On that archived page: "A forever home for your collection"

Forever just doesn't mean what it used to.

Like when people assume a "lifetime guarantee" is for the lifetime of themselves. More correctly it means for the lifetime of the company or the product support cycle.

SaaS rots faster than the bits on your spinning rust. The incentive structure tends to drift away from a corp's long-term strategy. If you don't own it, you don't own it.

Even the bits you own rot faster than brick and mortar. It's just the nature of the universe - cosmic rays, magnetosphere, etc. Doesn't help that the integrated circuits are smaller, and hence much more brittle with each generation.

And do you even own the hardware you purchased? Even before the ongoing craze to turn fridges into subscriptions into landfill. Try some "retro" devices from 15, 20, 30y ago - many builtin websites/apps/services just 404, long before companies planned for obsolescence.

Only diamonds are forever.

Agreed, except none of those things (Saas, hardware, etc.) explicitly promises you a forever timeframe. That's really what I'm poking at--the promise, rather than the reality, which you quite accurately describe.

And that's the fundamental problem with web software, regardless of its technical merit (or lack thereof).

It's crazy that you can pay something for so long but whenever they decide it's not profitable enough, you not only loose access to the hosted ressources but also to the complete usefulness of the tool.

Meanwhile there are people still keeping around computers from the late 2000s. They might not be secure for browsing the web but at least the software can still be useful.

The update everything all the time is such a perverse incentive, tech is gobbling up value that could be better invested somewhere else.