Docker's destiny ????

I was reflecting on the fate of General Magic after watching the amazing ShowTime channel documentary, thanks to Patrick McFadin for pointing me to it, and was reminiscing about it with Ben Golub today. Ben was the founding CEO of Docker - the category defining container technology / company that is foundational to all digital transformation and software projects today. As Ben famously put it back in 2015, 'Docker is a ZERO billion dollar company' - and my interpretation of that is that it is everywhere, yet extremely tough to monetize because of its very open roots. My reflection, and I said this to him as you can see from this conversation we had here is that there was no right or wrong approach given the nature of the technology and the way the community needed it. Despite the immense hype around it, monetizing Docker in the same way a VMware did with it's hypervisor and VM software was plain impossible. It's literally just one of those things that is what it is. And we just leave it at that. We bow down, we pay homage, and respectfully thank everyone's vision behind Docker as a foundational open source evergreen technology, a company that tried it's best to monetize it, and we move forward. It is the infrastructure plane's version of General Magic of our time perhaps.

I leave you with this quote that Ben gave as he keynoted the annual AWS conference way back in 2014:

Docker is a disruptive technology, some vendors will win, some will lose. What happens when we liberate developers from worrying about issues of production, and issues of distribution? What happens when we liberate applications from infrastructure? Who wins when we liberate all that creativity from the developers? And the answer is pretty clear – WE ALL WIN !