Survivorship bias. These are the ones that haven't _yet_ gotten worse and are still currently popular. I'm listing them so people won't get blindsided when they do eventually bite their users.
There isn't enough space to list the closed source software tools that didn't make it. Off the top of my head: Adobe Flash, MS Basic, SourceSafe, ActiveDesktop, FoxPro, J#, Oslo, IronRuby, and Silverlight.
That’s not what survivor bias is. You listed a set of services saying that open source is better. But the entire history of everything you said shows they are superior to the open source solutions and have gotten cheaper and more capable.
Flash had a 10 year transition and was open sourced along the way, but was no longer supported by any of the open or closed source browsers… how does that help your point? No one. Listing a bunch of crap closed source projects doesn’t strengthen your point as there are equally a bunch of crap open source solutions.
What’s the open source solution to S3 or DynamoDB anyway? These are software solutions that require a certain kind of infrastructure, you are saying all companies should also specialise in that infrastructure?
Where do you stop? Self host in a data centre? Well now you rely on the data centre… self host in premise, now you are beholden to your ISP. Be your own ISP? Now you are beholden to government regulation? Be your own government… it gets absurd, but I’m just following your line of logic down the line.
It rather looks like it depends on who makes the product. One thing to look at is who has established trust and (so far) maintained that trust. For example, AWS has said that their products will get cheaper over time and that they wont deprecate any. The fact that they've managed to do that for 15 years or so means they have a built a lot of trust - which is itself an investment that they would be foolish (financially damaged by) a decision to break that trust.
Meanwhile, Google has firmly established that they will destroy any product at any time, and you would be insane to build a business on their products.
Adobe and Microsoft make meh products that dominate industries, and you are at their whim, and look, these two companies provide all your examples. (And to be fair, SourceSafe went away because it was not reliable and any sane business paying for a VCS switched to perforce before eventually moving to git like everyone else).
IBM will sell you anything as long as it's called "Watson" so who knows which Watson has been discontinued or not.
