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Re: Docker

#11

Post by MBCook »

soneil wrote: post #6

The narrative seems quite clear to me. They released the tooling and the services to become the defacto solution, and then Swarm was supposed to be the cashcow that turned that into cashflow. And then k8s happened. They've raised a tonne of capital, and it probably looked sane at the time. And now they're grasping at straws trying to figure out how else they can turn this into revenue. A lot of the recent narrative h…

It always seems like VCs. They did great and started growing a lot. More VCs jumped into the next possible “unicorn” and they had even more money. They had to do stuff with it.

But they weren’t paying back fast enough, and K8s was making waves. Better make money fast while you can. Time for the squeeze play so the VCs can win.

If they had been allowed to grow at a more natural rate maybe it would all be fine. If they were allowed to be happy with a 40% share of a big future market, things could be great.

But that’s not the VC-shoot-for-the-moon way.

Re: Docker

#12

Post by zx8080 »

chrisbolt wrote: post #2

> There's been a lot of discussion lately about Docker, mostly about their boneheaded reversal following their boneheaded apology for their boneheaded decision to eliminate free teams. So making a bad decision is bad, but admitting it was a bad decision and reversing it is also bad?

What went bad is a little thing called trust. From the community.

Probably, especially from those who think in the long term. Like those who builds things for themselves. They don't like to read news from Docker every day and keep in mind that their project images and even base images can just disappear overnight. It's too expensive for them to track docker decisions. It just takes resoures.

Making bad decisions is not bad at all. Losing trust is.

Re: Docker

#13

Post by MBCook »

KronisLV wrote: post #3

> Still, the point of this tangent about Docker Desktop is that Docker's decision to monetize via Desktop---and in a pretty irritating way that caused a great deal of heartburn to many software companies---was probably the first tangible sign that Docker Inc. is not the benevolent force that it had long seemed to be. Suddenly Docker, the open-source tool that made our work so much easier, had an ugly clash with capit…

You grow WAY faster with a free product. There is no downside for people trying it out.

If it was paid, even a small amount, that’s a hurdle for people. Plus people avoiding it would have created more/stronger competing products as they had more incentive.

Get a ton of users then try to monetize later is a very common SV play for VC backed companies.

Re: Docker

#14

Post by berkle4455 »

okay so swarm is dead, but is kubernetes actually that good or is it just ubiquitous and you’re forced to use it today? what about nomad? or mrsk?

Re: Docker

#15

Post by jcrawfordor »

mitchellh wrote: post #10

I’m someone who had a front row seat to the emergence of Docker, and some might say competed with them (I’d disagree on that point). I don’t plan on commenting on their company, business model, or recent decisions. The only thing I want to comment on is the claim Docker was evolutionary, not revolutionary. I disagree, I believe Docker /was/ revolutionary. And I feel like I see heavy technologists make this sort of di…

(author)

I'm not sure that we really disagree, but I wrote this sort of late and I also think I wasn't entirely clear. The point I was trying to make is that the "container runtime" part of Docker is a lot less important than the tooling they put around it, and they made Docker Hub a very core part of that broader ecosystem.

Re: Docker

#16

Post by Waterluvian »

> How is it that Docker Inc., creator of one of the most important and ubiquitous tools in the modern software industry, has become such a backwater of rent-seeking and foot-shooting?

My guess: Because not all good ideas are profitable. Especially in software.

I read most but not all of the article, so if I missed this already being stated, that’s egg on my face.

Re: Docker

#17

Post by bobleeswagger »

I think we're past the point where key players like AWS have _ran with_ the technology Docker provided and did not pay their fair share in the process.

Docker as a company may be a joke, but I don't think the software will be nearly as nice to use without them. I think it's ridiculous that so many asshats are jumping on the hate Docker (the company) bandwagon without understanding how much they have been taken advantage of by the big players who can absolutely support them, but choose not to.

Sometimes I am so disappointed at how much ego still exists in tech. We're supposed to be more educated than the folks who came before us, yet we're doing a worse job.

