[klarrimore]

Developer tools have never had a huge market. Honestly, what are the necessary products for a relatively small market of thrifty developers? Maybe an editor, a nice keyboard, hosted code repo, and some code analysis tools? It's not a huge market.

Containers are something else entirely. They'll probably be running on every device on the planet in one form or another in just a few years. Anytime you're on the forefront of something like that, there's money to be made.

[nostrademons]

Developer tools have never had a huge market, but the enterprise ops automation market is huge. Think of IBM - this is their bread & butter.

Investors must be betting that containers are going to be the next Java, XML, or virtualization in enterprise computing, and that by controlling that technology, Docker positions themselves for extremely lucrative enterprise IT support contracts.