Sparrow, the Nokia Lumia 800, and a finished product

Late last week, news broke that my favourite email client Sparrow had been purchased by Google. The notice came with some grim news about Sparrow, namely, that it wouldn't receive any new updates outside of patches and bug fixes. This morning, I uninstalled Sparrow and configured Apple's Mail app as my default client.

Why did I uninstall Sparrow, even though today, July 22, 2012, I like it more than Apple's Mail? There's two reasons. Apple's Mail is going to get an update in a few days when Mountain Lion ships, and Sparrow, while excellent, is never going to get better. The second part of that sentence matters when you realize that as good as Sparrow was, I feel like I used it because I knew one day it would be a lot better. I saw the potential in Sparrow, and was excited to support an app from infancy to adulthood. I was doing what I felt a good customer does: support an indie developer selling a great app by giving them money.

Marco Arment, Instapaper developer and blogger, fairly recently wrote about this:

If you want to keep the software and services around that you enjoy, do what you can to make their businesses successful enough that it?s more attractive to keep running them than to be hired by a big tech company.

I don't know if it's good or bad that the Sparrow team now works for Google. It's absolutely possible that the Sparrow team can make gmail a lot better. It's also possible that Gmail will released a ruined version of Sparrow on desktops, just like Twitter did when they acquired Tweetie. What I do know is that the ten dollars I gave to Sparrow was used to enjoy their app from the time I purchased it to last week, and that's it. I don't regret my purchase, but it still stings a little.

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I'm sure people who used and loved Sparrow felt it was a solid, finished product, but I never looked at it that way. I saw something with loads of potential, and wanted to support it so that one day it would really blow everything else away. But perhaps that's my failing: supporing something in the hopes that it'll be good one day, but isn't necessarily now.

When I look back on the Mac apps that I've purchased, Sparrow is one of maybe three that, as of today, don't exist anymore. Every other one—Transmit, Scrivener, Textexpander, 1Password, Omnifocus, various Rogue Amoeba apps, etc etc—are all still independent, succesful, and able to improve on software because I and a lot of other people support them. Sparrow isn't part of a great trend. It's an oddity.

I was thinking about this when I answered a craiglist ad and purchased a second-hand Nokia Lumia 800, a device that will get one more software upgrade this year and then no more for the rest of its life. Why, if I'm interested in in supporting living products, would I buy one that's essentially DOA for future care?

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The simple answer lies in Matt Buchanan's blog post a few weeks ago, where he suggests that it's much wiser to buy products that are great now, instead of ones that promise to be great later:

You might buy a new phone that's missing something, thinking, "It will get better." No, it won't. If I were to tell you one thing about buying technology, it is this: Buy something because you like what it is right now, not because you think it's going to get better, or that one day it'll be what you really wanted it to be. It's kind of like marrying somebody and thinking you'll change them and they'll get better. They might. But they probably won't. Over time, you'll just hate them even more. And yourself, at least a little.

I bought and supported Sparrow because it was really promising and I believed that one day it'd kick ass. I bought the Lumia 800 becasue even if it never recieves another update, it's an amazing phone that does everything better than I hoped.

I'm still getting used to writing longer posts, so I'm not good at conclusions yet. But I just wanted to say what I thought about future expectations when putting money down on things, and how that's a somewhat complicated relationship. I'm sure I'll come back to this idea later.