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Comment by crag | Hacker News Reader

No NO.. it's not because they're small. It's because tech start-ups have a history of shutting down or selling, and leaving their users in the dust.

The list is long. Another recent example was Sparrow. I broke my rule about buying/licensing software from small companies (unless I got the source) with Sparrow. I didn't just buy 1 copy, I (we) brought 15 (for the office). And of course, I got burned. Again.

It will not happen again. Period. Unless you tell me up front your plans - what you plan to do for me, the user, when/if you fail or sell.

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It is not only tech start-ups that do that. Big tech companies regularly kill or sell off divisions or product lines. Most times, a start-up might still be on its first product line, which makes you think selling off their single product line or single division in this instance the whole company to be different from what the tech giants do when they sell or kill off product lines or divisons.

Start-ups with more than one product line, sometimes sell off one product and keep the rest acting thesame way big companies do. So, Yext a start-up sold their Felix product line to IAC eg:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/20/iac-buys-yexts-pay-per-call...

An example of a giant doing thesame thing:

http://techland.time.com/2012/04/26/google-sells-sketchup-wa...

I have shown above, an example of start-ups and giants selling a product line. You can Google around for example of tech giants and start-ups with more than one product, killing off a product line.

Did you really get burned with Sparrow though? You bought software, not a service. Them being bought, and shut down, by Google has zero effect on you given that you can continue to use their software. Forever.

According to a friend, the most recent version of Sparrow is essentially broken (100% CPU and crashes). I haven't upgraded in a while for this reason, and I'm not expecting that issue to be fixed, ever.

That said, I'm still using Sparrow on my laptop and desktop machines as well as my iPhone. But probably not for a whole lot longer.

I don't know about your friend, but I'm happily using the latest version of Sparrow with no issues whatsoever, maybe he has some other unrelated problems...

"Forever" being until Google changes their service which is probably about every few months.

Sparrow is essentially an IMAP client. I don't see Google turn off IMAP support any time soon. Way too many clients are actively using that.

I don't know exactly the protocols behind Exchange (IMAP ? MAPI ?), but it seems to me that it is, for now, Google's prefered way of accessing emails & calendars from a mobile device (at least from iOS).

Yes. But we were talking about Sparrow and Sparrow is an IMAP client.

Well yes, but doesn't it's usefulness come from the tight integration with gmail only features? disclaimer; i only used Sparrow for a bit a long time ago so perhaps they've made these features work in regular IMAP as well..

You paid $150 for software which still works, which had no promise of updates forever anyway, and you're upset?

Not that your point is invalid talking about Grove - suddenly everyone who used it has to move in under a month. But I don't get the upset over Sparrow. If it helped you at the time, it should help you now.

I don't want to rehash Sparrow. But, if they'd had fixed long standing bugs, and added the features they promised I would not be so upset about it. But they didn't. They dropped the project and went on to Google.

Leaving with with a ridiculous "feel-good" blog post.

My point though, this isn't uncommon. And this kind of user treatment is one of the big reasons many tech start-ups have a tough time making the sale.

Now of course, if said company manages to get momentum (like a Dropbox, Github, FB - to name a few) - I guess they are no longer startups.

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