It's a hard problem, especially for a product that has as much surface area as OpenShift.
- It is a PaaS, which would compete with Docker, EC2, and Heroku.
- It's development environment. Sublime?
- It's a collaboration tool. Github?
More to the point, it probably doesn't do any of those things in particular quite as well as those specific solutions do, but they're hoping you see the value in everything together. Would there be value in an IDE that had a deploy button that automatically marked a task as done?
I'm not sure that's exactly it, and I agree that this site isn't wonderfully done, but it's hard to get across "the thing" when there isn't a perfect comp to "the thing" already out there. Bad comparisons will pigeonhole your product forever.
At Pivotal we call this idea the "Circle of Code"[0], which lends itself nicely to a diagram.
We see similar value in it, but so far I've seen it explained more via products that play nicely together versus packaging a single platform.
I guess the question to ask is: if I take away this part of the circle, how much worse off am I? The anticipated pain gives some inkling of how important it is to provide it. Take any of Tracker, Cloud Foundry or Concourse away and it all becomes much harder.
Where I personally differ is that I like plain ol' IDEs and text editors. The web-based IDE thing keeps coming up. It may be that it's one of those ideas waiting for its time. Or may be one of those ideas that is a bad idea. I personally think the latter, but my predictions about technology are so frequently wrong that I should write for Wired. (Edit: it's also possible that I don't understand what Eclipse Che is)
Kudos to Red Hat for tying it all together. People forget how many smart PMs, designers and engineers love working there.
Disclosure: I work on Cloud Foundry on behalf of Pivotal. I'm just an engineer, I shouldn't be cited as authority about plans or whathaveyou.
- It is a PaaS, which would compete with Docker, EC2, and Heroku.
- It's development environment. Sublime?
- It's a collaboration tool. Github?
More to the point, it probably doesn't do any of those things in particular quite as well as those specific solutions do, but they're hoping you see the value in everything together. Would there be value in an IDE that had a deploy button that automatically marked a task as done?
I'm not sure that's exactly it, and I agree that this site isn't wonderfully done, but it's hard to get across "the thing" when there isn't a perfect comp to "the thing" already out there. Bad comparisons will pigeonhole your product forever.