All good things must come to an end

things we love closing.
Image credit: flic.kr, romana klee

SpringPad is the latest cloud service offering to close its shop. If you don’t know, it is a collaborative note taking app with cool features to organize things. (springpad news)

What can users do? In this case, the company is gracious to let users know a month in advance and is also helping with a migration tool to export their data to a competitor’s service (Evernote )

It is a way of life, only constant is change. Technologies change (Flash news), companies go bankrupt, products and services get nuked.

Are there any signs to predict that a service may be going out of business?

Is it not popular? There are more than 5 million users of Springpad service.

Is it just a new fad? Springpad has been in operation for 5 years.

Is the Product not good or useful? Springpad has some of the nice features that competition does not have and there are loyal users even willing to pay

Is it just the size of the company ? Google drops services every year (70 services lost in 3 years, last popular one to go was Google Reader)

Google spring cleaning

So, what makes or breaks a service?

Bottom line is Springpad did not get additional funding to keep it alive. Springpad did not monetize with advertisements or subscription based premium accounts. It was only a matter of time to run out of funding unless bought for billions of dollars by one of the big internet companies like Google, Microsoft or Facebook.

How to survive in the ever changing world of technology?

• Go with a large company and hope that the product/service becomes profitable.
• When you use a free service, expect that the service will not be free forever. Also, understand that the service can be decommissioned at any time. This is the risk for using a service for free. Even paid services can have temporary outages.

Netflix issues

• Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. Try multiple services and spread your risk across multiple services.
• Also, you can keep an offline backup of your important data, photos, videos and documents.

Enjoy the ride while it lasts!

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