I didn't get that from Marco's post at all. I heard a developer saying "stop blaming indie developers for accepting generous offers from companies and start supporting their products instead".
I got a similar vibe. Also I DID support sparrow. I told absolutely every person I know with a mac that they should use sparrow. Every computer I setup at work and for friends I installed sparrow by default. I have tweeted about loving sparrow. I'm really not sure what more I could have done other than wear a sandwich board around with their logo on it. That STILL didn't stop them from being bought out...
That STILL didn't stop them from being bought out...
I wonder how the poo-pooing of anything that isn't a $10m+ funding or $1bn+ market cap business on sites like HN encourages people to think "well, hey, perhaps I should go join a business like that if mine can't be."
Which brings up a great digression: the app store gold rush has left us in a situation where it's no longer feasible to sell high-maintenance, low-market software directly to consumers. Consumers will buy games and media in high volume, so you can sell those at a discount. But email clients? Photo apps? Nope. The only way to make that stuff is to sell it as some kind of "cloud" service where you make your money on eyeballs elsewhere. And even then you generally can only make it big that way as part of a larger product suite (c.f. Instagram).
I'd look to the open source world for good geek tools, honestly. I think expecting people to sell them to us in the app stores just won't work. No one will buy this stuff at the $50/seat the developers would have to charge to avoid the Google and Facebook buyouts.
That's exactly it. Though to be fair, I pulled the $50 number out of you-know-where. The point is more that the caramel-latte-priced software model only works for items with huge volume.
Worse yet, say someone looked at sparrow dying and wanted to clone it, because it looks like there's a business there. Now they'll be pinched by people being cheap as shit on the upside and google migrating some of the best features into their presumably free iphone client on the low side. So I think google has now poisoned the well for better gmail clients on mac/ios.
What didn't you get? Both Macro's post and the parent are reasonable and non-contradictory. Marco says "I was only able to reject those offers because Instapaper is a healthy business" and the parent says "Well, congrats to Marco for having a successful and sustainable business".
My point is, you are disagreeing with two people in agreement. What you "heard" is a miscalculating brain that projected sentiments that don't exist.
Could be I misread the tone of the article. Perhaps I was reading it through the lens of everyone being upset about the current state of acquihires on the "Sparrow acquired by Google" thread.
Even so, if you take his advice and do what you can to support software you love to keep it alive, in the long run it may not be enough. Either way, my comment about why these things happen still stands.
> The hard part is coming to terms with what is actually sustainable. It takes a while to figure that out.
Exactly. And if it takes longer to figure out than the money you have to burn, then why not at least try for some sort of exit before giving up completely?