[ajross]

Good grief things seem argumentative here.

Uh... It's not a "coincidence" that commercial products tend to die before their users want them to. It's basically the norm. Commercial software services tend to live, what, maybe a decade at best? I cited Parse as a particularly apt example, but let's try some others you might remember, trying to pick examples from a broader time range, all of which were very popular in their prime and had many teeth-gnashing users at their death:

  * Geocities
  * Google Reader
  * ICQ
  * Napster
  * Twitter's API Access
  * Deja News / Google Groups

That's just off the top of my head. You really want to continue this argument?

[brwr]

Open source projects die too, and it's not always because there are no users. Sometimes there is no one willing to maintain the project. My point is that "closed source software dies" isn't a valid argument for not using a product.

[ajross]

Indeed. My email client of choice (Thunderbird) "died" this way last year. Except of course I'm still using it, and it's still being maintained by community effort for high priority bugs. So I don't see your point, actually.

[st3v3r]

Commercial software tends to at least give a warning before dying.