Docker, the technology, is the poster child for containers. But it appears Docker, the business, is in trouble. In a leaked memo, Docker CEO Rob Bearden praised workers -- despite the "uncertainty [which] brings with it significant challenges" and "persevering in spite of the lack of clarity we've had these past few weeks."
Lack of clarity about what? Sources close to the company say it's simple: Docker needs more money.
Indeed, Bearden opened by saying: "We have been engaging with investors to secure more financing to continue to execute on our strategy. I wanted to share a quick update on where we stand. We are currently in active negotiations with two investors and are working through final terms. We should be able to provide you a more complete update within the next couple of weeks."
Docker has already raised $272.9 million, but the company hasn't been profitable. It's[sic] venture-capitalist supporters -- ME Cloud Ventures, Benchmark, Coatue Management, Goldman Sachs, and Greylock Partners -- which have seen it through Series E financing, can't be happy, that after almost six-years, Docker still isn't close to an IPO.
While the previous CEO, Steve Singh, promised in May 2019 that Docker would be cash-flow positive by the end of this fiscal year, that appears not to have been the case. Otherwise, Docker wouldn't need to seek additional capital.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 01 2019, @10:51PM (5 children)
Everyone who use Docker can either buy $1000 of DockerDollars, or let Docker use 10% of each container's computing power to mine more DockerDollars. Who needs IPO when you can ICO.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 01 2019, @10:58PM (4 children)
Blockchain, blockchain, blockchain. (evil grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 01 2019, @11:24PM (3 children)
(I bet) there's a Docker container for that... would be a fun crowdsourcing experiment, but... we use our Docker instances in non-internet connected machines, so I guess we won't be contributing.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday October 02 2019, @03:12PM (2 children)
At least, not until the forced always online requirement. If they can't ping your server 24/7, then you can't be trusted!
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Wednesday October 02 2019, @03:18PM (1 child)
Hmm...., okay, maybe there's no forcing the issue as I guess this is open source software.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 02 2019, @04:32PM
Which is why I'm not too concerned that the people trying to make a business out of it are bungling the money side, badly. Maybe not bungling, so much, as running a high risk, high return game that's going the high probability route: down in flames. They've got a solid-ish implementation of some very useful tech, and even when the paid employees all shuffle off to other gigs, the open source project's performance shouldn't get much worse than it is today.
It's kind of like if you were using CentOS, and RedHat did something stupid - yeah, I wish they wouldn't, but... it's not terrifying in the way that a total shutdown of Apple for some reason or another would screw that ecosystem.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday October 01 2019, @10:57PM (9 children)
Hard to find financial statements for docker... best I could google up in five minutes was a crunchbase page where they've raised a quarter billion, they get about 50 million/yr in revenue, and their funding was based on being a billion dollar unicorn.
So ... depending how you run the numbers as a capital return project its not bad, returning somewhere between 5% and 20% on capital, which isn't bad.
The bad news is the articles seem to imply the revenue is a tiny fraction of total expenses, so they're losing money.
I guess their big hope was to get valued for $5B and IBM or something would buy them. Doesn't look like its gonna happen. Interesting to see what happens when they close down.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 01 2019, @11:00PM
Your pension fund may devalue your holdings (if they were stupid enough to bail out the initial investors).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 01 2019, @11:05PM (3 children)
Revenue / capital is not how you calculate ROC, it's net income / capital. On that measure, Docker is a dud. But don't worry, they will pivot and become a leading vendor of fintech... yeah, that's the ticket.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 01 2019, @11:26PM (2 children)
Yes you are correct and this is late at night for me. But, yeah, they spent a quarter B to get 50 M/yr revenue stream. Its better than some of the dotcom 1.0 companies that spent plenty of dough to get zero revenue at all, LOL. So we're not quite at April 2000 again, but gettin there soon....
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday October 03 2019, @08:21PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday October 03 2019, @09:28PM
Well... WeWork is a real estate management subletting company kinda like a shopping mall holding company but for office space instead of womens clothes retail.
Its somehow branded as "tech" because... they have a website. Oooh a website, in 2019, how innovative. So there are aspects of 2000 dotcom 1.0 there...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 01 2019, @11:12PM
This is what continues happening [github.com]. probably some forks too.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by qzm on Wednesday October 02 2019, @06:50AM (2 children)
Revenue is not profit
50m a year in revenue while making a loss is not a good return for anyone.
They operate at a loss.
Like most of these 'startups' they hope to profit by taking investors funds, not through actual profit.
The real question is how has docker burnt quarter of a billion dollars on what is mostly open source software...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday October 02 2019, @11:09AM (1 child)
https://www.docker.com/blog/docker-at-the-grace-hopper-celebration/ [docker.com]
https://www.docker.com/blog/now-open-dockercon-us-diversity-scholarship/ [docker.com]
It seems "creating and fostering diverse communities" is very expensive and marketing along those lines seems to indicate against a company becoming a successful unicorn.
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Wednesday October 02 2019, @03:02PM
Pretty much all the big tech companies are pushing diversity.
