[hxa7241]

The whole of the author's argument, and its weakness, in four words:

> It’s fine. It’s business.

Why is this inadequate? Because whether something is 'business' is not the beginning and the end of whether it is a good thing to do. It is merely one aspect.

The market is not a perfectly accurate and complete representation for all of human wishes and behaviour. So we cannot delegate to it as the final arbiter on questions of what should or should not be done.

No, the whole issue is really the other way around. What currently happen to be the rules of the business game are not grounds for telling people what they should or should not want. What people want is grounds for examining how the market and business are failing to work well -- and then pondering how that could be improved. That seems the more reasonable, just, and interesting avenue to pursue.

[k-mcgrady]

The "It's business" attitude has been popping up a lot. Nobody seems to be making the distinction between good business and bad business. Everything I've seen around the Sparrow sale has been bad business. The told users they were working on push notifications and an iPad app. They had a half price sale last weekend! And even though they were charging a premium price and clearly had a sustainable business (they were one of the top grossing apps and were highly rated and publisised) they still screwed their customers.

There was a good way to do this. Finish push notification and iPad support before discontinuing development (i.e. keep your promises). Don't have a half price sale days before you are acquired without informing the users the product will be discontinued.

[ChrisLTD]

As someone who bought Sparrow during their sale last week, I feel ripped off. I don't think they owe me free updates forever, but I would have liked to have known that it was a fire sale.

[slantyyz]

I paid full price for Sparrow and used it for two months. I didn't like it and switched back to Mail.app. But I don't feel ripped off because I got my money's worth from using it.

The app works, so I don't know why you would feel ripped off, fire sale or not. It's an overglorified EMAIL client for heaven's sake. How much more can you expect from an app that does e-mail?

[rhizome]

Did you use a credit card (likely)? Charge-back.

[ChrisLTD]

I got it through the Mac App Store.

[acdha]

Many people have reported getting refunds

[apu]

You feel "ripped off"...over $10? As in three cups of coffee?

[ChrisLTD]

Would you have bought it last week if you had known they were being bought by Google and effectively killing the product line?

[apu]

It continues to function as-is (albeit with no updates) regardless of whatever happens to the company, right? And if it really is as useful as people are saying, on email, which most people spend hours of their day on, then I'd definitely still have bought it.

How much do you value your time? For most software professionals, $10 is not even rounding error.

[mikeash]

Premium price! It was ten bucks!

This whole episode has further reinforced my complete lack of faith in humanity. How people can get so upset at so little and be so entitled when they are owed nothing just disgusts me.

[k-mcgrady]

It's a premium when you look at the average price of software on the Mac and iOS App Stores. It's also premium considering my computer comes with a free email client and Google provides a free webmail app.

[cageface]

This says a lot more about the absurdly unrealistic prices on the app stores than it does about the actual value you get from your $10 purchase.

[slantyyz]

When I look at the top paid apps in the App store, I see at least as many >$10 apps as I see under $10.

If I look at my own App store purchases, $10 is easily on the cheap side.

It's amazing how so many people are complaining about the EOL'ing of a software app that's equivalent to the price of two lattes (one if you're talking about the mobile version), especially when the Sparrow guys said they'll be providing bug fix releases as required.

[mgunes]

> It's amazing how so many people are complaining about the EOL'ing of a software app that's equivalent to the price of two lattes

The value of productivity software that is integrated to your workflow cannot be determined by its cost of purchase. Try taking Microsoft Word off an author's set of tools, and telling them that they only lost $120 and shouldn't be complaining.

Moral of the story: don't bet your digital life on cheap, cool, transient, proprietary, made-for-App-Store software built by enthusiastic young startup founders or "indie" developers.

[mikeash]

They could legitimately complain, but anyone without a service contract who says that Microsoft owes them further updates is being a jerk.

[shenberg]

By 'free email client' do you mean the one funded by paying for your OS (Outlook Express), your hardware (Mail.app), or maybe Google (Thunderbird)?

[mikeash]

What is the average price of third-party e-mail clients, or other productivity software of similar scope?

And how did anybody get "screwed" here, as you stated in your original post?

[dorian-graph]

It's disturbing that someone's faith in humanity is so fickle that it is perturbed by something like this. Human behaviour isn't exactly something new.

[mikeash]

Fickle? Where did you get that idea? My lack of faith in humanity is as constant as the terribleness of humanity on which it is based. I merely said that these things reinforce it, not that it changed my mind.

[JabavuAdams]

This doesn't address the OP's post but here's a quote from Iain M. Banks along your line of thinking:

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

[durga]

and wtf does this mean in everyday language? ;-)

[ams6110]

So are you suggesting there should be some arbiter other than the market of what a business can or cannot do with regards to product decisions, or acquisition opportunities? Who might do that?

Would you even consider developing a product if your hands were then somehow tied to supporting it and even improving it forever? Would your company be attractive to potential buyers if they were obligated to support your product line indefinitely after an acquisition?

On top of all that I mean we're talking about TEN DOLLARS. I often spend more than that on lunch. If you bought a $10 hair dryer on Amazon and later discovered that the manufacturer had been acquired and was no longer producing hair dryers would you feel ripped off? Betrayed? Offended?

[andrewflnr]

They're not suggesting anything as far as I can tell. But I think a suggestion they would agree with would be for conscientious business owners to consider not only what's good business, but what is good for the consumers, even if it means not getting quite as much profit. It's about personal ethics. Of course, ethics, also demand you feed your family, so it's hard.

As for the hair dryer example, see the top-level comment by makecheck.

[Spearchucker]

"What currently happen to be the rules of the business game are not grounds for telling people what they should or should not want"

I've not ever heard anyone say that. OP included.

There are no "rules of the business game", other than an obligation to make money. And other than abiding by the law, there are no rules on how that money should be made.

Whether you consider the process moral or not makes no difference. The metric is $.