This seems like an embarassing error in communications for Docker! I wonder what's going on behind the scenes.
There is one positive message for Docker coming out today, which is that they raised $35 million dollars. Yeah, they didn't announce the valuation, so it is probably a down round, but still, getting $35 million dollars to work on your core business is a good thing.
However, the first announcement that TechCrunch wrote about didn't include that at all!
Check out the timeline here. At 8:45 a.m. TechCrunch publishes the first article, about selling off the Docker Enterprise line. Then at 9:21 a.m. TechCrunch publishes a second article - https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/13/mirantis-acquires-docker-e... - with two really large pieces of news. Both that Docker raised the $35 million, and they replaced their CEO for the second time since May.
TechCrunch says: for reasons only known to Docker’s communications team, we weren’t told about this beforehand. It seems like they only learned the full news after publishing the original article, and quickly wrote a followup in the next half hour.
What's going on at Docker to be this confused in the message to the press? Chaos around the leadership change? Close to running out of money and they only raised the round at the last moment? Were they going to sell off the open source component to someone else, but that fell through? Or, boringly, maybe they just thought they clicked "send" on an email that they didn't. I'll keep imagining there's an exciting reason though.
It sounds like a full recap so it's not exactly the sort of fundraise you necessarily want to announce at all. Unless you made your other press release accidentally sound like you were going out of business.
That's going to take a beating from GitHub's repository service especially when GitHub actions can automatically build containers and dump them in that repository.
maybe signals it wasn't a done deal or similar? but still, I agree that none of this makes sense. why not just sell off all the bits? like you, wondering if that fell through.
Well, it's not an end yet. That $35 million isn't nothing! That's why it's a shame that this was messaged so weirdly, a lot of people are going to skim this news and conclude that Docker went out of business.
Plus, open source Docker is a really nice tool. Even if the company tanks, I hope somehow the open source community manages to keep it going, because it would be a shame if the Docker parts of peoples' infrastructure just decayed over time.
"Why not sell off all the bits?" is the only clear part of this. No one wants to acquire all of the baggage of a 10 year old company. Dozens of investors, two major pivots, many rounds of funding. Hence taking 90% of the company...the good stuff.
Might be a good idea to steer the rest of Docker (the open-source, less commercial parts) towards CNCF and/or Linux Foundation as a subsidiary. It would be a better fit, and probably grow better as a baseline.
The $35m could keep the organization running and revise itself. Though not sure what constraints are on existing funding, revenue streams or what was and wasn't sold off there are left.
There is one positive message for Docker coming out today, which is that they raised $35 million dollars. Yeah, they didn't announce the valuation, so it is probably a down round, but still, getting $35 million dollars to work on your core business is a good thing.
However, the first announcement that TechCrunch wrote about didn't include that at all!
Check out the timeline here. At 8:45 a.m. TechCrunch publishes the first article, about selling off the Docker Enterprise line. Then at 9:21 a.m. TechCrunch publishes a second article - https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/13/mirantis-acquires-docker-e... - with two really large pieces of news. Both that Docker raised the $35 million, and they replaced their CEO for the second time since May.
TechCrunch says: for reasons only known to Docker’s communications team, we weren’t told about this beforehand. It seems like they only learned the full news after publishing the original article, and quickly wrote a followup in the next half hour.
What's going on at Docker to be this confused in the message to the press? Chaos around the leadership change? Close to running out of money and they only raised the round at the last moment? Were they going to sell off the open source component to someone else, but that fell through? Or, boringly, maybe they just thought they clicked "send" on an email that they didn't. I'll keep imagining there's an exciting reason though.