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Comment by michaelsbradley | Hacker News Reader

I suspect an announcement re: Docker's acquisition by a major tech player may follow closely on the heels of this news.

I don't think so. Docker Inc seems to want to take this as far as they can on their own, and I haven't seen anything to indicate a deviation from their stated and implied goal of becoming an entrenched brand of enterprise platform. I don't think they've done much in the way of positioning themselves to be bought, though I'm sure some of the bigger players would like to buy them. I'm interested in this kind of discussion, though, and would like to hear all about why I may not be right.

I think you're right. CoreOS never made the transition from technology and community leader to a sustainable enterprise business. I think Docker has made that transition. They are at a completely different stage than CoreOS and facing vastly different challenges.

For Docker the question is: can they carve out enough of the enterprise IT budget to reach IPO-level revenue growth before either A) their direct competition (Red Hat and Vmware) catches up to them, or B) Big Cloud commoditizes the entire container platform space, eventually nuking the growth of Docker, Red Hat and Vmware alike.

I'm not sure their direct competition really is Red Hat or VMware to be honest. Their product is Containers-as-a-Service, which is becoming a table-stakes service in cloud: everyone offers k8s management at a starting price of "free".

Docker is in a kind of weird place in the market where they're selling as-a-service for on-premise. Puts them in the same place as OpenStack and CloudFoundry for me - the former is already squished; jury's out on the second (IMHO). I don't see their current strategy succeeding, personally.

Why is that? They seem to be at very different stages.

Amazon perhaps?

My bet would be Microsoft

Or Oracle

Anybody but Oracle. Google perhaps, or VMWare.

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