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why do ppl abandon projects when they promise not to?

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The90sKid

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I find this more common on WJ than on other sites.

ppl on here start projects. promise it won't get abandoned and then what do you know.. 6 months later.. sometimes not even 3 months later it's abandoned.

example
lulzimg. it became popular when tinypic was clearing their datebases. they promised it will stay online and to be honest i stupidly trusted the owners when they promised it wouldn't be abandoned and people's pictures would stay up. to be honest i think it's one of the reasons why it took off the way it did. people were looking for a image host who would not delete their pictures. ..less than 12 months later.. they broke their promise that our pictures would stay up and now all our sites are once again plague with 404 missing pictures.

there are many more projects that ppl have started on WJ that ppl promise not to abandon. it's kinda annoying. I guess my point is. Why do ppl promise it won't get abandoned in the first place? don't make promises you can't keep. DON'T PROMISE USERS STUFF LIKE OUR PROJECT WON'T GET ABANDONED IN THE FIRST PLACE! Not only is it very annoying but it makes everyone look untrustable. i now think... is a promise just fake because nobody sticks to it?
 
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IMO. Firstly no one can promise forever.

As a user of any site whether hosting websites , images or files it is your responsibility to keep backups. People always plan on their businesses to succeed but can not foresee the future. Illness, cash flow, host problems and just time consumption.

If a site gets too big it becomes a major consumption of the owners time. If the money does not flow then they can not get help and the site will either fall into a slow poorly maintained mess or shut down.

This is only common sense. And here on WJ we have almost all new business owners with good intentions and no real funds to keep a site going without income for more than 3 months. They do not realize when you start a business you should have at least one year of resources available to keep you going until the cash flows.
 
People promise such things to get more clients.

IMO, if a service provider gives proper reasoning to his/her decisions - it must be okay. You need to understand that there's ups and downs in any business.
 
If something happened to me, Easehosting will still exist, because it's no one man business.
We have examined everything before we started this business

You can make promises. that's good but also make credible promises.
We will continue in this industry that I can guarantee, and you know why? Because we have arranged everything so.

I'm almost every half hour online at Wjunction. Why? because, I am promoting my business and I must therefore monitor whether someone is intrested in our services.

Our live support is almost 15 hours a day online.
We do all that effort because we guarantee our customers something and we stand behind our words.

You have people who want to do a quick buck, but you also have people who like this work, because they enjoy this.
 
It's the way technology works. Often referred to as "Google Culture" as they excel at launching products only to end them months later.

As a developer the most exciting part of a project is the build. You have goals, ideas, research, feedback and most importantly fun. The next stage is maintenance. This is terrible as you have to deal with common folk who unlike your beta testers usually haven't a clue. They require huge amounts of time and support and cry like children when they can't get the most basic of things to work due to their incompetence but blame the developer. Added to this they demand additional features and upgrades on a regular basis for free.

As projects are so enjoyable to develop compared to maintain it's often easier to jump ship if the revenue or user numbers aren't worth the hassle of maintaining or if you have a similar product that's better.

So lulzimg while successful from a users point of view wasn't financially. Returning to Google as an example both Wave and Buzz weren't successful from a users point of view. Google Video on the other hand was dropped due to the success of a similar product Youtube. Google Gears, Google Friends Connect, Google Sync, Google Talk Web App, Google Flu Vaccine Finder, Google Patents, the list is massive were all shut down even though they had thousands of users. Larry Page said that you can make something 10% better than what exists and it will survive but if you make something 10 times better it will excel and make real money.

This means even if your project is 10% better than whatever else is out there it's better to abandon it and follow that goal to create something that's 10 times better. Look at the projects that Google has closed and look at the ones it has coming. Google Glass and self driving cars. These are revolutionary and wouldn't be possible if they kept the staff maintaining all their closed products.

I applaud any developer who closes a successful product in pursuit of an even greater one.
 
Well sometimes at some point things doesn't workout as it was planned to, people will keep their projects active only if it is worth it, and by "worth it" I mean that they are making money of it or it is doing to job it is supposed to.
Of course they shouldn't promise anything they can't guarantee but they do that to attract customers.
This is the market.
 
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