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Comment by gtf21 | Hacker News Reader

Sparrow, Sunrise, Wunderlist... all the good apps just get bought and killed.

> Sparrow, Sunrise, Wunderlist... all the good apps just get bought and killed.

Consider it as a lesson only to use open source apps so that a group of convinced users can at least hire a programmer to fix bugs or add new features.

self hosting where possible from now on for me

Wunderlist was super useful - fast, all devices in sync, excellent browser version

starting to rethink using so many hosted services now - Zerigo is closing too in 10 days - that was another service a lot of time had been invested in setting up

it feels like the better a service is the more chance the team gets borged and the app shut down

I get grumpy about cloud services coming and going, and I can imagine how much marketing data we're all providing to Microsoft by sharing our shopping list this way, but then I remember what a pain in the ass hosting my own email was for a decade and what that would be like in this era of massive botnets.

Then I put my cane away because as much as I wave it at clouds, I will still use cloud services over having to host my own.

Can you blame the developers, though? These acquisitions are life changing. I mean, heck, if someone offered me crazy money for an app, yes please!

I would say these acquisitions change lives of generations in a family.

No, you can't really blame them. One could make the argument that once providing a service to users you have some responsibility towards them, but I don't think it overrides the case for them to be acquired.

I can't help feeling that there is something rather dreadful about this state of affairs, however. It just seems like too many good things get acquired and shut down. That could be the fault of the market/culture/prevailing business models/app stores in not making it profitable enough for developers to want to keep going with their single app, and it could also be the fault of the acquires for shutting down good things.

I'm unsure as to the solution.

The question I ask is, were all those apps just created to be bought? In other words, were they 'startups' always aimed at some kind of buy-out or IPO or whatever? If so, I have to question that whole model (shock, horror).

After all, it's one thing to expect everything to get cannibalized into, well, Microsoft I guess, and consider that an ideal world.

It's quite another to get used to the idea that all good things exist to be consumed and obliterated. I really don't care if it furthers somebody's stock prices or is a correct competitive move, to me that seems like entropy in a very obvious way.

And I have a feeling that when AI does kick in, its value system must surely be founded on resisting entropy… so it'll look at this sort of thing with a very dim view.

I don't think those apps were just started with a boyout, acquihire, or an IPO in mind. But to "succeed" and be able to get money out of them. Do better in life, have a better (maybe a lot better) lifestyle and be able to support it for considerable time. Maybe a desire to retire younger. So when a good offer comes around they go for it. Because you never know - another excellent XYZ todo app from some ABC MNC or startup might have killed it in future - just an example.

This is normal, why would you be shocked by it? Consider going for open source apps only that supports open standards. That is not full proof and not always convenient but it's a good way to avoid some of thse shocks and horrors.

It's not really killed. The original Sunrise, Accompli and Wunderlist teams still work at MSFT and they're working on their new apps respectively. Chad works on Wunderlist. Javier still runs outlook. They just absorbed a bunch of other apps too

I presume that's the same Chad Fowler that wrote The Passionate Programmer?

Work has LinkedIn blocked, so I can't confirm easily.

Yep, same one.

It doesn't matter where the team is now, the Outlook Calendar is not Sunrise nor To-Do is Wunderlist. I get what you say but the apps are gone (or soon to be in this case) and for the people that used those apps that is killing them.

I totally get where you're coming from, but Outlook is literally Accompli renamed. I see the opposition to Sunrise being folded into the Outlook client (it's not standalone), but To-Do is effectively the same as Wunderlist but their V2 that they've been gestating on for more than a year (a more to-do oriented view).

> all the good apps just get bought and killed

isn't this what the developers behind them are hoping for these days?

Also Mailbox.

Whoops, forgot Mailbox

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