Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sparrow acquired by Google

sprw.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 393 posts

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#161

Post by humbledrone »

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.

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 skipping a sale, etc? All the work necessarily involved in a merger is hard enough on a company, and it would be much worse if they flat out stopped running the company in the meantime.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#162

Post by [deleted] »

uptown wrote: post #108
ceejayoz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine if you'd bought it last weekend in their half-off sale. https://twitter.com/lifehacker/statuses/223750237490126849 "Let's make as much money from our abandonware as possible before we have to tell everyone it's abandonware."

That's when I finally bought-in. The thing has a critical bug with iOS6 ... no clue if it'll ever get resolved.

[deleted]

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#163

Post by yoda_sl »

uptown wrote: post #108
ceejayoz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine if you'd bought it last weekend in their half-off sale. https://twitter.com/lifehacker/statuses/223750237490126849 "Let's make as much money from our abandonware as possible before we have to tell everyone it's abandonware."

That's when I finally bought-in. The thing has a critical bug with iOS6 ... no clue if it'll ever get resolved.

If you 'critical' bug is about the rendering of email on one column... looks like latest beta 3 is solving that.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#164

Post by disbelief »

mmuro wrote: post #27

Damn, it was nice knowing you Sparrow. I seriously hope they don't let Google's UI/UX designers anywhere near Sparrow.

Normally I would have agreed with you, but have you seen the latest Gmail native client for Android? It is hands-down the best mobile mail client I've ever used. Attractive and incredibly intuitive. Someone at Google has been taking their UX vitamins.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#165

Post by BlackNapoleon »

pippin wrote: post #151
BlackNapoleon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Sparrow needed to be acquired by Apple. Period. Imagine iOS mail with Sparrow's gestures and organization? Fantastic.

From The Verge: Our sources also noted that Google isn't ruling out native Gmail clients for platforms beyond iOS and Android, and emphasized that Google wants to bring polish, "beauty," and ease of use to all of its Gmail experiences across platforms (a suggestion that a native client for Mac and PC might be in the offing). Sparrow, apparently, is a way to get there. http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/20/3172365/sources…

Won't mean anything without PUSH email enabled by Apple.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#166

Post by ozataman »

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…

Agreed. Sparrow had finally evolved enough to be a really good, fast and practical email client. I was waiting eagerly to see what else they would add to the product to make it better.

This is really quite frustrating. At least spin off the product, or make some sort of deal to devote some devel time to it.

It has many uses that Gmail proper can't satisfactorily provide, such as offline usage and super-fast switching among multiple accounts.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#167

Post by brandall10 »

BlackNapoleon wrote: post #53
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…

Agreed. Sparrow needed to be acquired by Apple. Period. Imagine iOS mail with Sparrow's gestures and organization? Fantastic.

From what I recall Sparrow was essentially a spin-off from R&D work done at Apple that Apple did not want to incorporate into their mail app... the dev went off and partnered with a designer to build a polished product from that work. An acquisition by Apple would be an interesting turnabout.

Of course market validation is a great equalizer.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#168

Post by codex »

It sounds like the Sparrow guys ran out of money and were bailed out by Google. This is a sad outcome, but not unexpected: plenty of people make "good enough" mail clients and give them away for free. Just because you want a gold-plated email client doesn't mean many other people are willing to pay for it, and monetizing an email client is very difficult without massive scale, and advertising.

Re: Sparrow acquired by Google

#170

Post by ChuckMcM »

carsongross wrote: post #156
simonbarker87 wrote: post #36

Congratulations but... Argh, I love Sparrow. Why couldn't you do the 37 Signals/Panic/Mail Chimp thing and not sell and just be a nice profitable company that provides some consistency - ohwell.

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 it to someone you were done. They didn't like selling bug fixes as 'upgrades' (that was just a paid support model) and once you had a working client there wasn't much reason to upgrade. The 'free' ad-supported version had a better revenue future than the purchased one.

By the same token these guys have to eat right? So its not like they can do the open source route. They really need to be part of a bigger stable of things in order to make it a business.

I did think it would be a good acquisition for Apple as the front end for their gmail killer.

Post reply on HN