<story><title>Sparrow acquired by Google</title><url>http://sprw.me/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rglover</author><text>A great point. But still no excuse to have their existing customers left behind. All of their customers (myself included) invested in the product because it was good, because it worked extremely well, and because it solved problems. I didn&apos;t invest in their work at Google. Where does that leave me?&lt;p&gt;The biggest concern I have with this is the same thing that happened to Tweetie: the one company that should have scooped it up did and then completely changed it into something that barely represented the existing app (and more or less dropped an interest in the desktop client).</text></item><item><author>w1ntermute</author><text>&amp;#62; This is getting extremely frustrating. Sparrow is a fabulous email client both for iOS and Mac. I love and use both daily and this is fairly devastating. I was really looking forward to the products development, growth, and future releases. To read this announcement and hear that they won&apos;t be working on their apps but on Google projects is sad.&lt;p&gt;I think it&apos;s a matter of perspective. As someone who doesn&apos;t use and has no intention of ever using OS X or iOS, this is great news for me! I&apos;ve been hearing a lot about Sparrow&apos;s revolutionary UI, but haven&apos;t benefited at all because they don&apos;t support Linux, Android, or Windows. Now, there&apos;s a very good chance that some of Sparrow&apos;s UI features will be incorporated into the Gmail web UI and into the Gmail apps for Android phones and tablets.</text></item><item><author>rglover</author><text>This is getting extremely frustrating. Sparrow is a fabulous email client both for iOS and Mac. I love and use both daily and this is fairly devastating. I was really looking forward to the products development, growth, and future releases. To read this announcement and hear that they won&apos;t be working on their apps but on &lt;i&gt;Google&lt;/i&gt; projects is sad.&lt;p&gt;To bigger companies: chill out with the &quot;acquihires.&quot; If anything, do what Facebook did with Instagram and keep them working on their product. It would be awesome to see the guts of Sparrow used in a Google branded Gmail client or similar (hopefully that happens, but I&apos;m reluctant based on this statement).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mindcrime</author><text>And now you&apos;ve gotten lesson #1 on why F/OSS solutions have one huge advantage over their proprietary counterparts: If the original developers of a F/OSS app decide to drop it, you have choices.  In the best case, another group of devs may simply fork the project and keep it going, or you (&apos;you&apos; in the general sense here) may choose to bring development in-house, or contract with a 3rd party to maintain and upgrade the app.&lt;p&gt;Now you might argue that some of those choices aren&apos;t &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; appealing, or that it&apos;s not guaranteed that someone else will pick up the app and run with it... but look at the scenarios with a closed-source, proprietary app: If the devs drop it, you&apos;re f%!#d, end of story.</text></comment>
<story><title>Sparrow acquired by Google</title><url>http://sprw.me/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rglover</author><text>A great point. But still no excuse to have their existing customers left behind. All of their customers (myself included) invested in the product because it was good, because it worked extremely well, and because it solved problems. I didn&apos;t invest in their work at Google. Where does that leave me?&lt;p&gt;The biggest concern I have with this is the same thing that happened to Tweetie: the one company that should have scooped it up did and then completely changed it into something that barely represented the existing app (and more or less dropped an interest in the desktop client).</text></item><item><author>w1ntermute</author><text>&amp;#62; This is getting extremely frustrating. Sparrow is a fabulous email client both for iOS and Mac. I love and use both daily and this is fairly devastating. I was really looking forward to the products development, growth, and future releases. To read this announcement and hear that they won&apos;t be working on their apps but on Google projects is sad.&lt;p&gt;I think it&apos;s a matter of perspective. As someone who doesn&apos;t use and has no intention of ever using OS X or iOS, this is great news for me! I&apos;ve been hearing a lot about Sparrow&apos;s revolutionary UI, but haven&apos;t benefited at all because they don&apos;t support Linux, Android, or Windows. Now, there&apos;s a very good chance that some of Sparrow&apos;s UI features will be incorporated into the Gmail web UI and into the Gmail apps for Android phones and tablets.</text></item><item><author>rglover</author><text>This is getting extremely frustrating. Sparrow is a fabulous email client both for iOS and Mac. I love and use both daily and this is fairly devastating. I was really looking forward to the products development, growth, and future releases. To read this announcement and hear that they won&apos;t be working on their apps but on &lt;i&gt;Google&lt;/i&gt; projects is sad.&lt;p&gt;To bigger companies: chill out with the &quot;acquihires.&quot; If anything, do what Facebook did with Instagram and keep them working on their product. It would be awesome to see the guts of Sparrow used in a Google branded Gmail client or similar (hopefully that happens, but I&apos;m reluctant based on this statement).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>untog</author><text>&lt;i&gt;All of their customers (myself included) invested&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;No you didn&apos;t. You bought. There was no investment, you should not expect a &apos;return&apos;.</text></comment>