Marco Tabini:
Customers are not investors. When you buy something, you are not taking on a stake in the manufacturer. You need to want to buy software because it’s the best fit for your needs, and not because you want to do someone a favour, or because of some hope about its future. To do otherwise creates an unhealthy relationship between buyer and seller that does not reflect the simple reality of commerce.
There’s been a lot written in the past 48 hours or so about Google’s acquisition of Sparrow, the developer of e-mail software for iOS and OS X. Some are squarely siding with displaced customers, who say they’ve been ripped off by the company, who’s taken the money and run. Others lament that acquisitions like this hurt indie software development in the long run because it makes customers gun-shy about future purchases.
Tabini throws in a much needed dose of reality: smart customers should pay for software that has the features they need, instead of banking on the developer’s promises (or their own wishes) for future development. That’s a fool’s bet.
I agree with him… but the reality is that OS updates break apps. If you purchased Sparrow last week, it’s not unlikely that it will simply stop working with the next OS update (though we know it does work with Mountain Lion, but you get my point).
Why should I invest my money in an app when there’s a good chance that it won’t exist in a year, AND will stop working in about the same amount of time?
My problem isn’t that they sold out to Google but that for the past week or two they dropped the price of the app to bump up sales in what feels like a last minute money grab just before announcing that they’d sold to Google and would not be continuing development of the product. Very shady behavior in my opinion.
Exactly. Given the pace of iOS and MacOS X changes, should we just assume that we are buying apps that are only going to work for at most a year?
If so, that’s pretty dangerous for pricing of indie apps. There’s no way I would pay more than $10 for an app if there’s only a guarantee that it will work only until the next major release of iOS and Mac OS X.
(good example is the current version of Sparrow is broken with the current iOS 6 betas. If it’s Sparrow’s fault, I guess we can just bury it)
Invest? $10?
What kind of cheapskates are you? Good for Sparrow for selling to Google as you guys clearly don’t value them for their worth.
You used the word “invest.” You don’t invest in an app. You buy it. All you should reasonably expect is that is works on your system at the time you buy it; not in the next OS upgrade.
Isn’t the idea that your purchase price means the developers owe you to keep updating the app forever is a bit ridiculous?
You have a right to be disappointed, sure. But you don’t have the right to expect a developer to turn down a lucrative offer just because you threw a couple of bucks their way.
As I saw on twitter, someone asked “what if you received a better job offer – one you liked more, paid more, and was closer to your home?” But of course you wouldn’t take it, right? After all, your current boss “invested” so much money in you.
You pay more than $10 for lunch, and that lasts only an hour. Several hundred dollars is one thing. But the price of app store apps are ridiculously cheap. They pay for themselves in days, not months, or years.
Valuing software that is only guaranteed to work for a year.
They promise fixes until 2013, but given their track record, that probably means January 2013 – and even that’s a stretch given that they also said a bunch of other things too (paid service for Push, etc.)
Clearly their track record is not good.
Well said. I’d also like to know why this is still on the App Stores as a paid app if it is guaranteed that it has no future?
Another question to be asked is what will happen the next time when you have a ton of data inside an app on iOS and the developer either cashes out or goes out of business? That data is locked inside of the app with no feasible way of getting it out. This will certainly make me far less likely to buy an indie app if it doesn’t sync to Dropbox or Evernote.
As much as the article may be right to some degree, it also has to be said that there are a lot of Apple bloggers who have the tendency to blame the customer but are silent when it comes to the developers taking any blame. Matt Gemmell may be right in calling the customer a fool for buying a product based on promises but I’ll gladly take the side of the one who trusts too much rather than the disingenuous.
I don’t pay more than $10 for lunch.
In any case, my $10 is obviously an exaggeration. What it signals is that company viability should be considered during a purchase, and will make it harder for new indie developers to break into the market (or break into it very cheaply).
We in the Mac (and iOS) market don’t usually worry about it – in fact we cherish and support these types of developers. What the Sparrow team has done is told us that we have been naive.
Indie developers should be pissed at the Sparrow team for pissing in the pool for them. It’s only worse moving forward.
That’s a good viewpoint – thanks for linking to it. I guess I did romanticize the situation (albeit it sincerely) a bit too much in my “acquisitions like this hurt indie software development in the long run” post. Perhaps mine is not a loss of faith in the system so much as it is a loss of naivety (which isn’t a bad thing).
Nice sentiment, but if people only ever bought software that met their needs, the software industry would collapse overnight.
