It would be easy to say that Nitrous' issues were due to technology or the market not being excited. But they went through 3 different CEOs and did not advance

It would be easy to say that Nitrous' issues were due to technology or the market not being excited. But they went through 3 different CEOs and did not advance / innovate for a number of years after raising a bunch of money. The market shifted on them and they didn't adapt to that. I think that in their case, they had other issues beyond technology that got in their way. They were way way ahead of Codenvy and Che, and in many ways Cloud9IDE 4 years ago when all of us raised our money. And they just didn't adapt. By all rights, my company, Codenvy should have been out of business because of Nitrous. They had a good 2 year advantage on us with Docker workspace management. They had top top tier investors with seemingly endless pockets and a native understanding of how to sell into the enterprise or with SaaS. Essentially, they had a stacked deck. If they had innovated or open sourced their IP it into the right community two years ago, we would have had no oxygen to pursue our Eclipse Che strategy. That would have turned us into a #3 or even worse a #4 or #5 vendor. That would have cut off additional capital, not a great growth strategy, and death would have been likely. At this point we are a #1 or #2 vendor, and likely the #1 vendor by revenues given the number of enterprises we have with onpremises systems. I don't know what we would have done if Nitrous had moved differently 3 years ago, but for a number of years I obsessed about them as a competitor, refreshing their home page every day.