[trhway]

> They tried/are trying not to cannibalize their main source of revenue, and the world has moved on without them.

reminds me about Sun. There i learned that if you don't cannibalize your main source of revenue yourself, somebody else will do it anyway.

>They couldn't go from a lucrative private cloud revenue stream and then somehow convert it to a public cloud and expect to make the same amount of money.

it is the way of technology - from higher margin low volumes things grow/scale into lower margin higher volumes (with total money on the table only growing). To play that transition successfully a fat slow cow has to start moving faster and to become more lean.

>virtualization itself is dying

the original way - full VM like the VMWare Workstation - has become just one among several. Containers are here to stay for enterprises. Many enterprises aren't going to bother how you run the service which runs their containers as long as it runs and scales.