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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.'"
Developer count is not what matters. Linux has plenty of great developers. Marketing is what's missing to Linux today.
Sadly, if you google "Ubuntu Marketing", you land on an empty page (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam/News). Maybe someone needs to update Google's index :-)
Everyone here knows that Linux has the technical goods to take on Windows. But the cheerleading is missing. Where are the ads (with or without Jerry Seinfeld) and the glossy brochures at Best Buy?
So yes, Ubuntu being sustainable is a step in the right direction.
--
FairSoftware.net -- jobs for geeks by geeks
That's what will kill Microsoft (and why I believe Ubuntu has become one of the top distros). Everytime I hear about Microsoft management story, it seems to be an exercise in bureacracy.
But what will hurt Microsoft is the day Quicken or Photoshop have Wine 1.xx on their system requirements, next to XP/Vista/Etc. I'm too cynical to think they'll come out with native Linux version, but eventually they'll want to tap into the 10 million+ users of Ubuntu and other Linuxes, if nothing else but to stop their competition from taking hold.
At this point, there isn't much reason to not be OS agnostic for those type of programs.
$30 million? That's it? That's nothing. That's a regular grocery store. I'll check back when this number is about 100 times bigger...
Only if one ignores all the sales of commercial and support contracts. Otherwise, it's pretty sustainable. A better question might be "How effective is it?".
Caveat Utilitor
Remember, this is slashdot, the story will be posted. Around Friday.
They are close to the $30 Million dollar mark! Hooray!
Okay... is that gross sales? Net profit? Payroll? My guess is gross sales, but the summary doesn't say. Without that other piece of information, this summary makes ZERO sense (and you can put any unit you want after ZERO).
Hey, guys, my car goes from 0 to 120 in 3! That makes about as much sense as the summary.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
MSFT reported revenue of $60.4 billion dollars for 2008. That comes out to about $165.5 million per day.
There are reasons why Microsoft may or may not feel threatened by things like Linux. Maybe netbooks. But I doubt a $30M company scares them much. In fact, I'd say they're much more worried about RedHat than Canonical - not because of their size, but because RH and Microsoft do really compete in the server market. How many Linux notebooks has Dell sold so far? Even by the lowered standards of Vista there's simply no comparison there.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I'd love to have a 'failure' like Vista!
Just like RedHat took off in its own direction, after being the darling Linux distro some years ago, eventually perhaps Canonical will see the same writing on the wall and abandon the focus on the Linux desktop. The money is in servers and support contracts, the Ubuntu consumer desktop serves to give a distribution a foothold, to give it eyeballs, to focus developer attention on it. But if Ubuntu is to truly become a business it needs to be a whole lot more than self-sustaining.
I also second comments that $30 million is nothing in terms of revenue. There are thousands of small businesses that do that kind of revenue every year, and yet we don't ask if MS is worried about XYZ business.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
And that's the problem -- people think a product or service has to make tons of $$ to be successful. Something like Ubuntu subverts our capitalist assumptions, because it actually gets cheaper the better it gets, and the more people who use it. Supply and demand work differently.
If you remember a while back I said something like: There will never be a year of Linux, but it doesn't matter, what matters is that there is never a 'the last year of Linux or 'the Final year of Linux'. The fear never leaves the back of my mind that there will be a day coming when either Jobs or Ballmer or some US politician like Orin Hatch says 'If you are a Linux user, we will come find you, man, woman, child or company. You will use Windows pr you will pay fines, you will go to jail.'
This whole 30 Million, if its true, could mean Linux is here to stay, at least for a while. It could mean that we will continue to see at least a steady development of Linux games and applications. So Linux may hold on if we can for one thing, find a way to keep from losing any more important programmers, while at the same time attracting new talent. An example of this that hits close to home for me is the announcement Pixel would be leaving. I'm a Mandriva contributor. I'm worried about what will happen to Mandriva without Pixel.
So, again, don't celebrate just yet.
You have to be kidding me.
How much source code from Q-DOS do you think still remains in the Windows NT tree? The only portion of BSD that I'm aware of that was - at one time - used for NT 3.51 and 4.0 was the IP stack. Which is a pretty dinky part of the kernel, never mind the entire OS tree. SpyGlass wrote a little web browser that could render no more than HTML 1.0 back in the day - how much of that do you think still remains in Internet Explorer 7?
Get a grip.
Canonical is the company that produces Ubuntu.
