The company has never been good though. The technology was great, but they never found a way to monetise it properly, and their whole approach to outreach, community, and developer experience was terrible. Their support, non-existent.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that, given the ubiquity of their product, I can't think of a worse way a company could have performed. It's been about 10 years now since it really took off, and in that time, the technology has been great, but dealing with the company, always been difficult.
Nah, you just didn't look carefully enough. Docker the technology has been recurring amateur hour of screwups. For example, they hashed the downloaded data but forgot to compare the hash to expected value.
The only thing "great" about Docker was the rough idea of easy-to-transport filesystem images that could run just about anywhere, and the fact that they managed to make that kind of thinking mainstream.
I disagree with you. I've used it in production for almost a decade now. There have been issues sure, but name me a single production-level technology that hasn't had problems?
- Microsoft Windows: Various versions of Windows have had critical security vulnerabilities over the years, leading to widespread malware outbreaks like WannaCry and NotPetya.
- OpenSSL: In 2014, the Heartbleed bug was discovered in OpenSSL, which left millions of websites vulnerable to attacks that could steal sensitive data.
- Apache Struts: In 2017, the Equifax data breach was caused by a vulnerability in Apache Struts, a popular open-source framework for building web applications.
- Boeing 737 Max: In 2018 and 2019, two deadly crashes were caused by a software flaw in the flight control system of the Boeing 737 Max airplane.
- Google Cloud: In 2020, a widespread outage of Google Cloud services caused disruptions for many businesses and organisations that rely on the platform for their operations.
Many things have had individual bad incidents. Docker has had many, and they've been of incredibly naive kind. To compare Docker to the kind of careful engineering done in e.g. airplanes is just silly. The commits to Docker ("Moby") have historically been underwhelming. Docker is to containers as what MongoDB was to NoSQL.
Docker either came up or popularized the idea that completely dominates how almost all services work today. That is something imo. It is obvious in hindsight maybe but not in 2012.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that, given the ubiquity of their product, I can't think of a worse way a company could have performed. It's been about 10 years now since it really took off, and in that time, the technology has been great, but dealing with the company, always been difficult.