On the business of e-mail clients / Sparrow

In my experience, ($700M sale to Google in particular) that's just not true. It's quite typical for acquisitions to include either earn-out provisions (you must work for the acquirer for N years or you forfeit some of the purchase price) or retention bonuses (work for N years to earn an additional $X million).

Every investor expects these outcomes; nobody would be surprised or put off to hear that the Sparrow guys are locked up for N years, and nobody I know who invests would view them as damaged goods as a result.

As for Sparrow users being the losers; there are lots of fish (future email clients) in the sea. The popularity of Sparrow is evidence of a market need. Whether any email client author can make real money meeting that need is another question.

As it is, we'll probably get a compatibility release for anything that may break with the next OS update and not much beyond that. Come several years from now and it may simply not work anymore because of an OS change. That's my primary concern. Being abandonware with an unspecified, vague promise of critical fixes makes it seem questionable whether there's any value in continuing to use it vs. investing time in switching to another tool (of which there are few to none which work perfectly for my particular workflow) up front before it does inevitably stop working down the road.

"Companies have thrived on "one-off" sales for decades. Want more money? Develop something new, the work is already paid off."

Not because this is wrong, but because the implication of that statement means that we're doing more wrong to the indie developers than good.

This is right that companies are thriving on one-off sales but from my observation the companies in question are big companies with lot of marketing muscle backing their products and not the indie developers.

If you think about it, you'll need to have a huge distribution to reach more and more customers and keep that recurring income you need to keep your business afloat.

Some companies opt to roll out updates or new version for an additional price. Some are trying to upsell some support licenses to earn more money on top of the customers who need more personal and frequent support (and possibley have the financial means).

I keep looking at indie developers who release great software but their price it too low, and have problem distributing it (either because this is a nice market or either because they're doing a piss job at it).

They sell a few hundred of copies and then sales just halt, what do you think happen next? They close shop and stop development and support on the product. The result is the same as what happened with Sparrow but in that case the developers are financially broke and need to get back to corporate life against their will.

Now I don't mean we need to agree to a SaaS model or something, I just say that we need to aknowledge the problem, If developers have trouble monetizing their software (but are still doing a great job at it) and then end up selling their companies to bigger companies, this is great for our eco-system.

It means more people will give it a try in the future knowing that if they utterly fail at marketing their products, they can still sell their companies and what they build to a bigger company who will know how to capitalize on their hard work.