Hacker News Reader

Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

I think it's a matter of perspective. As someone who doesn't use and has no intention of ever using OS X or iOS, this is great news for me! I've been hearing a lot about Sparrow's revolutionary UI, but haven't benefited at all because they don't support Linux, Android, or Windows. Now, there's a very good chance that some of Sparrow's UI features will be incorporated into the Gmail web UI and into the Gmail apps for Android phones and tablets.

View on HN

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 scooped it up did and then completely changed it into something that barely represented the existing app (and more or less dropped an interest in the desktop client).

> 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

Even worse, I invested in Sparrow because I vastly prefer desktop apps like Sparrow to web apps like GMail. That's sad.

Will you still prefer desktop app if you get all its benefits with web app?

Because you really don't get all the benefits of a native app with a web app. It's getting better, the gap is closing, but it will be a while before web apps are an enjoyable an experience as a native app. I think Sparrow was actually a good proof point of that.

More than that - apps like Sparrow move the goalposts actually. It was such a superior to experience to even the best native clients of the day that it widened the gap between web and native once again.

What was so much better about it? I tried it and was unimpressed. Search was slower and worse than web, for one. That surprised me.

sometimes I'm surprised by this sort of thing, but then I remember that Google is INSANELY GOOD AT SEARCH and I stop being surprised when that plays out.

That's exactly why they had to kill it. If you don't use the web app you don't see GMail ads.

Do you really need to see gmail ads, or does it suffice if they can associate your client IP address with your email content and show you suitable ads the next time you visit a site with AdSense / doubleclick?

At their scale, even statistical advantages pay off.

All of their customers (myself included) invested

No you didn't. You bought. There was no investment, you should not expect a 'return'.

If they changed their workflow to incorporate the product, they invested.

In that case, they should be delighted on their return from this acquisition!

Simply put: that's a risk you take for being an early adopter. Deal with it, there's a good chance it will happen with any/all early adoption startup products out there.

"... an early adopter" Hardly. Sparrow has been out for a few years.

5 people in a small startup and not many mainstream users. It's very much early adopter.

The initial release was February 2011.

How is that "a few years"?

Version 1.0 came out in February of 2011. However, there were 7 Public Betas before that. The first one came out on October 4, 2010 [1]. By the time version 1.0 was released, Sparrow already had hundreds of thousands of users [2].

(Granted, October of 2010 still isn't ‘a few years’ a go.)

[1] http://blog.sparrowmailapp.com/post/1262858384/40-000-sparro...

[2] http://blog.sparrowmailapp.com/post/2497742134/150000dwnlds

The wants of the many outweigh the wants of the few.

Especially if the "many" are dead presidents.

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 the app.

Now you might argue that some of those choices aren't that appealing, or that it's not guaranteed that someone else will pick up the app and run with it... but look at the scenarios with a closed-source, proprietary app: If the devs drop it, you're f%!#d, end of story.

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.

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

Agreed. But to their credit, Google have some history of open-sourcing things[1][2][3][4], so maybe there's a chance that this product will be released as well. At least one can hope...

[1]: http://code.google.com/opensource/

[2]: http://code.google.com/opensource/projects.html

[3]: http://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label:google

[4]: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/

With open source it is often the same. I am looking at you Mozilla Thunderbird.

But Thunderbird proves mindcrime's point - even though Mozilla-the-company has decided that developing Thunderbird is no longer aligned with their interests, community-driven development will continue, because it's open source. Yes, development will be diminished, but it won't die outright like Sparrow or other closed-source software would.

For most consumers it's the same. I'd rather pay someone a few dollars than maintain Thunderbird myself (for example) and most people realistically do not have the option of maintaining it themselves.

On the other hand I use a lot of OSS on servers and in the past on my workstations, and have modified them and fixed bugs and such. There are definite advantages but this particular one is not that useful on a large scale.

And you've also proved why any dev can't make any money off of open source unless they have speaking engagements lined up.

Tell that to Red Hat, Alfresco, OpenNMS, etc.

That said, yes, I agree that some projects would be difficult (maybe even impossible) to monetize as F/OSS. We know the enterprise stuff works, consumer apps may or may not be a different story. I think that book still remains to be written.

Yet more wild-eyed, open source zealotry. No GUI-based F/OSS product has ever achieved the level of polish and usability of things like Sparrow because the people working on open source projects only want to do coding, they don't care about design, bug detection, documentation or, God forbid, user interfaces. If the developers of Sparrow had not been paid for their work, which they ensured by keeping it under their control, it would likely not have happened at all.

I agree with your post so I want to add something which I think was your intent:

* without a corporate "sponsor" entity behind it. (Chromium => Google, etc.)

Yet more wild-eyed, open source zealotry.

No it isn't. I didn't say that F/OSS is universally better than closed source, or anything crazy. I said that F/OSS has one specific advantage over closed-source, proprietary software, and that relates to the ability for a different group to continue development of a project that would otherwise be abandonware. Are you going to argue that this isn't the case?

No GUI-based F/OSS product has ever achieved the level of polish and usability of things like Sparrow because the people working on open source projects only want to do coding, they don't care about design, bug detection, documentation or, God forbid, user interfaces.

That's debatable, but it also has nothing to do with what I said. Yes, F/OSS has a reputation for being weaker on the UI/UX/design front, no one is contesting that, so far as I can see.

there's no way you can possibly categorize Sparrow's UI as "revolutionary". It's just a simple mail client that works extremely well.

It's a little embarrassing that most software is so bad at simple tasks like this.

I see your point, but the difference is that you had no expectations. As someone who purchased Sparrow (both on iPhone and Mac) I had high hopes for it continuing to grow, add new features, etc. Sure, as a Google user, you will gain something - but it's more of a happy surprise for you and a disappointment for us Sparrow users.

Sparrow is no rocket science and its UI was invented before. The app simply defined a modern workflow which is more comparable to instant messaging. What I mean is: you need not to destroy Sparrow to get similar features on other systems. Google's latest acquisitions is - without any reason - destructive.

> Now, there's a very good chance that some of Sparrow's UI features will be incorporated into the Gmail web UI and into the Gmail apps for Android phones and tablets.

Why acquire a whole company if all you want is to re-use some of their good UX ideas? You get those for free with the app.

Presumably the talent was another draw for Google, but will breaking up/subsuming the team defeat that purpose?

You did not miss much. I use Sparrow as my main prefiltered-private-email client on MacOS X. I don't think the UI is revolutionary. Maybe it is on iOS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com