Musings from The Software Underground

NetNewsWire, a Mac application, was recently acquired by NewsGator for an undisclosed amount, as was the primary developer, Brent Simmons. Congratulations go out to Brent of course. Unlike one of the last major Mac app acquisitions, Watson, from Karelia, it doesn't look like the end of NNW. The acquisition of NNW clearly fits into the business plans of NewsGator (unlike the purchase of Watson by Sun, which wanted, of all things, a Mac application to boost their Java technology business. The project they were working on has evidently been canceled, and Dan Wood is now working on Sandvox, a new Mac OS X app).

So, while the Mac software world doesn't lose a well known developer, Brent will continue to work on NNW full time, it does loose another small, independent development company. I can certainly relate to some of Brent's comments:

"When a software product becomes as popular as NetNewsWire you end up spending less and less time actually programming. But programming is what I love to do, it’s what I’m good at—and the only way to keep making NetNewsWire better is to write code."

...

"NetNewsWire users deserve a product with more resources behind it. If my time can be freed up so I can spend lots more time working on new features (and bug fixes!) then that’s good all around."

One thing some users need to understand about small development houses is that in most case the developers are also the support, sales and marketing people too. This all takes away from the time you can spend developing the product, and all of these "jobs" are necessary to survive and hopefully thrive. I can certainly understand Brent's desire to JUST write code now, though. With his user base, even with help from his wife, I'll bet he was getting less and less time to devote JUST to development, and I think it's safe to say that the joy of software development and creating something from nothing is why most of us are doing this to begin with.