Your argument itself aside, I think it's a bit uncharitable to fault someone for not seeing the relevance of an article they might not have read. Not everyone necessarily keeps up with every HN thread.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but maybe phrasing your comment a little less combatively would be nicer.

You've completely lost me. The argument ("Facebook killed Parse" -- see, I can even do it in three words) was given right there in the text. You certainly don't have to find it in HN archives.

The bit about the top post was just evidence to how visible to our community these kind of things are, in response to the great-grandparent's request for "name some examples", as if they were hard to come by. They're not hard to come by: you literally don't have to look farther than the most popular article of the last 24 hours on this very site.

Sorry if that seems combative, but them's the breaks. Argue from a sound position or else you'll get corrected.

The Parse situation is different because many there are companies betting their entire infrastructure on Parse. Moving from HipChat to Slack took a couple of days. Moving from Slack to whatever comes next won't take any longer.

Also, supporting your opinion with a coincidence (Facebook killing Parse) does not give you a "sound position".

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?

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.

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.

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

Someone can certainly be forgiven for having not noticed a bit of news that may not be relevant to them, but they should definitely be cognizant of how this industry functions, both now and in the past.

"Technology changes, economic laws do not." -- Hal Varian, who is now the chief economist at Google.