[fcsp]

I think it's pretty clear that docker as the software extracted from the initial paas is by any means wildly successful to this day.

I think docker the company not succeeding as a unicorn has more to do with trying to position it as a unicorn than a viable business built upon something in that original offering

[jrockway]

I think they're having trouble selling the actual tool, though. Docker turning the screws on Docker Desktop users has resulted in a lot of people saying "we'd rather just switch to Podman".

I think the place where you're most likely to find success in selling tools is being a team that works for a cloud provider. Developers can just start using it, and someone else gets the bill. If you're a developer and have to start paying the bill somehow, that can be challenging in many organizations, and that's why "I'll just write it myself" is so popular.

[znpy]

> I think they're having trouble selling the actual tool, though. Docker turning the screws on Docker Desktop users has resulted in a lot of people saying "we'd rather just switch to Podman".

That was almost ten year later since Docker was released as open source.

[jrockway]

That's why I'm saying it's a questionable company. Would Docker have been as popular if it was closed source $100/month/seat? Would Docker have been as popular if they had registry pull rate limiting on day 1? No. They just lived off of VC for half a decade, then when that went away, they had to say "oh shit we better turn the screws", but by then, everyone had cloned their thing.

That's why I think developer tools are a very risky business. Your salesperson emails a developer in the wrong tone, and suddenly they just up and cloned your company over a 4 day weekend out of pure spite. (That was not Podman's story, rather, a large company decided to do that. Similar to the registry-screw-turning; gcr.io, quay.io, AWS's thing, etc.)

[fcsp]

Well, I think after taking the VC money that was lying on the table they focused on the wrong thing, trying to become a unicorn, where many companies have emerged building devtools around docker containers that have at least made solid exits, and this is something that docker could have provided itself instead of chasing whatever