I have no problem with Google exercising their right to purchase a company they are interested in.
I also have no problem with the Sparrow developers getting their big payday for all the work they put into the app.
I do have a problem with Google as it appears they bought Sparrow to eliminate a competitor. Very much like Twitter purchasing Tweetie, only to let it die a slow death.
I also agree with @Sergio. One last money grad before the app is abandoned.
If that is the case then people should rarely or never buy indie software unless they are willing to take a gamble. The problem with your argument is that the price of any given app is exceeded by the value of the data you keep on it.
Yes, in the situation of Sparrow, customers can rest easy that their emails still exist on Google’s servers. With many other apps that is not the case on iOS. I don’t think they were wrong in cashing out but to make it as simple as you and others are doing is not the entire truth.
Spot on.
Most everyone here “get it.” But for the few of you who obviously don’t, let me shed light.
It’s NOT about the $10 (or whatever any particular app costs), it’s about the investment (yes, BUYING an app IS an investment) in time, not just money.
And yes, I have “reasonable expectations” that the app I purchase today works NOW. But unless I’m a total douchenozzle, I only purchase an app if I have reasonable expectations that it will exist next year and have an update (other than games, and a few fringe apps). It doesn’t matter how much the app costs.
There are plenty of iPhoto-like apps out there. They come and they go – and most are better than iPhoto. But I KNOW iPhoto isn’t going anywhere.
There are probably numerous and cheaper apps that can mimmick the capabilities of Default Folder X. But St. Clair software has been selling that app for decades. It’s not a flash-in-the-pan. They don’t offer discounts, they rarely participate in bundles, and they aren’t on the Mac App Store. I have no problem giving the developer $35 every other year or so for major updates, because I KNOW the app will be there through the next OS upgrade.
It’s not about the price. It’s about the time investment and the hassle.
The only reason you should have iOS 6 is so you can report that to Apple as an iOS bug. Have you yet?
“If that is the case then people should rarely or never buy indie software unless they are willing to take a gamble.”
Scratch “indie” from that statement and I’d say it’s accurate.
That’s kind of missing the point. I’ve changed how I work with email thanks to Sparrow. This tool is saving me a lot of time and making my life more pleasant. Now, it won’t get any future development. Which means that it will slowly break (either because stuff stops working, or because new stuff that I rely on won’t be implemented), like Eudora did before that, and Musashi, and Claris Emailer, and Cyberstudio, and all the other email apps that I used. And slowly, I’ll be more and more screwed, just like with these other tools.
And eventually, I’ll have to switch to an inferior tool.
It’s not about the 10 bucks. It’s not about “paying for the tool that it is, not the tool that it will be”. It’s not about promises from the developer. It’s simply about a great tool that I rely on almost every waking hour of ever day, slowly dying.
In the days of packaged software you didn’t buy the software, you puchased a licence to use it. Are you sure that you “buy” software from the app store? My guess is that the terms and conditions that none of us ever bothers to read has all these angles covered and that we’ve leased the right to use a certain clump of code with no promise going forward that it won’t become worthless.
Took me less than 5 minutes to purchase, download, and configure it. It’ll take me that long to do it again.
There’s no investment, there’s no hassle,
And learn the features and its quirks?
You clearly don’t get it.
Stop pretending you are making an investment. It takes minutes to set up Sparrow, or Default Folder X. Your investment in time to set it up has already been paid back through your previous use of the app.
Yep.
It’s not unreasonable to be upset. It is unreasonable to expect the developers to pass on their opportunity or anything other than what is implied in the purchase of software. Staying around in for the indefinite future is not implied.
Oh wow. If people started thinking that way, the ecosystem crashes.
Is that what you’re saying?
So is it your assertion that indie devs should not take acquisitions, or can never discontinue a product? Do you really think your $10, or even if it was $1000, buys you control over the fate of their product?
I can guarantee that the big companies (Apple, MS, Google) will be around for the next decade. I can’t guarantee that with an indie company unless they’re like Evernote or Dropbox where they are platform agnostic and can exist independent of a platform. They had the chance to cash out but they didn’t because they wanted to create a business. Making an app exclusively for iOS the best you can will suffer now.
Matthew Panzarino wrote an interesting article today on his Svbtle blog explaining why Sparrow had to sell. If this is true then it destroys the concept under which iCloud currently exists and why an iOS device can’t be your only computer.