It's easier to find talent if you go where other people aren't looking or at least it was before it was a fad. It also helps avoid the problem where you do something destined to fail but all of your workers are white guys from the suburbs of northern cali so they all share the same particular blind spot to the stupidity of their dumb idea.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday October 01 2019, @11:21PM
The actual quote is free cash flow positive which has a technical precise meaning in financial analysis of investments and FCF does NOT include non-cash stuff on the P+L sheet.
So famously in other situations two ways to manipulate using FCF as a goal, are to ignore significant interest payments because they're not counted, or to zero out planned investment destroying the company in the future while turbocharging FCF for a quarter or year to make some executive bonus.
Its not that execs are lying or cheaty when they use FCF as a metric because 1) They're like that all the time because the business market evolutionarily selects for it 2) sometimes its actually honestly the best way to eval a company. Its more that if an exec gets all talky about FCF thats a flashing red light to look really close at their current manipulations of non-cash items on the P+L and how they might be dropping investment plans today to boost cash flow at the expense of future growth ... or future survival.
If financial analysis like this sounds interesting, its worth considering that classically an example of playing FCF vs EPS is buying factory capital machinery... FCF takes a single year hit for the entire expense of a machine, whereas EPS takes a longer term depreciation hit every year. Kinda sorta. So focusing on FCF is what a company does when its not planning on spending money to grow in the immediate future. If nothing else I'd be surprised if they made FCF their metric for success if they are planning on buying a data center full of gear in the near future.
And taking the above paragraph, plus looking at crunchbase, isn't it true that docker hasn't done any acquisitions for like three years? And the CEO talking about FCF instead of EPS would POSSIBLY imply they're not planning on buying anyone or anything (equipment, etc) very soon.
So that in a general sense is how you read management intent based on their use of a very specific technical financial buzzword. Its only slightly more accurate than astrology, geomancy, or biorhythms. But its worth pointing out that the CEO using that specific accounting term IS significant in some way, its not just flippantly tossing out a meaningless buzzword like "cloud" which is ironic given their business area.
I just thought that was interesting, why is this dude tossing out FCF instead of something more conventional like EPS? Well, he's probably not an idiot so he's likely sending an intentional message by that word choice.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 01 2019, @11:34PM (4 children)
Yet another example that the best way to lose money is to have an open source business.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 02 2019, @01:28AM (2 children)
Instead of open source you should say free pedophile foundation.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 02 2019, @01:53AM (1 child)
If you are referring to Richard Stallman, he would take MAJOR OFFENSE... that you associated his name with open source software.
It's FREE software, damn you!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 02 2019, @02:43AM
Ironic how Stallman likes parrots when he can be replaced by a parrot that squawks "free software!" and "GNU/Linux!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 02 2019, @02:55PM
Like Red Hat?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 02 2019, @01:27AM
For better results please replace with:
podman
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 02 2019, @04:53AM
Is it finally the time of reckoning for Tech Bubble 2.0?
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Wednesday October 02 2019, @04:13PM
I'm out of the world where this stuff happens for a few years, so I read the article and I'm struggling to understand how this is any different than running *NIX apps under different user accounts. Surely I must be wrong. Surely they didn't just re-brand user accounts as a "thin alternative to your fat VM", did they?
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ilsa on Wednesday October 02 2019, @04:25PM (1 child)
I can't say that this surprises me even slightly.
While Docker, as a concept technology is great, their execution is probably one of the worst I've seen. Developers love docker because it's so easy to do stuff with it. But ask a Sysadmin what they think about docker and their face will alternate between various shades of red or pale.
Docker is not like some library you plug into your app, to be added or ripped out whenever the developer feels like it. Docker is infrastructure. Infrastructure, by it's very definition, must be stable. Docker isn't even remotely stable. Continual releases. Continual bugs and regressions. Docker follows the idiotic "move fast and break things" philosophy, and that means anyone who is responsible for maintaining infrastructure looks at Docker very VERY warily.
Tack on an orchestration layer like Kubernetes or Swarm, and you've just multiplied the complexity, the bugs, and the complications.
So what's happened? There is now a cottage industry for managing docker. Almost nobody runs their own kubernetes cluster on-prem unless they have a very specific use case. In fact, it is actively discouraged. Kubernetes in particular is working very well, primarily because we as end users are not having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Google, Azure and AWS is. They're handling the version compatibility issues, etc, because only they have the economies of scale to justify the expense all that trial-and-error incurs.
So yeah, Docker has done a great job of making themselves irrelevant by all their dicking around. Hell, they can't even decide on a registry server without discontinuing the entire product and making an new one from scratch for no apparent reason whatsoever. If HTTP followed the "move fast and break things" philosophy, the internet as it currently exists, wouldn't. Microsoft would probably have gone bankrupt a long time ago if they cared so little about compatibility. The examples are endless.
Repeat after me: Infrastructure must be stable. The lower the level, the more dependent things there are on top, the more stable it needs to be.
End rant. :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 04 2019, @03:07AM
HTTP/2.0 and HTTP/3.0 follow your example perfectly well. Let's move from text based protocols to first binary and then UDP!