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.

"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.

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.