Rereading the zones paper now makes me cringe, but I was in my 20s, what can I say. I think the argument we made that holds up is that this was designed to be a technology for server consolidation, and the opening section sets some context about how primitive things were in Sun's enterprise customer base at the time.

I have a lot of admiration for what Docker dared to do-- to really think differently about the problem in a way which changed application deployment for everyone.

Also I can tell you at the time that we were not especially concerned about HP or IBM's solutions in this space; nor did we face those container solutions competitively in any sales situation that I can recall. This tech was fielded in the wake of the dot-com blowout-- and customers had huge estates of servers often at comically low utilization. So this was a good opportunity for Sun to say "We are aligned with your desire to get maximum value out of the hardware you already have."

It's a blast to see this come up from time to time on HN, thanks.