It depends on your definition of "back-burner". DotCloud might no longer be one of the most innovative PaaS, adding features left and right like it used to - but there's no reason it can't continue to be a reliable place to host your applications. DotCloud production customers want availability, performance, reliable support, good tooling, prompt bugfixes, and generous advance warning and transition support in the event of a sunset. It's very important to us that they continue to get all these things.
"While Docker, Inc. will continue to offer PaaS services under the dotCloud brand, we will be devoting the vast majority of our resources towards growing Docker and the Docker ecosystem, and have fundamentally re-oriented our business model towards Docker-related products and services."
dotCloud is quite stable and mature, so running and maintaining it at the quality standards of our customers (including support, 24/7 ops, bug fixes, etc.) requires surprisingly little resources. Little enough that we can "devote the vast majority of our resources towards growing Docker" while continuing to offer a quality product.
My argument to support this is that we have actually been doing this for 6 months, and so far there hasn't been any kind of exodus - in fact we have many more paid customers than we had 6 months ago :)
I think this is one of the reasons the public PaaS market is difficult: at the end of the day, past the excitement of developing a new app, people will pay for a reliable service that doesn't get in their way - not for the bells and whistles. It is very difficult to differentiate a paas on features.
The issue is really about the future. Your service is as useful today as it was yesterday or six months ago, but the perceived usefulness of your service a year from now has gone way down. We all appreciate your honesty about the pivot. But how will your customers fare in the long run?
It is kind of a strange situation. You're clearly the leader in hosted Docker PaaS at the moment. However, you're also promoting an ecosystem where all these Docker based startups are springing up, like deis.io. Why won't you be out innovating them? I fear you'll be moving down the stack, and letting others fill the PaaS role. It isn't clear to me how you're going to make money out of Docker (perhaps it isn't to you either).
I say this as someone who was going to be deploying my first Django app in a couple of weeks. I have a dotcloud account, and had messed around a little. That was my deployment plan. However, I spent tonight reading the Heroku docs. It seems at some level you realize you've lost out to Heroku, and have pivoted to this shiny thing that is getting lots of traction. That's great, and I'm sure that is the right path to take business wise. However, it doesn't sound like your current dotcloud customers will get any particular benefits from the great Docker fueled future.
