I couldn't disagree more. Startups just going away over night is _the_ major objection I hear from business users (small and large) against using any of these products.

Purely consumer oriented entertainment kind of apps may be a different matter, but for anything else consumers are very apprehensive when there is any talk of losing access to an app they rely on. Unlike geeks, they can't just take some CSV dump and move their data elsewhere. For them, the UI is the data.

You may be annoyed about the tone in which some geeks complain about free apps going away, but don't let that mislead you into thinking geeks are the issue here. There is a huge issue and it's not opinionated geeks.

A business which wants a guarantee of continued service from a vendor knows exactly how to phrase that: contract.

True, though it also requires a belief that the company will honor the contract (and be able to), which is hard to rely on too much with many startups. Due to the desire not to complicate potential exits, startups also tend to be wary of signing service-guarantee contracts that can persist through acquisition; just about any service contract I've seen from a startup includes clauses about it going poof if the company is acquired.

Could be an angle for big companies like IBM and Microsoft's cloud offerings, or at least that's what they're trying to push, with pitches of: come get something reliable from us, with guaranteed service that we'll actually honor and will still honor in 10 years, instead of some startup that might be dead or bought next year.

It takes two to make such a contract.

I know a guy who runs a small web hosting business. He has actually gotten this question: "If you die, what happens to my website?"

This is a very valid question, and I hope he has a good answer.

I hate to seem so pessimistic, but it's more than just "geeks," instead, most people suffer from a sense of entitlement.

If you don't think this is a major problem with web services, you must have either not been around long, or don't use many of them.

"We can observe that many online services close" does not imply "People who make online services have a moral obligation not to close."

It's not a moral obligation. It's that there are structural reasons why most web services have a short lifespan.

That's a problem because it makes it hard to rely on any new service, and that's eroding user trust. At least among people I talk to, there's a lot more skepticism about new stuff than there was a few years ago.

I don't think it's a sense of entitlement in this case.

Why shouldn't people be upset when they would gladly pay to keep a service alive, but the silly creators decided not to let their customers pay out of some misguided hope for megariches?

This isn't about getting something for free. It's about the way you feel when somebody you love makes the same criminally idiotic mistake, over & over -- no matter what you do or say or how you try to help -- and ends up really hurting themselves AND others.

Like the whole Xmarks fiasco. The guy was totally against the idea of asking his customers to pay, and he had huge costs, so he announced he was going to shut it down.

Then his users revolted to such a degree that he finally decided to accept payments. And his customers paid up.

Result: Xmarks is still alive & appears to be thriving.

It would have simply fallen off the face of the earth, forever, if not for its devoted users getting angry enough to act.