Just like:
Microsoft is the company that produces Windows.
Apple is the company that produces OS X.
Ubuntu is the most popular desktop version of Linux, probably because there's a large focus on being user friendly. One of their main slogans is: "Linux for human beings".
The article clearly describes it as revenue.
From that alone, you can tell he reads slashdot.
The second best quote from TFA:
Kudos on reaching the self-sustainable mark Mr. Shuttleworth! Let's hope you really do make the world a better, more free, place.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
MS will not be toppled any time soon. very long term they will, because all companies die at some point.
The vast majority of end users don't know the difference between XP and Vista or that Vista was some kind of failure. They bought their computer and whatever it has is what they use. Only geeks know/think that Vista was a failure. It was only a PR failure. If it was a real failure new PCs would not be shipping with it.
Currently and for the foreseeable future almost every PC ships with an MS OS. That is the key, people do not decide which OS to run, the vendors do.
The only way that Linux is going to take off is if a vendor produces some must have pc/appliance/etc that runs Linux. I thought the netbook might be it, but now I know several people that have them and they all got the XP version.
Numbers are totally irrelevant, or at least their magnitude is. The point is that Canonical is self-sustaining. Last time I checked, Mr Shuttleworth did not need the cash to mend his shoes, he wanted to make something that was good.
When Canonical becomes self-sustaining, he will have accomplished that goal. This means development will be funded, marketing efforts will be ongoing, and with luck, people will make money.
This means that if you like and use Ubuntu, it will be there in the future. I do for both, so this is very good.
The more money it makes, given their structure, the more development and marketing they will be able to do. I don't know the financial structure of Canonical, but I doubt the people with a piece of it are more interested in money than changing the world. That likely means the people who own it will dump the majority of anything over the $30M back into the distro.
If you see what they did with $30M, imagine what an extra $10M can do?
This is a good thing.
-Charlie
Where are the ads (with or without Jerry Seinfeld) and the glossy brochures at Best Buy?
Marketing isn't just advertising and promotion. It is also the act of determining what kind of product a particular target market desires. The reason why linux isn't on the desktop is because it doesn't get something right that other OSes and platforms for that particular target market. If the target market is "desktop users" then I say desktop users don't care about what is running under the hood, they only care that their apps and their devices work.
In my opinion, the correct marketing strategy for a desktop linux distro would be:
And no, the correct answer is not "use gimp" or "use openoffice" or "don't buy ipods". If you want to sell linux, you need to offer them something that meets the customer's needs. All I hear when open source devs say "use openoffice" is the same as forcing openoffice down their throat. Instead, the first question any good salesman asks of any customer is "what do you need?" If they then answer "I need to use itunes for my iphone" then you better get linux to work with itunes and their iphone otherwise your product is not for that customer!
Notice that I never specified how one would get devices like iphones and MS Office and such to work. One could strike an agreement with the manufacturers to release drivers, apps, and such or maybe outline a standard that manufacturers can build and work with. But guess what, that means a new marketing strategy for a new customer. In this case you're going to have to make it easier for the companies (the new target market) to make more money either by sharing the workload or offering them something that benefits them.
Unfortunately, things like the GPL and even the nature of linux limit the choices in marketing strategies (as well as the one-sidedness many FOSS advocates have). But remember, the customer is king; if you can't give them what they want, they will never be your customer.
On a side note: I've always felt that FreeBSD had a better chance for being a good base for a desktop OS simply because of licensing. Example: the FreeBSD camp has always had madwifi available with no licensing issues while the linux camp has only recently gotten some fully supported madwifi drivers without tainting the kernel. But of course in a desktop environment, I have no problem with companies providing proprietary drivers. If their product doesn't work, it goes back to the store. In a corporate environment, I do have everything against proprietary software but that is because the needs of a company (different target market) are different from the needs of a home user. If that hint wasn't big enough, I was pointing out that while linux might not be for the home desktop user, it might be better suited for the corporate office user. Get MS Office working and you've probably met most cubicle worker needs.
...as long as Windows is the OS that everybody wants to use because it runs on their system, any development process is sustainable.
Vista, for all its perceived faults was a massive step forward for the Windows architecture. Yes, it had sucky bits that people didn't like, but on the whole (and going forward), the changes were for the better.
Just remember that Windows NT was pretty poor when it first came out too, as was OSX. Windows 7 looks to be shaping up quite well (at least in terms of popular reception, even if it's not much different), which Microsoft must be thankful for.
