entirely? Why not continue the development at Google a la Instagram?

Moreover, the real discontent is more so with seeing a talented group being bought out and not encouraged to grow on their own. I've found that some of the most unique and useful work has come out of small dev shops. I'd rather see the company continue and see where they would have taken sparrow or any other ideas they might have.

I'm extremely happy for and congratulatory to the Sparrow team. Their work is most definitely worth any offer they've been given.

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