John Gruber’s Postmortem of Vesper
It’s always fascinating to read an insider’s perspective, and doubly so when it comes from someone whose day job is industry analysis. That combination makes John Gruber’s postmortem of Vesper on Daring Fireball all the more interesting for those curious about what makes some apps succeed and others fail. Vesper was a note-taking app developed by Q Branch, a company made up of Gruber, designer Dave Wiskus, and developer Brent Simmons, who is well known for apps such as Glassboard, MarsEdit, and NetNewsWire. Gruber attributed Vesper’s failure to generate enough revenue to bad timing with regard to iOS 7, shipping the iPhone app before the Mac app, competition from Apple’s Notes, and not switching to a subscription model. His evaluation should be required reading for any developer considering making a productivity app for the Apple ecosystem.
And if you want to read more on this, check out this post from Brent Simmons:
http://inessential.com/2016/08/21/more_notes_on_vesper
And this article from David Sparks:
http://macsparky.com/blog/2016/8/vesper-as-the-canary-in-a-coal-mine
Has Brent Simmons ever created a successful product? It seems like everything he created, withered away until he abandoned it with many excuses and explanations.
I don't know about Glassboard, but Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software bought MarsEdit and continues to maintain it. Brent also sold NetNewsWire to NewsGator, and it was later acquired by Black Pixel.
http://tidbits.com/article/16077
I checked around. Simmons was a protege of Dave Winer, which explains why his influence is vastly disproportionate to his actual results.