It seems weird they're announcing this during I/O - you'd think they'd avoid telling developers that their platforms sometimes shut down with 3 months notice and with no replacement provided when everyone's paying attention.
This isn't exactly a graceful shutdown. The majority of their files were already deleted in the past on very short notice. I have no idea who still used or trusted their service.
That's about as classy a product shutdown as you could wish for.
Pity this didn't work out financially for Canonical, and too bad for those users that came to rely on it (but this is the issue with pretty much any service that you don't operate yourself).
Perhaps things were running in maintenance mode already, and there is no longer the desire to run this part of the business, so they took this unfortunate opportunity to wind things down.
This would definitely be something more warranting of a website shutdown. Holding out hope for a driver issue or something, but I had a bad feeling about that frivolous patent app as soon as I read it.
They can't keep up the supply.
But I don't understand why they need to shutdown -- looks like the upkeep cost is quite low as long as they are not releasing new product...
I am sure they thought about the "PR" consequences of shutting this service down. My guess is the number of users are comparatively so low that it doesn't really matter. I doubt any of their major enterprise customers were using it.
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