Canonical Close To $30M Critical Mass; Should Microsoft Worry?

ruphus13 writes "Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, claims that the company is very close to the $30M mark, at which point, they will be a self-sustaining company. While people feel that this should not worry Microsoft, the real question is whether a 10,000 person effort on a failure like Vista can actually be the paradigm of a long-term strategy. From the article: 'Microsoft had 10,000 people [the article is unclear whether these were all developers, or administrative and support staff were factored in] working on Vista for a five year period ... huge profits in any given year can mean relatively little five years on. Canonical's self-sustaining revenue may not be threatening — but it leaves one wondering how sustainable Microsoft's development process really is.'"

Comments

Re:Marketing MIA

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Ubuntu has really removed the need for a terminal. I can easily get a system working (more easily than a fresh Windows installation) without touching the terminal. Sometimes I go to it because it gives me a power and speed a GUI *CANT* provide, but everything that needs to be done in Ubuntu can be done in GUI.

Anything that really can't (fixing a package error, for example) is explained very very clearly and tells the user exactly what to do to fix it.

There's nothing you NEED to do inside the Terminal anymore for a normal user. Just powerusers.

Re:Um, no?

[mhall119]

It's not the total dollar amount that would concern Microsoft, it's that a company can afford to compete with them on the desktop. Yes, RedHat already competes on the server, but so far Microsoft has owned the desktop. Now Canonical is competing in that space, on the same hardware, through the same channels, and it might be able to make a buck doing so. Microsoft hasn't faced competition like that since OS/2 died.

And before I get flamed by the Apple users, Microsoft doesn't compete on Apple hardware, and Apple doesn't compete through Microsoft's OEM channels. If Apple sold OSX separate from it's hardware, then it would be a serious threat to Microsoft, but for now Apple can't out-sell Dell, HP, Lenovo and all the budget brands out there.

Re:Marketing MIA

[fprintf]

I am a marketing droid. One of the things that has always been confusing to me is how I sign up. There seems to be lots of places where a developer can sign up, or even just start coding in spare time, submit a few changes etc. Perhaps I haven't looked lately, but I don't see any places that want my help. Sure, I can't offer free advertising or financial resources, but I can help write press releases, ad copy, design business proposals in powerpoint etc.

Actually the last sentence was somewhat in jest, as that seems to be what most techies think of marketing guys like myself. Really we do a lot of market research, helping to set what direction a technical business will take (e.g. the strategy), also a lot of what I do is explain what is possible to the business types, based on what I learn from techies, and in turn explain to the techies why they cannot build yet another friggin datamart for $2M. I have customer service skills godddammnit! Anyway, I'd hope to be able to help. Like I said, where do I sign up? Is it with Canonical, or is there a generic "Linux" marketing effort someplace?

Re:Marketing MIA

[xenocide2]

Marketing has two meanings to people in open source.

The first is "advertising". Advertising is great, anyone can volunteer to do it. People donate to buy ads, create them, and do crazy grassroots activities like chalking a Firefox logo in the campus quad. Of course, it's crazy expensive to buy an ad in the NYTimes, or put the Tux logo on a race car.

The second meaning is "market research", and frankly, that's insane. Ubuntu is free of charge, as is Debian and a zillion others. Market research in corporations are used to direct investment. I.e. telling engineers what to do. This is not compatible with volunteerism. Sure Canonical employs engineers and tells them what to do, but the way they make money is basically through consulting. I know tons of software consultants; none of them need market research because they already have a market paying their bills. Open source basically operates sans market research, on the theory that the people who know exactly what they want are best able to make it happen ("scratching an itch").

If you happen to disagree, great. But you'll have to take a guerrilla approach. I've observed the Ubuntu marketing project for a while and the thing basically falls apart from two basic conflicts: confusion over whether marketing is "research to direct effort" or "advertising," and a fundamental lack of engagement with the people who's efforts to be directed. Dodging the first problem is simple and just takes motivation and a little leadership. The second problem is much harder; a lot of people with marketing experience don't correctly understand how Linux and OSS differs from their own experiences in the corporate world.

Re:Marketing MIA

[ArsonSmith]

I've been using windows now for a little over a year. Coming from and exclusively Unix and/or Linux background since 1994. I am regularly told by the windows admins to go to the command line to do things such as recently ipconfig \flushdns I don't know for sure, but windows still seems to need a terminal for similar tasks.

Plus sudo apt-get install foo seems much easier than the windows version of get in your car and drive to the store and scan through the packages or download from some freeware site or research many vendors about foo to find a package for foo and break out the credit card in order for you to do anything.