I think this anecdote hits right to the more general reason that the evolution of the Internet has shifted away from decentralized services. In 20/20 hindsight,

I think this anecdote hits right to the more general reason that the evolution of the Internet has shifted away from decentralized services. In 20/20 hindsight, the maintenance load was never going to scale to the increasingly broad segment of the online population. Even for a lot of technical folks, the maintenance is a hassle. My anecdata: almost all of the technically capable folks I know who could maintain their own email server choose to outsource it. For the average Internet user it's outright impossible. Even if it only took "3-person days a year" for maintenance, the mountain of experience required to be capable of the setup just isn't there. Not to mention the stress and hassle of dealing with attackers, software upgrades, outages of various sorts, etc. And that pain tends to be multiplied by the number of services maintained. In this light, perhaps tools like Docker are quite a bit more interesting. We might imagine a scenario where the maintenance itself is the product, not dissimilar to automatic updates on Apple's App Store. You buy a "cloud app", which is installed on your server (or cloud instances) in a container, receives auto-updates provided by the vendor. Purchase and configuration is handled by apps on mobile and/or web. There a ton of potential wrinkes in this idea, and certainly some services (e.g. web search) wouldn't adapt into to this model... but it would be pretty neat to see even a partial shift to services-as-apps.