I can get behind most of what Tabini wrote in his article, but not the quoted passage. In it he warps what he calls “the simple reality of commerce”.
By definition customers who buy your products are stakeholders, they take a chance with your product and thus a stake in your business.
This especially holds true for licensable goods like software as they are durables and not consumables like, say, toilet paper (here your business relationship and expectation ends once you’ve wiped you butt with it).
Tabini says that you should buy software that suits your needs, not because you have some hopes about its future, yet when a person invests in software by form of a licence, they expect to get a certain use out of it that extends beyond using it once or twice. Buying and using software is more akin to a service relationship than to buying physical goods.
Now to be perfectly clear: I don’t expect developers to support a piece of software indefinitely — not for free at least. The question of “How long is long enough?” leads to a wholly different world of pain, but as JimD has correctly pointed out, OS updates do tend to break software and Sparrow for the Mac and iOS haven’t been on the market for very long.
The same holds true for Pulp for the iPad by Acrylic Software, an app that hasn’t been around very long either and that I bought — yup, my fucking luck — three hours before the announcement of the acquisition by Facebook. After purchasing the app, I found out that certain essential aspects of the software didn’t work as advertised, something I’d expect the developer to improve on. Now that they’ve been purchased none of this will happen and I basically have a dud sitting on my iPad.
What existed before is now different for numerous reasons. People rely on these apps to keep what they have because the future has become reality.
Tell someone (or a kid) that their journal/diary app they’ve been using is now broken because they upgraded or that there’s no way to export the data. Even if you tell them they may not know how to find a way out. This is the problem that exists today. iOS was supposed to be made for everyone, even if they didn’t care about technology.
I think Tabini is missing (or at least not addressing) a common complaint that’s not about the money. Tabini wrote:
I agree fully with him about the money (and I use many of those apps myself), but I would still be sad about the lost development of those apps.
I’d pay twice in a heartbeat for Fantastical but I would be very sad if this fantastic piece of software didn’t evolve further, especially since the developers have done such great things already.
It’s not about the money at all, it’s about how much I enjoy the software and how much I would like to see it evolving. Even if all further development came with and upgrade price. I want that development.
Thanks for making the distinction between a consumable and a durable (or at least somewhat durable) good.
Whether you’re buying software for recreation, personal productivity, or professional work, you do so with a certain degree of expectation that it will be usable and useful beyond, say, the amount of time it took to find it in the first place.
Anyone who needs another illustrative example of this issue should consider the position Quicken for Mac users were in before Intuit released its recent Lion-compatible update. Is such a utility as easily replaceable as an email client? Should I only use such a utility with the understanding that it has no known roadmap for customer support?
And the products? I “invested” money and time in MobileMe’s galleries, I used to use FrameMaker and FreeHand too. All owned by big companies still around today. When they left, I was disappointed, sure, but that’s as far as it went. I moved on. Developers have a right to stop producing their products, big or small.
It’s not just the time to buy & install. It’s the time you put into using it that you lose having to find a suitable replacement, and get your data into that replacement. Then you’ve got the hassle of learning that new app, along with the additional cost.
You’re trying to simplify the problem by narrowing it down to Sparrow alone, and the relative simplicity of that particular app.
And you are ignoring the developer’s side. It doesn’t matter if it’s Adobe or an indie dev. They have the right to stop producing their product if they wish. Your $10 or even $1000 does not buy you control over their product.
The only way to guarantee development in the future is to sign a contract with the developer. If you can’t do that, then you have to accept the risk.
I really hope you’re not a developer. Your attitude towards customers is pretty awful.
We aren’t buying “control” of the product. We’re buying a product with described features and… get this… expectations the developers have set with the product.
The Sparrow team set some pretty high expectations with their customers to… wait for this … get people to buy their product.
The developers set expectations are proceeded to not meet them.
That’s all they did. And if you don’t get that, then you really shouldn’t be in the business of, well, having customers.
And I hope you don’t.
And, guess what, the companies that produced them provided an upgrade path.
Like a real company should.
Stop pretending you know anything about the software business.
You really are thick-skulled.
No one is complaining about them being acquired. Bully for them.
What we’re complaining about is that Google is killing a paid-for product and leaving people pissed off.
At least with your example earlier, Adobe was smart enough to maintain and eventually provide an upgrade path for Macromedia products.
I’m glad they’re rolling in their $25M. I just won’t ever buy a product from a team with any former Sparrow developers on them.
I have common sense, that’s why I’m ignoring the develop’s side… and now you.