Weird that no one mentioned docker as a counter-example.
It was the internal company aspiring to be a paas provider and failing to do so.
It was the internal company aspiring to be a paas provider and failing to do so.
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
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.
That was almost ten year later since Docker was released as open source.
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.)
> In fall 2003, the World Online developers (Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison) ditched PHP and began using Python to develop its websites. As they built intensive, richly interactive sites such as Lawrence.com, they began to extract a generic web development framework that let them build web applications more and more quickly. They tweaked this framework constantly, adding improvements over two years.