I found this video so super interesting and yet frustrating for completely personal reasons: the company I work for used to sell a tracing product that was specifically designed for the distributed tracing problem and handled all of the issues he highlighted - trace sampling, cross-language/framework support built in, etc. It was/is based on the same tech as Zipkin but is production ready. Sadly, he and his team must have spent a huge amount of time rolling their own rather than ever learning about our product. Now, it still might not have been a good match, but man, the problems he mentions were right in the sweet spot of what our product did really, really well.
This is why sales and marketing is so so important and yet overlooked/undervalued. You might have a great product that's perfect for your customer, but you also have to convince them to use it and pay for it.
Yes, I think that is the primary problem - they invested in Zipkin. At the end of his talk, he mentions the idea that you should prioritize core functions and use vendors for everything else. But he's right that some person created that code - and thus it becomes difficult to get them to switch. And instead it becomes a huge source of technical debt for a company that is non-core to their mission.
