From my experience, it's not either-or. First you need "bottom-up" adoption by actual practitioners (in the case of Docker, developers and sysadmins). Then you

From my experience, it's not either-or. First you need "bottom-up" adoption by actual practitioners (in the case of Docker, developers and sysadmins). Then you also need to understand the constraints and requirements of people who are in a position to say "no". Those include managers, but also procurement, architects, network engineers, security teams, etc. Those people aren't the ones championing your product (most of the time they don't have very strong opinions either way), but they have a job to do, and if a new dev tool affects their ability to do their job, they're going to say "no". It's very common for developers or sysadmin to contact us and ask for a powerpoint deck, so that they can give a convincing presentation to their management about the virtues of using Docker in their new project. We even have specialized teams that go in and do everything they can to help Docker-based projects succeed. But as you point out, it all starts with someone inside the organization who really, really wants to use your product. Otherwise no amount of messaging is going to save you.