“When I learned this morning, via Twitter, that the small company behind Mac/iOS e-mail app Sparrow was being bought by Google, I almost didn’t need to read the startup’s announcement to know the upshot,” Harry McCracken writes for TIME Magazine. “Its five-person team will be working on Gmail henceforth; the existing Sparrow apps aren’t being discontinued, but they apparently won’t get any updates, either.”
McCracken writes, “Shall we review other examples of these announcements—some terse, some more chatty–from the past few years?”
• Google buys Gabor Cselle’s iPhone email app reMail, February 2010
• Google buys 3D interface company BumpTop, April 2010
• Google buys SageTV, June 2011
• Google buys interactive web-content company Apture, September 2011
• Google buys friend-sorting app company Katango, November 2011
• Facebook buys Foursquare-like social network Gowalla, December 2011
• Facebook buys social discovery app company Glancee, May 2012
McCracken writes, “I could go on–and on and on. But you get the idea… If the inventors of something you love tell you that they’re thrilled to announce they’ve sold themselves to Google and Facebook, remember this: They have reason to be thrilled. So does the company doing the buying. It might even be a happy development for users of the Google or Facebook services that the acquisition is intended to bolster. But it doesn’t really matter how celebratory, thankful and ambitious the announcement sounds–it’s probably bad news for you.”
Much more in the full article, which also discusses YouTube and Instagram as exceptions, here.http://techland.time.com/2012/07/20/why-google-or-facebook-buying-your-favorite-startup-means-its-probably-toast/