The real reason we’re upset about Sparrow’s acquisition

Unfortunately, this is what you get when you pay $10 for an app.<p>There is a huge disparity when it comes to the cost of apps these days vs the salaries required to sustain the engineers who make those apps. Even at $10/pop, you need to sell a lot of apps just to sustain the salaries of very good engineers, and THIS is what makes great products vulnerable to acqui-hires.<p>The problem is that the $0.99 model of the App Store makes a $10 app look ridiculously expensive, especially when there are free alternatives out there, even though it's only 2 Starbucks coffees. And even though $10 is worth it.<p>It's the price of the apps that have drastically lowered the expectations of what people need to pay for software, and this goes in direct conflict to the rising costs of great engineers' salaries.<p>I'm not sure what the exact price point is, but my guess is that people need to start getting used to the idea of spending $30-50 PER YEAR in a subscription model for a great app in order to create enough monetary incentive for the developers to keep their products alive. Otherwise Google and Facebook will continue to drop the bills and pick off the best teams who eventually get tired of the smaller comparative payoffs that these apps bring in.

In 1998 we wouldn't of complained - at least me.<p>It is 2012, and when I purchase software, I don't buy into the premise that this software is going to be static for perpetuity, and this is because of the fast-paced nature of OS, platform and web evolution.<p>I "marry" the software I love, and I am very happy to pay for upgrades. I upgrade my Mac the day after a new OS X version is released, not only that, but I use non-large company software every day for years: Panic, Bjango, Made@Gloria, etc.<p>When I buy software, I don't only buy into the software I get, but I support it because I think it has a bright and better future. If I knew the developer was to stop development going forward, I would simply not support it.<p>Going forward, if I find that a small/medium developer has received capital from an angel or VC, I am going to stay away from it (I already decided not to use Foursquare, Path, Highlight, Kik and many other mobile apps for this reason) - the investor will have the need to flip the company, whatever the outcome for the software is.

Also, frankly, I think people chose Sparrow because they weren't happy with the big boy's applications (Apple's Mail.app on Mac OS X, Apple and Gmail's apps on iOS).<p>It's a case of "We don't like Google or Apple's apps, so we're going to _pay extra money_ to get something we like."<p>So when the Sparrow team gets picked up by Google _and_ we hear that Sparrow.app is becoming abandonware, many people think "the bad guys win again."<p>Of course, I hope the hue and cry about this will suggest to google that Sparrow might be worth maintaining after all. A mail app that people like? That can't possibly be a bad thing, can it?

This posting is very true, and this is exactly why I prefer Free Software when it comes to sustainability.<p>Even if the developers' revenue plan (services, merchandising, whatever) turns out to not be sustainable, at least the remaining software is free (in the sense of freedom) such that others can fork it and can take care of it.<p>In that sense, Sparrow could have made a great move, since they don't plan to make any more money with their product: publishing their latest code base under GPL.<p>However, in that case Google might have hesitated to acquire them in the first place. On the other hand, MySQL has been acquired by Oracle despite being Free Software, and despite having existing forks such as MariaDB.

Obviously, those arguments are somewhat metaphorical. Paying $2.99 (or even $2,999) for software doesn't guarantee its sustainability. It doesn't move the needle. It's more like voting where your individual vote doesn't count but you still feel that its important to vote. Especially if you voice an opinion and try to convince others (something that probably has more effect than voting).<p>I think we are talking about more abstract things. We want this software to exist. We want these business models (small, profitable development companies) to exist. It's not just "I want to use this software."<p>I think a reason for these kind of reactions to acquisitions is that we feel or suspect that they are destroying rather than creating value. But, it's kind of hard to tell so we don't usually make that claim. For small companies, we know what they make and how many people use it so its easy to get a feel for the value they create. When Google acquires a great team, its hard to know what, if any value they create. Google obviously create enormous amounts of value but its hard to tell what a new team ads or subtracts from that. Much more nebulous are the effects that the existence of such acquisitions have on founder and investor motivation to start and fund these companies in the first place.<p>I think thats it at the core. A suspicion that such acquisitions are value destroying activities resulting in less/worse software being available to the world.

I guess the problem with this is that in the days of app stores, internet everywhere , automatic updates and 0 day vulnerabilities software suddenly looks very fragile and susceptible to bit rot.<p>I remember in the late 90s there were still plenty of people around using Word 6.0 which was old at the time but still usable since MS allowed recent versions of Word to create docs compatible with it.<p>Now, if your favourite app gets pulled from the store (that your device is locked to), gets broken by an OS update or the developers simply release a non reversible update that you don't like you're in trouble. Not to mention the consequences of the vendor going bust or getting bought by a rival.<p>There seems to be a strong "C'mon just use an iPad and the cloud already!" voice on HN, I guess I can understand why people are somewhat conservative about it.

