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Comment by david_shaw | Hacker News Reader

> The days of paying for e-mail clients is long gone.

I'm not sure I totally agree with that. My first example is the ridiculously wide-scale enterprise adoption of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange -- sure, there's a bunch of features that are piled onto those "email clients," but at the heart of it, people are still paying for this stuff.

The second example is Sparrow itself. If people weren't paying for e-mail clients, then would Sparrow have such a huge, dedicated userbase? Or is this just the vocal minority we're hearing from?

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I agree - people are no longer willing to pay for the little bit of the client that connects to a server, downloads the email, and renders it, because all of that is widely available for free.

What they are willing to pay for is a value proposition that goes beyond the mere mechanics of email. Outlook succeeds because it integrates email with calendaring (so does GMail, with less success), does a fantastic job with sortation, filtering, and highlighting, and also is a champ when dealing with unmanageably large address books.

The market for an amazing email management service is absolutely existent. The market for a rubber-stamp me-too mail client is not.

I agree that if someone could improve email management they would indeed make more money. However, I still feel that sparrow was able to become so popular because it's iPhone interface was so much nicer to use than both Google's and Apple's free alternatives.

> sparrow was able to become so popular because it's iPhone interface was so much nicer to use than both Google's and Apple's free alternatives.

Sparrow became popular way before the iPhone version. Anyway, how is making an app more convenient supposed not to be an improvement worth at least a couple of bucks?

BTW, "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less."

Even in that example, the real product being sold is the Exchange server. The Outlook mail client is essentially a freebie.

> My first example is the ridiculously wide-scale enterprise adoption of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange ...

Yes but there is a completely different dynamic driving those sales: top-down adoption mandated by people whose main goal is not to get fired. Same reason as why you see so many middleware posters in the airport raving about security. Most users, given the choice, would not choose to use these products.

Humans don't buy Outlook. Selling to humans (like Sparrow tried) is categorically different than selling to organizations.

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