It also probably cost significantly less than Vista to produce.
Interesting though, that the most popular Linux distro right now according to distrowatch is headed by a billionaire.
Money talks, even in open-source/free world. I doubt Ubuntu would be where it is today if Shuttleworth had to work at [insert company here] to earn a living.
I'm not saying it's BAD. I'm saying that success is generally dependent on funding, whether you're talking open source software or commercial software.
Brand imaging.
Same reason why over 80% of Americans think Sony is a highly-rated brand for TVs and Computers/Notebooks. Also same reason why 75% of them think Mercedes-Benz makes reliable automobiles. Same reason why people think a bullet fired out of a pistol can actually knock someone on their back like it does in the movies. Same reason you and most others bash Vista.
Vista's big issue is program compatibility. Other than that, in every single fresh install of the OS I have seen or done (not on the Toshiba or Gateway POS-3000 laptop at bestbuy), it has been tremendously stable and even FASTER than XP at times with the right amount of memory. Don't expect it to work well on your 5 year old slow-ass Pentium4, to play old PC games from the 1990s, or to run Office97.
Linux has Vista beat in modability and portability. But on modern hardware, Linux can't play anywhere near the games or run the same apps as Vista.
Linux still requires computer know-how to operate when things go wrong or don't quite work right. Those of you that think its mature enough to be sold with a Joe-The-Dumbass PC have your head up in the clouds. 99% of americans can't even point at the CPU if asked of its location, they definitely don't know how to troubleshoot outside of restarting the computer.
Mostly they work from support agreements and managed services. Although reading the original New York Times article also lists development and installation onto Dell machines and other OEM providers as a source of revenue.
I had personal friends who were fucked over by the Stacker imbroglio. I'm well aware of Microsoft's anticompetitive and criminal business tactics. But leftovers from that era at MS are still a very small part of the entire source-code tree that is Windows. I don't really like Windows. I don't use it. I don't much care for Microsoft as a business.
But the assertion that Canonical has somehow found a better business model than Microsoft's because they hire fewer developers and have a smaller gross income than Microsoft and - yet - also sell an entire OS like MS does is utterly ridiculous at its face.
Yet more stupid Slashdot crap that offers no insight into the problems of maintaining a large tree, and even less insight on the business and logistics problems of managing a large project and many developers. That's the real underlying discussion here. And nobody is having that discussion because Slashdot is filled with a bunch of fucking kids who want to spend their time finding reasons to hate Microsoft.
One needn't have much reason to dislike Windows. It's a piece of shit. We all know that already. But that doesn't mean that some random Linux distribution based off of a huge free development project with decades of history, is in any way comparable with a private internally developed product. It's not. And to argue that MS doesn't do any internal software development is idiotic at its face.
Just as I knew friends at Stacker at one time, so do I know a few devs at Microsoft. They work their asses off writing code.
But I don't want to download *your* DEB file, I want to use the one from the standard repository. Does it do that?
Why do people care who runs GNU/Linux and who does not? GNU/Linux marketshare is abysmal and still the community is pulling in support from hardware and software vendors, which is great!
What I don't get is this whole "PLEASE RUN LINUX!"-shit. Who cares? So, run Mac OS or Windows, good on ya. As long as we've got open standards, it doesn't make any difference at all what operating system you run on your computer. Frankly, it's mostly boring, in the end.
GNU/Linux is a CHOICE and that's enough for me.
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
I like Linux and all, but I've been running Win 7 for the past week or so, and while still buggy in places, it's a VAST improvement over Vista. I hated Vista, and I love Win7.
You had two years of "Vista failure" to gain traction in the market. You have failed.
And before you jump on my throat and say "what have you done to help", I'll tell you that I haven't done anything, and I'm not demanding anything. I'm just stating the fact. I only use Linux on the server, it requires too much manual labor to run on a laptop. And by "run" I mean suspend and wake up, use wireless, support all hardware, etc.
Heck, you even failed to beat Mac OS X on the desktop, in spite of Apple daring to charge money for it.
This already works since Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) released over a year ago: https://wiki.edubuntu.org/AptUrl - just write a link that goes "apt:fortunes;frozen-bubble" instead of http://whatever/ and when an Ubuntu user clicks on this, it runs the equivalent of "apt-get install fortunes frozen-bubble". You can install any number of apps launched with a single click, and it's safe because they come from the repositories defined on the user's machine in /etc/apt/sources.list.