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Source: YouTube. As Dickens said, it was a complicated time and with a certain point of madness and daring in an Apple that wanted to separate itself from what it embodied years ago. The time has come to take the dare-to step forward and determine your FATE. An infinite number of levels and exciting battles await you. In FATE you can play as a youthful boy or girl, always.
Today, Sparrow CEO Dom Leca sent me an e-mail entitled, 'An Update from the Sparrow Team.' But it should have been entitled, 'So long, and thanks for all the fish.'
As my Ars colleague Andrew Cunningham reports, Sparrow—the makers of the much-beloved eponymous mail app for Mac OS X and iOS—has been acquired by Google. Thousands of other users made it a top-selling application in both the Mac App Store and the iTunes store because we love the software and thought it was promising. But now, as Leca and his team move to their shiny new Mountain View offices, yet another promising application has been cut down.
Like most Sparrow users, the news caught me off-guard; the application had recently been updated in Apple’s App Store, and the latest version had widened its performance lead on Apple’s Mail.app and other Mac OS mail software. But the update turned out to be a final act instead of a prelude to something bigger—and the bow was an undisclosed payday for Leca and Kima Ventures, the French venture capital team that originally backed the company. This is the sort of exit that's become common to software and Web companies in the current economy, where the only way to get the big payout is to be acquired by a Google, or a Facebook, a Microsoft or an Apple.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin once claimed 'Don’t Be Evil' as Google’s unofficial motto. Acquiring and shuttering Sparrow is not evil, but it's also not good customer service. Sure, Leca, his team, and his backers all win. But customers who paid for Sparrow through Apple's App Store believing they were paying for a product with a longer future are left with a hearty handshake and a product that, if not yet killed, is clearly now on minimal life support—there will be no further development of Sparrow beyond critical bug fixes.
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'It’s been an honor and a pleasure to build products for all of our wonderful users who have supported us over the years,' Leca wrote. 'We can't thank you enough.'
Well, thank you for thanking me, Dom. Sure, $10 wasn’t a lot to pay for software in the scheme of things, but for those of us who live in e-mail daily and have grown dependent on a tool that didn’t suck nearly as much as the alternatives, gratitude for our support is not exactly what we were looking for.
This is not the first time Google has bought and killed a product out from under users like me, and it will not be the last. It’s part of a pattern of behavior by the company in its march toward Web domination. Just go to the search engine of your choice and enter the phrase, 'Google acquires kills,' and you’ll get an inkling of the carnage. Since January, Google has acquired:
Digg founder Kevin Rose's mobile social networking startup Milk (just for the talent)
The iOS mail app maker reMail (just for the talent)
KikScore, an e-commerce 'trusted site' scoring service (killed because it competed, sort of, with Google Trusted Store)
The mobile productivity tool developer Quickoffice (for a front-end for Google Docs and its talent)
The Meebo Web-based instant and social messaging platform (for what, we're not sure).
With the exception of Quickoffice, all of the acquisitions' existing products were abandoned, and their staff and technology were assimilated into Google’s hive mind.
Meebo may not be as mourned as reMail or Sparrow—it was an instant messaging tool, after all, and getting acquired by Google was part of Meebo’s original 2005 business plan. But like Sparrow, reMail, and Quickoffice, Meebo had gained some success with its mobile applications as a way for users to cut through the proprietary client mess of multiple services and take control of their content. When Google yanked the plug on Meebo Messenger and pretty much everything else but the Meebo bar on July 11, killing the functionality that many customers had embedded in their websites and rendering the mobile apps useless, I’m pretty sure Meebo’s millions of users were not cheering.
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All told, Google has made over 100 acquisitions since 2001, and 17 in the last 12 months. Not all have been euthanized; Quickoffice’s assimilation may be more benign, and Google can hardly afford to kill off Motorola. But the vast majority of the products Google has acquired have at best been broken up for parts and wired into other Google services. Other notable recent applications in Google’s acquisition body count include:
Apture, the multimedia and search service for Web publishers (shut off, and assimilated into Google Search)
Clever Sense and its iOS and Android Alfred application (incorporated into Android, iOS product abandoned)
The BumpTop 3D desktop for Windows and Mac OS X (now part of Android)
PostRank’s social media analytics tools (bought last year, and 'sunsetted' this May, shifted over to Google Analytics)
The SageTV DVR and home theater application for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux (merged into the ill-starred GoogleTV platform)
Fridge, the social networking and photo sharing tool, that became the basis for Google+ 'circles'
But at least Google bought these companies; Facebook just wholesale hired the staff of mobile imaging app startup Lightbox and left investors and users holding the bag. I guess Sparrow users can take cold comfort in knowing that at least the software will continue to be patched for a while, and it won't become just the funding model for the next version of Facebook Messenger.
But it's still bad customer service on Google's part. Whether or not Sparrow lives on in some future GMail client that is recognizable as a Sparrow descendant, Google has made it a too-frequent habit to turn off or shut down the products it acquires and leave users with a bad taste in their mouths.
Update: I've changed much of this to clarify some of my points above.
