
Why Google’s Sparrow Acquisition Just Ruined My Morning - kposehn
http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/20/why-googles-sparrow-acquisition-just-ruined-my-morning/
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petercooper
_Finally, there is an opportunity here for other iOS developers. [..] Sparrow
is still tough to beat, but in a year or so, it will have fallen by the
wayside, and that’s when the opportunity really shows up._

Totally. That's the up-side. But let's imagine a great client does turn up and
it's from a group of developers who _hate_ acqui-hires.

They realize they need a recurring revenue stream so two situations (of many)
might play out. The first is they say upfront their _native app_ is $5/month
and people poo-poo the idea of paying a subscription for an app or its
traction is otherwise dampened. The second is they sell an app like normal but
then try and introduce a recurring charge later on and suffer the ire of their
users (we've all seen the "ew, profiteering!" sneers).

There's surely a "nice" solution somewhere here, but it seems Sparrow didn't
quite stumble across it. Who will or has?

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leftnode
Couldn't developers just build software and sell it without a recurring stream
of revenue? I know the holy grail is a monthly charge, but companies are still
making a lot of money just selling software for a one time fee.

Case in point, Google just purchased Quickoffice (my previous employer) which
just sold software (and didn't until a few weeks before the Google acquisition
have a recurring fee product).

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emmett
The problem with non-recurring revenue is that it's difficult to justify
further investment once you saturate the market.

If you want them to keep working on your product year in, year out, you have
to pay for it year in, year out.

The alternative is selling upgrades, but that doesn't work on iOS at all.

~~~
evilduck
Couldn't this be handled via in-app purchases unlocking new features or later
"versions"? It's not optimal, but it seems like it might be workable.

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suresk
You could, but it would get really clumsy pretty quickly, especially if you
were trying to ship multiple versions and only unlock certain ones. I'm not
sure if Apple would even approve that.

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blahedo
Acquihires always make me feel like this, even for apps I don't use or have
never even heard of. From the perspective of a consumer, acquihires send out
one, very consistent, message: "we're going to hunt for the best, coolest,
most interesting apps that people love and find most useful, and shut them
down. Suck it, users!"

It's depressing.

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pnathan
Every time I see something like this, I think about what the general benefit
would have been if it had been an open source project.

What if a company made & supported their software, selling it as a GPL-based
system? Then if they went under (or any other sorts of terminating
conditions), the software would still be usable and available.

~~~
cgh
Sparrow is an iOS app. The App Store does not allow GPL'd applications.

Also, it's conceivable that Google wants to incorporate Sparrow into their own
iOS client offering, so keeping the source to themselves makes sense.

~~~
vijaykiran
> The App Store does not allow GPL'd applications.

I don't think so, Wordpress for iOS is GPL licensed:

<http://ios.wordpress.org/development/>

~~~
radarsat1
I guess what is going on here is that WordPress owns the copyright to
WordPress, and doesn't have any GPL dependencies, so they can do with it what
they want. No one _else_ is allowed to make a Wordpress app for iOS, however.

(I didn't check and am not familiar with the WP source code.. if they _do_
have any GPL dependencies they might be in violation. Likely their app just
presents an interface to communicate with their server stuff, so things like
databases or anything else the WordPress _server_ depends on don't count as
dependencies for the app--so as long as they wrote the app from scratch they
are okay.)

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bengtan
No they don't. If I remember correctly, Wordpress is a fork of an older GPL
cms. They do not have the full copyrights to license it under a license of
their own choosing.

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pyre
You're answering the question with regards to "Wordpress the PHP app the CMS
app that runs on a LAMP stack." I'm guessing that "Wordpress to iOS" is really
just a native iOS mobile interface to the PHP CMS app. In that case, they
probably have written it from scratch.

~~~
csixty4
No need to guess. Licensing info & source code are available at
<http://ios.wordpress.org/development/>

The Vendor directory contains the third-party libraries they're using. All of
them appear to be MIT or Apache licensed.

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rbanffy
What if the "other projects" include the Gmail client for Android? A great,
cross-platform, Gmail experience is something we can all relate to.

