The problem I see with their business model is that the technology has long been commoditized, and alternatives are often better. It's a pretty tough spot to be in.
Anecdotally, I use Colima on my Mac, and it is better than Docker Desktop in pretty much every way I can think of. I'm sure I'm not alone.
Generally, a company like Docker would sell support agreements (ie: how Red Hat does it), but selling support to developers rather than to support core infrastructure/production deployments probably wouldn't work. I hope they can figure it out and succeed.
Competitive Docker Desktop replacements (podman) are just starting to see adoption IMO. Let's see the number next year. Lots of companies had no other choice but to pay.
Maybe i'm just in a bubble but none of those Docker Desktop replacements work well on a locked down corporate laptop. Sure you can get it to work somehow, manually configuring proxies, dns and stuff. Docker Desktop somehow just works. Thats why we pay for it.
That is changing fast and in a year or two Podman and Rancher (and a few others) will be just as good. A number of large companies are also building their own in-house replacements.
I was personally looking for an alternative even before the license change, because the performance of Docker Desktop on my Macbook Pro is terrible in a number of different ways.
I think it will be interesting to see the next few years. There were quite a few orgs that jumped as the pricing was introduced, detachment from k8s etc that was a side effect, a bunch of new options in (free) market. Just from my perspective out of the orgs I know of that bought into the pricing, every one of them has active projects to get off in the next year.
Such a strange way to say, “Charging enterprises for value provided.” They’re clearly providing value if customers are paying for it. If you would prefer to spend engineering time rolling your own, that is an option. Paying someone else to make that pain point go away is, clearly, also an option. Tangentially, sell to businesses, not individual devs.
Isn’t this forum supported financially by startups generating value from solving someone else’s problem…for money?
Assuming I meant absolute dollars is absurd, I was talking about sustaining or increasing revenue. That should, if anything, be easier for a small company.
In theory it’s simple and it’s happened many times: If you have a company with a lot of users but no income stream, you can hold those users hostage without adding much value, just find something that causes immense discomfort if it disappears and charge for it. Profit skyrockets, customers leave over time, the company dies.
You said "Juicing ARR in a dying company is not rocket science" - I'm saying it is rocket science and that it's way hard. The fact there aren't any examples makes me feel like I'm correct in saying it's not easy.
do we know the breakdown of that revenue? are companies paying for dockerhub access? is docker desktop a big chunk? how many users? how many companies?
if they can keep providing value to their high-revenue clients, sure, they might keep doing great, but if all they provide is a mediocre desktop app and the dockerhub these companies will eventually set up a caching proxy for the dockerhub (or otherwise trim down pulls), and will migrate to alternatives for the desktop app.
the hockey stick looks great though. and comparing it with Atlassian is really apt, because Jira is a bona fide UX garbage fire, but ... there are just no real alternatives. So folks continue to pay for it. It's madness, but there's a method to it, of course.
It makes me wonder if Oracle is making any money off of Java at this point. Aside from losing court cases over IP, they have seriously soured the brand.
Anecdotally, I use Colima on my Mac, and it is better than Docker Desktop in pretty much every way I can think of. I'm sure I'm not alone.
Generally, a company like Docker would sell support agreements (ie: how Red Hat does it), but selling support to developers rather than to support core infrastructure/production deployments probably wouldn't work. I hope they can figure it out and succeed.