That's what people usually say but they have tried to do just that a few years ago and it didn't really work. Docker inc has been doing great since they have shifted towards even more standardization in their container runtime, and focused on dev tooling. They became profitable when they focused on Docker desktop and docker hub instead of trying to build a clunky alternative to kubernetes or yet another cloud orchestration tool/platform.

Docker was a spinoff of an internal tool used to build exactly the type of PaaS you're describing. It was like a better Heroku and I loved it, but they shut it down when they focused on commercializing Docker itself.

dot cloud yes?

I was surprised when they shut that down too.

That was always weird to me they opted for freemium cli instead of enterprise paas play. Maybe it was just too early

My guess is the margins were really bad for a PaaS. It's expensive to build on top of other people's clouds.

There's also the issue that building an effective enterprise sales organisation is a whole Thing and if you believe you can achieve profitability via a different path then the temptation to file the enterprise approach under "I have no idea how to do this and also I would rather not" is probably pretty strong.

(this is in no way a comment about what the right decision would have been, only musing on an additional reason the decision might have gone the way it did)

Didn’t they buy at least one of these? It was garbage, and no one cared.

dotCloud was actually what Docker came out of. No one cared because they didn’t prioritize it enough to make it good

Orchard was the one I was thinking of.