Yes, the Sparrow acquisition is a great illustration of how the whole "you're the product" cult was broken from the start.<p>No matter how much you are (or aren't) paying you are always <i>both</i> the customer and the product. Even Apple, who gets plenty of money from their customers directly, is willing to pimp out their customers as "400 million active credit cards" in the right context. At the other extreme, Google devotes an immense amount of effort to continuously improving search. They know that they live and die based on how happy you are as a search customer, even though they aren't paid even a nickel from searches directly.<p>I'll say it again: we're always both the customer and the product. There's no escaping that. Our only option is to decide which vendors' tradeoffs we are and aren't willing to live with. And black-and-white moralizing about whether or not "you're the product" gets in the way of picking the shades of gray that work for you.

Perhaps we should only pay for development of open-source software, so we actually own what we're paying for.

It's a fair point, but I'd suggest the main reason people get upset is it feels like they've somehow wasted time getting attached to it.<p>People such as the OP get excited about having this pleasant thing in their life and the implicit relationship in that as long as you buy it, it will continue to improve.<p>For me it's the same reason early adopters back certain tech products, why fans will follow film directors and why we sometimes get disappointed when they don't follow the path we hope they would take.

This feels to me very much like the argument that "it's not worth voting unless my vote is specifically the one that changes the outcome". You are but one little person. You can do all the right things in the world and the universe can still stomp on your face. The right things are not "the right things" because they <i>guarantee</i> success, but because they <i>maximize the odds</i> of it. There are no actions that guarantee success.<p>This isn't a disproof of the "don't be a free user" philosophy; it's a disproof of the idea that it's a guarantee of success, which it never was, and never could be. The argument still holds.

<i>If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.</i><p>I don't think it has 'failed', as the article states. Paying for the software is necessary but no guarantee. If we slide back to everything being free, things will be worse. But even if we do pay, we cannot forget one very important thing: We are dealing with very small companies and all of the volatility that comes with them. The situation is simply exacerbated when the employees of that company are highly sought after.<p>It doesn't take Google to buy out a little company. They can just choose to get other jobs or spend their time other ways, get bored with the product, have a falling out, anything. Sparrow could have just as well said, "We're stopping all development on the email client today. 100% of future effort will be on games". And that's why boring enterprise software from MegaCorp still generates huge revenue, because they can go tell a GE, Chase, Honda or McDonalds something LittleCo can't. They can tell the customer that they can expect a specific level of support and life from the product, and here's 20 years of history to prove it, and that they're signing on with a $5 billion company that's not easily bought out. The cool stuff on the bleeding edge may also be fleeting. Large companies want stability, and I guess people using certain software do too.<p>Side-note: FOSS is a very different animal with interesting characteristics.

"<i>This</i> is the core of the disappointment that many of us feel with the Sparrow acquisition. It’s not about the $15 or less we spent on the apps. It’s not about the team’s well-deserved payout. It’s about the loss of faith in a philosophy that we thought was a sustainable way to ensure a healthy future for independent software development, where most innovation happens."<p>I seriously laughed out loud.<p>Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily think his idea is silly, and I think he may in fact have a point. However, let's not pretend all those people who complained about the acquisition were doing this because they lost faith in this philosophy. <i>That</i> part is silly. Those people were just being slightly dramatic because they liked a product and it would no longer get updated.

I think part of the problem in all the hubbub around the Sparrow acquisition is the attempt to represent people's apprehension as a single entity. The reality seems to be more complicated than that.<p>Some people are probably just upset because of an irrational sense of entitlement ("I paid for X, and now I won't get free updates forever as the product is being abandoned")<p>But there's lots of other reasons that people can be bothered by this.<p>I use the Mac version of Sparrow (without using Gmail), and the entirety of my reaction when reading about the acquisition was "Oh well, I guess at some point I'll have to find a new desktop email client. That sucks, I liked Sparrow."<p>I do wonder what the community reaction would be if it was a different product though.<p>If Sublime Text (which seems to be attracting a good following) announced tomorrow that they were being acquired, and that the product was being abandoned, would people complaining about it really be that surprising?<p>Even assume that they were also going to continue with maintenance on it, but stop active development of new features. People would be upset. People on here would say "You should never have assumed that Sublime was going to get new features before buying it, if it didn't do what you wanted now, you shouldn't have paid money for it" (I've found myself actually giving similar advice in the past regarding buying smartphones).<p>People would write asshole-ish blog posts saying that those people were whining.<p>I don't think this is actually an indictment on the "paid vs. ad supported" dichotomy. Other people have rightfully pointed out that companies get acquired like this all the time, regardless of whether their products are free, cheap, or expensive.

