This can sometimes represent decades of work. The information on the site will also be stored in the cloud, so if the cloud or Ancestry ever goes down or out of business, people stand to lose their family trees. This means people who have used solely to build their family tree will have to keep up an annual membership to the site to be able to access all the work they have done on their family tree. The only explanation the company has offered is that it does not see any profit in desktop software going forward, and so will focus on online offerings.
Ancestry has not offered any suggestions for alternate solutions. Their blog is full of comments from displeased people.
announced it will discontinue making its acclaimed FTM (Family Tree Maker) software, and there are a lot of angry customers.
