On the business of e-mail clients / Sparrow
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What if I'm not completely happy, it doesn't work as expected, there are bugs to be fixed, performance to improve? And what happens when there is a major change in the OS that requires significant updates to continue working?
Is bringing the SaaS model to the desktop a solution? It's only going to make things worse for users, now you don't even own a copy of what you bought; if it's gone, it's really gone and you're never going to see that software again. Companies have thrived on "one-off" sales for decades. Want more money? Develop something new, the work is already paid off.
Name one in the consumer space. Most struggle, and the few that don't really make their money by selling upgrades and new releases.
There are very, very few non-game companies making good money in the consumer softwear space unless they have a SaaS model (think of virus softwear companies)
"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.
Sure, this may be a great deal for the developers, and that's fine and good. But that doesn't change the fact that it still harms everyone they convinced to switch to their product. They could have done like Sofa and transferred ownership of the existing products to another developer, or open sourced it to allow others to pick up where they left off. If they had done that, I would've still had a bit of respect for them. Killing development entirely on a product used and loved by many is stupid and, while within their moral rights, a bit of a dick move.
This acquisition does not mean they're pulling your license to use the application, it does not mean they're disabling or hobbling the application, it simply means they aren't developing more features for it--only bug fixes and maintenance.
Although I agree, if you look through the other Sparrow threads there's a strong theme of "I paid with the expectation of future improvements". And that doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, given how quickly they'd shipped improvements before.
It feels like there's some larger argument here around what exactly you're buying when you pay for software. After all, many small vendors say things like "pay us so we can continue our work", which certainly suggests you'll be getting more in future.
As opposed to how the app store paradigm of low-cost one-time purchases has lay people believe, software is radically different from most shelf-sold commodities they are used to buying in stores, in that it is destined to become less useful with time, to rot, if not cared for. Unmaintained software is prone to security vulnerabilities, gets harder to document and understand, and eventually becomes unusable on modern hardware. That "you're not losing your email client" is only true for today; having a working binary today doesn't guarantee you'll have a secure, working tool a few weeks/months down the line.
If the app store industry is intent on continuing to sell software as minimally critical to people's productivity as email software, they are going to have to come up with a persuasive, standardized, binding method of informing people of terms of support, and learn to stick to the terms they have set. App stores and their respective platforms are only a few years old; give it some time and people are going to collectively get much wiser than to tie their critical workflows and data to opportunistic pieces of technology built by bright young people whose top incentive is to make a fast buck and/or pose as "indies" to get employed by the status quo.
It's a bit silly to say that you don't care about their interests, if they come at the expense of your interests, but you think that them having what is arguably a milder version of that same attitude (i.e. that they value their own financial interests over your time invested in their product) is a "dick move".
People aren't throwing their arms up because they lost ten dollars; they're doing so because a piece of software that was important in their daily work, and that they enjoyed using and cared about, and probably would have happily continued to pay for, isn't going to be around in a short while.
Too bad for them; perhaps they should have evaluated the consequences of tying up a piece of their workflow as critical as email to a ten-dollar proprietary app made by people without a track record of building sustainable software better.
The real dick move is to tease people with cool technologies, good design, so-called new marketing models like fenced-garden app stores where "the little guy can make a buck too", lure them in with a cheap and tasty bait, and then use it to make a fortune for a few people at the expense of tens of thousands. That's what a good portion of the software industry is doing, and in the long run, it isn't going to pay out. After a period of bitter lessons, people will stop buying your shiny apps that go away after a few months for critical tasks, stop giving you all their data for cool free services that may ruin their professional lives, and stick to solutions that respect their intelligence. The app store industry will be left selling games and fart apps.
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.
"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. I’m really happy for them."
I personally think that you need to give it a shot and try to monetize your product but if after some time you find out that this is a harder and thougher nut to crack than you thought - you better rally some bigger force behind you, pivot, sell or just give up.
The guy at sparrow decided to sell and this is a very legitimate exit strategy.
Winners: a) Sparrow guys. b) Google. They just killed another e-mail client without their ads.
Losers: a) Current users. E-mail client is just another tool, when you descide, you decide for life. Now all Sparrow users must abandon it after some time, unvoluntarily.
b) Other indie developers. People will step-by-step be waging vary carefully of using and paying for indie software.
c) Sparrow guys after some year. Now they are doomed to work to the end of their lives for big corporation. No one will give them a dime if they ever want to work independently again. This might be not a big loss of course, if you like working for somebody else.
I don't think people will stop buying indie software on account of this either. The Internet likes to make big news out of these kinds of things, but forgets just as quickly.
I also think that this sale is not a bad thing necessarly. It won't stop us from spending more money on software, on the contrary. I think that if there are more exits available for indie developers, more developers might opt to go the indie route in the future knowing they might have a chance at getting acquired and thus having more developers launching great software.
Again, I don't think the Sparrow team made a mistake and I applaud them for selling their company and joining a 'corporate', if that is what they wanted to do - good for them. I'll surely buy more software from them in the future.
(I'll probably get downvoted to the ground like my other comments on that thread for having somewhat different views from the mob).
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.