THE NEW SHIPPING CONTAINERS
A startup in the software world may be making a major contribution to programming efficiency. This is especially true for IT professionals who must constantly test, update, and reconfigure their code to work seamlessly during and after Internet site upgrades and changes. The startup, Docker, looks to be a very promising solution to this quandary as reported by Peter Burrows (with Jack Clark and Dina Bass) (“Growing Your Apps in Isolation” Bloomberg Businessweek , 12/22/15–12/28/15, pp. 33–34):
“ Docker automatically rearranges programmers’ code into virtual ‘containers’ that are preconfigured and standardized to work on most any hardware setup, shaving weeks or months off the process of sending an app into the world. ‘This is about the mass commoditization of the production of software,’ says founder Solomon Hykes, who named the company and its software after longshoremen. ‘Docker can have the same impact on software that shipping containers had on world trade.’ ” (p. 33)
As great as Docker is, it faces a popular problem many other software players have faced: it is free. Monetizing the product sufficiently to render the company solvent remains a major challenge. With 70 employees, 77 million downloads of the free code, but less than $10 million in annual revenue, Docker must execute a strategy revision soon if it wants to stay in business. Given the software’s popularity with the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and Google, I remain hopeful that Docker will find its profitable niche.