Classic Mac OS, as it's now known, had a decade-long honeymoon period. From its release in 1984 until 1994, it enjoyed a healthy development life that included several major revisions. But by 1994, the limitations of the OS were apparent to technophiles both inside and outside Apple. Sure, there was a lot of legacy cruft from the 80s in what was then known as System 7, but the real problems were more fundamental. These problems were so well-known that I'm sure anyone who was a 'PC enthusiast' back in those days can rattle them off. Classic Mac OS lacked two very important features. Say it with me, folks:
Memory protection and preemptive multitasking
In the early 1990s, Apple created the Copland project to add these two features to its operating system. Yes, a lot of new end-user features were going to be added as well, but memory protection and preemptive multitasking were Copland's raison d'être.
Funny story—as it turns out, it wasn't too easy to add these features to classic Mac OS while also maintaining backward compatibility with existing software. Oh, and did I mention that Apple switched processor architectures around this time as well? By 1996, the Copland project was dead, and classic Mac OS still lacked memory protection and preemptive multitasking.
Thus began a downward spiral that included several more frantic, abortive attempts to solve Apple's OS dilemma. We all know how it ended. A series of unlikely events led to the return of Steve Jobs and the refashioning of NeXTSTEP into Apple's new operating system—yes, an operating system with memory protection and preemptive multitasking. Phew.
So, here we are in 2005, with severalmajorrevisions of Mac OS X behind us. Maybe we Mac users are feeling a bit smug, knowing that we once again have The Best Operating System™. Of course, I felt that way in 1991 when System 7 was released, too. But a mere five years later, things were going downhill fast. Hm.
Will Mac OS X suffer the same fate? Surely not, you say. Mac OS X is The World's Most Advanced Operating System! But this is exactly the kind of thinking that lets an OS crisis sneak up on you. It's worthwhile to think about what Mac OS X will need in order to remain competitive two, five, even ten years in the future.
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Obviously Mac OS X will need (and will get) a ton of new features in the coming decade or so. The trick is to find the equivalent of 'memory protection and preemptive multitasking.' That is, the features that will be essential in the future, but that are very hard to add while still supporting existing software.
I'm tempted to make this a two-part post, asking the readers to write their opinions in the comments area first, and then revealing mine in a follow-up post. But that'd be cruel (or lame, take your pick), and I'm sure plenty of people would have the same ideas I do. Why let them steal my thunder?
So, here it is. Here's what I think will quickly become Mac OS X's most glaring technical limitation, and what could lead to another Copland-style disaster if Apple isn't careful. Here's what Mac OS X is missing today that will be very difficult to add later without causing big problems for existing software and developers:
A memory-managed language and API
<cue dramatic music>
Both of Mac OS X's primary application development APIs require the programmer to manually manage memory. Carbon is a C-based API, and memory management doesn't get much more manual than plain-old C these days. Cocoa uses Objective-C, which abstracts memory management with a retain/release system, but the programmer must still explicitly trigger or schedule these actions. Under the covers, Objective-C is just a runtime engine on top of C anyway, so it's no surprise that manual memory management is still part of the development experience.
But why is this a bad thing? Doesn't manual memory management offer more opportunities for optimization? Aren't languages with totally automatic memory management 'slower' than their lower-level brethren? Yes and yes. But 'more abstracted' is a better way to think of those 'slower' languages, and 'more abstracted' always wins in the end, especially when it comes to operating systems and application development.
I don't want to go down the rat-hole of programming language religion, but suffice it to say that languages (and their associated APIs) that support automatic memory management are the future of software development. In fact, in many cases, they're the present. Java has made great strides in the server arena, and languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby are coming from the other direction. C, C++, and yes, even Objective-C, are being squeezed in the middle.
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As was the case with the memory protection and preemptive multitasking crisis, Microsoft is way out ahead on the memory-managed language/API front. Jewel quest: the sleepless star mac os. MS has its own new programming language, C#, and is working on an all-new memory-managed API to supplant the venerable C-based Win32 API. These are both projects that were started years ago, and that are finally coming to fruition today.
Whither Apple? Back when C# and the API that would come to be known as WinFX were on the drawing board at Microsoft, Apple was kind of busy trying to finally get over that pesky 'memory protection and preemptive multitasking' thing. Today, Carbon and Cocoa are just settling down; Tiger is the first Mac OS X release to be accompanied by a promise from Apple that APIs won't be intentionally broken in future releases.
Our Disgusting Fate Mac Os X
Put bluntly, Apple is wayAlientrench mac os. behind here. Yes, 'Copland' behind.
Even if Apple is smart and 'borrows' an existing memory-managed programming language (hello, C#), there's still that pesky API issue. Apple recently killed their Objective-C/Java bridge, and with good reason. Bridges stink. So forget about an Objective-C/C# bridge. And no, don't talk to me about adding garbage collection to Objective-C. That is exactly the sort of 'half-way' mindset that led to Copland. No, Apple needs to pull a WinFX and rethink the whole widget, so to speak, from top to bottom.
New APIs are extremely risky and hard to pull off, of course. Plus, Apple's just coming off a big transition, moving from the Mac Toolbox to Carbon and, for new development, to Cocoa. It's way too soon to even think about another move, right? Sure, if you're a developer. But if you're Apple, you'd damn-well better be thinking about it—not only thinking about it, but beginning work.
Our Disgusting Fate Mac Os Catalina
Oh yeah, that's right, there's some other transition going on right now, isn't there? Well, fine, delay the whole memory-managed language/API thing a year or two if necessary. But someone, somewhere at Apple had better be thinking long and hard about this issue. If Apple does get itself into another Copland-style jam around 2010, I'm not sure there'll be any pre-fab 'modern operating systems' hanging around for them to purchase and refurbish this time.