Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

I agree it was a missed opportunity, but:

1) Is there another company that benefited from that missed opportunity? No. K8S is free and it "makes money" in the sense that it's a great on-ramp for GCP, and therefore GCP is happy to subsidize it.

2) It's never too easy to be the "first" company to break into a new technology or opportunity. Look at Altavista, and how it lost to Google in just a few years, despite when Google started Altavista was already a huge company.

3) I am not sure that your proposed solution would have worked, at least in terms of making Docker successful. It is the obvious alternative, but hard to be certain that its outcome would have been a better one for Docker (the company).

View on HN

There are dozens of companies providing kubernetes with various levels of management, and there are also many companies selling addons. It's a huge market, and Docker captured almost none of it.

Considering Docker literally developed the underlying technology, and a lot of the complexity and capabilities of Kubernetes come from its design, they had a tremendous advantage that was squandered.

Google clearly had a huge advantage too since they have been using containers for years. But Docker certainly was in a good place.

Exactly a good model is puppet labs. They have a enterprise version and a go to consultancy They seem to be surviving. I hope in this age of the cloud

From memory docker and some of its engineers and managers where at logger heads with redhat and google see rocket, systemd containers, podman and k8s This forced docker to commoditise it’s tech or docker was slowly boiled into commoditised component

Signed arm chair warrior

> Exactly a good model is puppet labs. They have a enterprise version and a go to consultancy They seem to be surviving. I hope in this age of the cloud

Their CEO stepped down three years ago:

https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2016/09/luke_kanie...

The new CEO has ONE expertise, which is winding down bankrupt tech companies:

http://thedronegirl.com/2018/09/14/airware-closing/

> It's a huge market, and Docker captured almost none of it.

Is it though? Aside from cloud vendors (Azure/AWS/GCP) who's the "huge market"?

The cloud market is pretty darn huge, why are you dismissing it? Aside from the public cloud vendors, containers are very much a thing in the private cloud space too (OpenShift, Pivotal, etc).

Huge? Don't think so, not now. Name me one of these companies with more than $100M revenues per year. None. It's still a tiny market.

FYI: AltaVista lost to Inktomi, which then ceded to Google.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com