This. As a consumer and professional I've become progressively more resistant to putting anything in the cloud for fear that any service I use and value will be

This. As a consumer and professional I've become progressively more resistant to putting anything in the cloud for fear that any service I use and value will be 1) acquired and closed, or 2) go out of business. Any platform we use in the cloud is an investment...learning how to use it effectively, transitioning all our related content to it, etc...so when they go down it's often non-trivial to find an alternative and adopt it. The transition costs can add up. I think the reality is that people (consumers and businesses) will spend a lot more time and effort vetting new apps and platforms before investing in them as users. This means that new startups will need some serious legs and a way of explicitly addressing these underlying concerns. They may have to put aside a large chunk of capital just to be able to say explicitly that they have an operational five year or ten year plan. Otherwise users like me won't use the next cool thing because the odds are very good it won't last even a year. Part of the value of the really big successes like Salesforce is that they are clearly not going anywhere. Where I work we've invested in using a machine learning model deployment service which makes it relatively easy to expose our models as API endpoints, but since it's a product offered by a startup I know I'm hyper aware it could shut down any day out of the blue. If that were to happen we'd have to find another service to transition to, trial their product, and adapt all our stuff to it (potentially lots of new code to write and lots of learning how to use their platform effectively). It'd literally set us back months. Yes, potentially good for my job security, but who wants to fiddle with that kind of stuff. I want to move forward, not back or sideways. So yeah, the startup world needs to come to grips with this. I suppose what we might see in the future is a lot less VC funded startups, and a lot more bootstrapped startups which organically grow much more slowly. But even these startups will need to buckle up for a much longer growth trajectory because they'll have to overcome the idea that they might just shutdown.