Sparrow’s acquisition is a success story. Indie devs make a great product,
build a customer-base, and are rewarded with a buy-out from a big company
and they get new jobs with that company. It might not be what your
particular goal or end-game is, but it is a success.
This seems like an obvious case of products/teams that should work well together. Something about synergies and all that.
I guess my feeling on it is that I paid for an app on Mac on iOS that works fine, has no showstopping bugs and I have more than gotten my money's worth. Sure, push would have been nice on iOS, but to put it bluntly, the Sparrow team don't owe anybody anything. Esecpailly for Mac users, as it was pretty feature complete as is.
The iOS userbase I can understand, as the devs apparently teased them with iPad screenshots.
"Maintenance" means that they will fix major issues that the paying customers are legally entitled to (such as bugs that make the app unusable). They will do nothing beyond that.
Users did buy into the Sparrow thing because they expected updates/maintenance etc etc. Their purchase was contingent on the ongoing support of the service, they would not have bought a product they thought would be discontinued.
Now, you can argue that they should have known that the service might disappear without warning, that they should never have used it if there was the possibility of them being bought, but where does that leave us? Should people just stop buying popular apps created by small companies? Should people insist on a legally binding "community promise" to open-source a product if active development stops?
This also neglects the fact that users are statistically credulous - as a group they're simply not rational enough to seriously consider the possibility of the developer being acquired. The Sparrow guys had to have known this, so they either did something unethical when they sold the app or they did something unethical when they sold the company. The blog post says that it is fine to take advantage of them for their credulity, but that's not an ethical position, that's just Ayn Rand.
I'm not sure what you are talking about. The comment above the one to which you are replying states:
"Maintenance" means that they will fix major issues that the paying customers are legally entitled to (such as bugs that make the app unusable).
It's almost like you completely ignored this to make some point about Ayn Rand.
>Now, you can argue that they should have known that the service might disappear without warning
What service? We are talking about a downloadable application that is locally stored on the user's device until they delete it. It will not stop working. I've been using an old version of Thunderbird for a while now simply because I haven't felt like upgrading and setting up all my GPG stuff again.
These things may seem like nitpicks, but I think the nuance here is important and is being skipped over in favor of complaining about something. The reaction is way overblown in my opinion.
>> ...fix major issues that the paying customers are legally entitled to...
Ah craps. You're right, I skipped over that comment and assumed the one I was replying to was making a different point. I look like an ass, and it serves me right. I'd delete or edit the post to make a retraction, but HN has decided that it's important to keep my mistakes around for posterity.
Expecting lifetime support for a one time flat payment of almost nothing is pretty silly.
Nice opportunity for an fast opportunistic developer to go and develop a kickass alternative and start selling it..
People love Sparrow, I can only assume because it made their lives better.
A tiny few are benefiting from the Sparrow acquisition, lots are realizing they're going to suffer in the long run by having to degrade, or at least Sparrow eventually falling behind other products in some areas.
But obviously the product wasn't generating enough revenue to protect it from a predatory acquisition.
This is no different from the 80s days of people buying companies to dismantle them so they can sell the assets.
It's just that the assets are developers.
So people are lamenting that something, somewhere in the equation is wrong. And it's probably down to the low prices they're charging in the app store.
Cheer on the cash out all you like, but it's never good for the customers. Time and time and time again the customers always suffer in these kind of acquisitions.
BTW low pricing of apps is essentially (or at least was at the beginning) because without that Apple would not have been successful in persuading consumers to adopt paid apps on a tiny device - in most consumers' mind (even today), a software is worth paying if it is on a "real computer" and does something "big" (like statistics or anti-virus or the OS). Everything else is taken for granted and to change that mindset low prices were a necessity. And it still is thanks to the gazillion apps out there.