The reactions across the board are quite disappointing, to be honest.<p>All you can do as a customer (or as anything, for that matter) is give up the illusion of control.<p>This is the Sparrow story: A fantastic product was built, and exchanged for money. The people behind the product were recognized, and were acquired for a significant amount.<p>Everyone is a winner, and customers move on to the next thing.<p>What's more worrying is our reaction to an email client going under: it's clearly a sign that we don't have enough well designed products for a system that's been in mass use for more than a decade.

"If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold."<p>This statement is complete nonesense and I do not understand why it keeps appearing everywhere.<p>You are almost always paying for apps and services, and you are never the product being sold. Sometimes you pay with cash, sometimes you pay with ad impressions. But you always pay and you are always the customer that needs to be satisfied.<p>Facebook is not free. You pay for it with your willingness to have Facebook show you ads. Ad impressions are as good as money for Google, because they can exchange them for USD.<p>Google Search/Gmail/Maps are the products. And Google has to make them as good as they can. Otherwise you, the customer, will stop paying for them.

It's all about value creation. Assuming every party here is rational: Google decides to pay for the Sparrow team only because the potential value of these developers is much higher than the price they pay. And Sparrow team accepted the offer only because the big pay check exceeds the value all their own customers combined.<p>If we hate this, we can either make such talent acquisitions less attractive, or increase the value of software customers.<p>Talent acquisitions become less attractive when:<p><pre><code> - The number of talents available increases significantly - Economies of scale in software business is less substantial - There's ethical pressure from online communities - The act of "selling customers" (through data collection or ads) becomes less profitable or costs more (with things like DNT or ad blockers) </code></pre> The value of customers increases when:<p><pre><code> - More people are willing to spend more money on independent software development - Access to software market is easier (with things like app stores) - More revenue streams with higher payouts (like high-quality ad networks such as Deck and Carbon) - Higher potential to get big (with VC money and building platforms/ecosystems) </code></pre> The sad truth is, independent software developers tend to be less entrepreneurial than startup founders (but I don't think the line can be drawn clearly). They are only a little bit more entrepreneurial than consulting developers (which are even more likely to be hired by big companies, but we don't care much about them). Therefore they may not be willing to actively improve their revenue by taking risks, and hence the acquisitions happen.

The whole argument seems backwards to me. If your dream was that good software could be supported by users alone (not ads or a giant corporate checkbook), and by your own admission they were selling the software at a price-point below the value you were getting from it ("I'd have given them more money if I could")...<p>It sounds like you got exactly what you want. You got software that worked great, that avoided the traps of "you're the product" and produced a positive result for everyone. Then they got bought. But you know what? A thousand teams of engineers are ready to take their place, since a big payout at the end means there's considerable draw, and you really can sell an app at a bit above costs, be comfortable, and that allure of a _maybe_ payout at the end is enough to get over the hurdle of starting.<p>I guess it baffles the mind. It's like saying that big paychecks have ruined sports, because strong athletes are only in it for the money. Perhaps they are, but you get people who would otherwise do something else being willing to give sports a try because that potential paycheck is enough of a draw.

After residing in unix-land for almost a year I decided to come back to Mac OSX just 2 days ago, and after re-downloading my purchased apps, the announcement by the Sparrow team was the second mail I picked up. Fuck.<p>Thinking back, in unix-land no such jokes were pulled. Something abandoned? another trooper taking over. How the $#&#38;% can you charge money for something _non-open-source_ and then just leave it to rot?<p>I would pay a hundred bucks for a similar app (or a monthly fee) if I'd be assured that the developers were dedicated to ME and THEIR PRODUCT.<p>Sparrow is above average. Congrats, I loved you for that. But you sinked your goddamn ship before it got half way. I'm only this pissed off because it could have been so much more. I will wait and see what glorious work you do for Google. I (and all the people who paid you money) await your work with great anticipation. Good luck.

Oddly enough, this is exactly what Stallman is on about. Without the source code and the ability to upload that code on to your devices, your programs longevity are subject to the whims of other people.<p>Even ignoring the whole "code wants to be free thing", the source is important for the longevity of the code. If the software really mattered to you, you would negociate a license that gave you source. Even if you weren't allowed to resell or redistribute, having source that you could hire others to work on if you needed it is important.<p>In fact, I'd love to see a shift to make proprietary software include the code without license to redistribute the original code; Maybe just patches, maybe nothing. But I'd love to be able to peek beneath the covers and learn, fix things, and/or make sure it runs on new platforms.