Re: Docker

#18

Post by usrusr »

MBCook wrote: post #11
soneil wrote: post #6

The narrative seems quite clear to me. They released the tooling and the services to become the defacto solution, and then Swarm was supposed to be the cashcow that turned that into cashflow. And then k8s happened. They've raised a tonne of capital, and it probably looked sane at the time. And now they're grasping at straws trying to figure out how else they can turn this into revenue. A lot of the recent narrative h…

It always seems like VCs. They did great and started growing a lot. More VCs jumped into the next possible “unicorn” and they had even more money. They had to do stuff with it. But they weren’t paying back fast enough, and K8s was making waves. Better make money fast while you can. Time for the squeeze play so the VCs can win. If they had been allowed to grow at a more natural rate maybe it would all be fine. If they…

Yeah, that's the elephant in the room that the article claims to acknowledge, but misses by an order of magnitude.

"Docker is also a company, and companies are expected to produce revenue." That reads like wages, office rent and perhaps a boat for the founders. But they can't be that humble anymore, not after burning through a quarter billion in VC money. (even if those numbers seems surprisingly harmless compared to some more consumer oriented VC bonfires)

Now it's their job to make those investments winning bets or ruin the company trying. All that free image CDN convenience much of the docker revolution was built on? Too good to be true, effectively a loan from VC betting on getting people hooked.

Re: Docker

#19

Post by nemothekid »

kinghuang wrote: post #9
soneil wrote: post #6

The narrative seems quite clear to me. They released the tooling and the services to become the defacto solution, and then Swarm was supposed to be the cashcow that turned that into cashflow. And then k8s happened. They've raised a tonne of capital, and it probably looked sane at the time. And now they're grasping at straws trying to figure out how else they can turn this into revenue. A lot of the recent narrative h…

I feel like all that VC money was actually their undoing. Instead of working with the community, Docker spent bucketloads of money acquiring a lot of community projects and startups in an obvious attempt to become an end-to-end container solution company. But, they didn't have a plan and ended up killing most of those acquisitions. To me, it felt like Docker was using all the money they got to squash the community in…

>I feel like all that VC money was actually their undoing.

I don't think you have Docker without VC money. I think at best you have some LXC-lite project that is intertwined with GCP/AWS/Azure but unfortunately, I don't think you get something as quite polished as Docker in the same timeframe without VCs pouring millions to hire people to work on it.

Where I am sympathetic to Docker is Docker wouldn't have worked as your standard Open Source project; it took a ton of paid engineering hours (and you can argue X% was wasted on projects that went nowhere, but that's a given in any org), to get the software and infrastructure right, and if they had tried to charge developers they would have gotten nowhere. Even now, where people are keenly aware of the value of Docker, trying to monetize it is met with tears and angry blog posts.

I think Swarm was the plan (as the money has always been in providing infrastructure), Google just had more developer sway (which also killed Mesos).

The way I see it are there probably a ton of services you could build with the right team and right amount of people that could make an even greater impact than Docker on productivity and they would never be built because it would be way too difficult to monetize and the people with the talent to build it are going to get paid more working at FAANG to do any sort of OSS approach.

Re: Docker

#20

Post by nemothekid »

KronisLV wrote: post #3

> Still, the point of this tangent about Docker Desktop is that Docker's decision to monetize via Desktop---and in a pretty irritating way that caused a great deal of heartburn to many software companies---was probably the first tangible sign that Docker Inc. is not the benevolent force that it had long seemed to be. Suddenly Docker, the open-source tool that made our work so much easier, had an ugly clash with capit…

>I'm not sure why they couldn't have been a bit more aggressive about monetization from the start?

I'm not sure there is that much money in running a glorified specialized S3. Charging for disk space is terrible - the people who have money would probably just setup a private repo on S3 where it's cheaper and the people who don't aren't going to pay you.

For the amount of money they raised I don't think that would have been a convincing story to tell.

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