It only appears to work if you think that kind of advertising is how they got to their market position. Usually it's not.
Let's Docker for an example.
Docker did not get adoption because of some cliche marketing on their landing page. It got adoption from people doing tech talks and tech demonstrations and several companies writing blog posts about how migrating to Docker saved them from the headaches of deployment they were having before with the ad-hoc systems.
Complex enterprise tech gets sold by other means, usually personal relationships with key decision makers, and maybe some amount of bribery, who knows.
Docker failed to sell its commercial products to enterprises relative to the OSS adoption of its container runtime, at least at the venture scales they committed themselves to
Afaict what was being sold:
* Artifactory (hub): plenty of companies doing fine.. for product different than what docker did
* DC OS (swarm): managed k8s etc doing fine too.. but diff product again
They seemed close to PMF for both... But never quite hit it?
Selling to enterprises is hard.. I'm not sure what the lesson is here beyond git stars not being revenue, nor guaranteeing that it can turn into revenue. Successfully building one thing but selling another means you have to do 2 hard things not just 1.
Maybe a good analogy: Bloomberg has great reporters whose content goes out for free... But that's not what sells the terminal and data feeds