I don't know why everyone keeps referring to sparrow as 'indie' developers. They took funding. When you take funding you're no longer independent.<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/09/sparrow-mac-mail-app/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/09/sparrow-mac-mail-app/</a>

The reason sparrow had to sell is because they didn't have a recurring revenue model. This is what limits all "pay once" desktop (and mobile) software: either they have to charge prohibitively high amounts or they have to get you to upgrade frequently. The former limits adoption and the latter is tricky and encourages feature bloat.<p>I now want to pay for the desktop software I like as a subscription: it keeps the developer fed and on call, and doesn't put undue pressure on them to add features, while still keeping their revenue from me contingent on the continued usefulness of their product.

For me it's as simple as knowing a product I like is not going to be developed anymore, and having a complete lack of faith in Google to use them to turn out anything near as good.

If you build something of strategic value to a big player, they'll pay more for it than the present value of its expected cash flows. They're expecting improvements in cash flow in other, non-competing products, which they can realize but which the original product will never see. Big players will "overpay" for something of strategic importance.<p>So if the hope is that buying small products will free you from the big players, yeah, that was always dubious, at least in the corners interesting to those players.<p>On the other hand, Sparrow got built, didn't it? And whatever you liked about it just got a big fat Market Stamp Of Approval. It wouldn't be surprising for similar features to start appearing in other mail clients, some of them open source. Maybe someone will build Sparrow The Sequel ("Google didn't get every egg in the nest . . ."). VCs just got more interested in pitches for email software.<p>How much this matters depend on what you want. If you want freedom from "you are the product", the complaint makes more sense to me. But if what you want is more innovation, well, Sparrow's DNA just demonstrated its ability to generate returns. And returns on innovation more generally have been validated. So it isn't clear to me that buying Sparrow "failed" to push innovation forward.

Contrary to the tweets, I think it's perfectly fine to be upset about sparrow no longer being developed.<p>The days of software being unchanging are gone, that's a pre-internet way of thinking about computing, and it's perfectly fine to be upset that something you rely upon is no longer supporting you into the future.<p>We live in an era where there is an expectation that our software titles will keep pace with the rapidly changing nature of technology. The business model of ios is simple, the vendor takes 30%, while the developer is free to lure new customers with additional innovations/features without having to worry about the expense of updating everyone who has purchased the title already. It's the life blood of competition and a business model that many titles adhere to.<p>So whether the developer is updating the code for new devices, adding software features that are relevant to new emerging technologies or simply staying relevant by supporting the latest standards. We treat software like a journey and not a static point. Software titles compete by out innovating each other. The moment this stops the software title is dead, it's competitors overtake it quickly and rarely would any of us rely on a piece of software that is no longer being developed.

The solution to this is insisting on guaranteed support periods/contracts for software you use - if this comes free, great! If you have to pay for it, so be it.<p>Paying more for something just so you can nurse a philosophy you like is textbook irrational. If you are paying more for something vague, pin down what you want and pay for that precisely. Here we have a fear of software we love disappearing - pay, explicitly, for it not to disappear.

Thing is, Sparrow was relatively cheap. And as I understand, they had a team of 5. So perhaps they were not as 'self-sustaining' as we assumed.<p>I guess the take-away is that, if you're going to remain independent - you had best charge a premium. In fact, Sparrow already was a premium app - so it is conceivable they could have doubled or tripled the price of their product with minimal impact on the size of their customer base.

I'm not upset about the acquisition. I'd be happy if Google was acquiring them to put extra muscle behind developing the app. But they are moving the developers to other projects. That means a fast, native email client for Mac isn't on Google's agenda. So I'm back to Mail.app or the browser. Gmail on Chrome is good, but for me and a lot of other users of Sparrow, it's not a replacement for the real thing.

The philosophy is modelled incorrectly.<p>Rather than being paying customers of a software costing $15 and expect support <i>forever</i>, be a paying customer of software costing $5 a month and expect support every month, while you're paying.<p>With regards to perpetuity software, the developer only has incentive to keep on building the product whilst the market is relatively unsaturated. When the entire market has purchased the product, the developer is no longer incentivized to produce new features besides the ones he must build to fulfil his contract (e.g. fixing bugs).<p>With a monthly subscription model, the developer must continue to improve the product, lest his customers switch to alternatives.

Shh.. Sparrow for Windows was just a few weeks away. <a href="http://tmblr.co/ZWzfbyPpHG3B" rel="nofollow">http://tmblr.co/ZWzfbyPpHG3B</a> <a href="http://t.co/OBeYi3Zp" rel="nofollow">http://t.co/OBeYi3Zp</a>

This is not true for me. I'm happy for the Sparrow team, but I got upset because I feel when I purchased their product, I got into an implicit, unspoken contract with the developers that while the current version of the product was good, there would be continued development and it would become something wonderful next year, and even better the year after.<p>Now I'm just sad the product will rot over time.<p>I know the commercial model is broken for this, but I would have been willing to pay more upfront and pay again for periodic major version bumps, assuming pace of development continued.

I've downloaded Sparrow on my iPhone and used it for a bit but then later switched back to the native email app, primarily because of the lack of push notification at the time of its initial release. I wonder how much of this sale has to do with the updates to email in ios6, such as the ability to attach photos directly from the mail app. Can they differentiate enough to continue to keep an active user base? if not its hard to beat a native app.<p>Can't comment on the Mac, haven't tried it.

There's also the very basic disappointment that a piece of good software won't grow to maturity. I finally found a mail client that restored my faith in SMTP as a communications medium; a mail client that had me managing email exclusively on my iPhone. A mail client that broke away from email as a metaphor for paper envelopes with written messages on pulp.<p>I liked handling email in Sparrow. It felt modern, and now it won't get any better.

&#62; I paid full price for every version of the Sparrow app I could find. I told everyone who would listen to buy it. I couldn’t have given them more money even if I wanted to. So, as a customer, what more could I have done to keep them running independently?<p>This could have been avoided if their software were open source, or if they committed to open sourcing it should they cease development on it.

It seems to me that the real story here is that software is starting to face real and widespread commoditization on a deep scale.<p>Software has always been a very high-end, specialized line of work, and qualified many developers still expect to make upwards of 80K a year (at least).<p>Well, what happens when the software industry starts suffering from the same crisis as the rest of the economy, in an irreversible way?

Actually, I don't quite get why users are so upset about this. They said they would keep releasing maintenance and security updates, so hopefully, I will be able to keep using this app for quite a while.<p>Because the thing is, I think this app is quite wonderful the way it is right now. I don't need any more features. As long as I can keep using it, I will keep being happy with it.

The real problem is that most acqui-hire teams disappear into BigCo never to be heard from again until they resign a few years later.

Not that it would have prevented this, but the App stores really need to work on an paid upgrade process. It's hard making $10 a head on software, especially when that's all you're ever going to make. I can't believe paid upgrades aren't a part of at least the Mac App store yet.

What should have happened is to hand off development and/or ownership of the app to another dev team. Sofa, the team that made Versions and Kaleidoscope, did just that when they were acquired by Facebook. The apps still live on, thanks to Black Pixel, and everyone is happy.

I think that's why you need to put your money into open source software, not closed source software. Mozilla thunderbird could be the next Sparrow. If the people with the vision and with the proper backing are willing to put the effort into it.

According to Einstein, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.<p>A cooperation is not the natural "business" model for software. It's a club. One won't get different results if one uses the same business model.

Sparrow is never independent OK?<p>They depend on GMail.<p>They cannot even deliver push-notification for their iOS apps because they don't want to save your credentials on their servers.<p>The argument around Instapaper still stands as long as it's an independent, complete product.

"We decided that we don’t want to be free users any more. " "The philosophy..." "This is why I am a paid subscriber to services like..."<p>Sorry but you are an idiot if you really believed that.

I never understood "If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold." It's clearly not true in the free software world.

Pfff... The market has just "adjusted" : the value of a mail client is close to 0. That's what you pay almost zero for it; and that's why Googl payed almost 0 for its developers as well. Selling a mail client in the 21st century ? Let me laugh... There's 0 added value in it. All you do is provide a mrginally better experience and all the devs get is to solve the exponentially harder support issues. Their business model was wrong. Because a business model is not how to make money, it's how you are useful in the global scheme. Sparrow was not that useful it seems...

&#62;If they don’t — well, at least they’ve eliminated a competitor, and they still win.<p>Since when was Sparrow a competitor to Google?

Am I the only one who didn't use it Gmail accounts?

Was Sparrow profitable?

Could it simply be that Google is willing to so overpay for engineers that it makes sense for Sparrow, which, in previous times would itself be a nice successful small business (like eudora used to be, etc.)<p>Back in the day, Sparrow might have grown over 5-10 years to be a big company to get swallowed up... but now, companies like google are so desperate for talent that they cut them off too early by making absurd offers?<p>As much as I hate working for big companies (and refused googles constant, persistent pursuit to go work for them) I'd be tempted by a $25M "Signing bonus" (or whatever a Sparrow Founder's split of that is....)