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

Marketing MIA

[alain94040]

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

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:Marketing MIA

[Hal_Porter]

He has buxom virgin cheerleaders that work for him for free, the only problem is they are all male.

Re:Marketing MIA

[morgan_greywolf]

I disagree. Most guides out there for ubuntu involve terminal commands.

Commands that say things like this?

sudo apt-get install foo

Yeah. That's because it's easier and faster to write that than say 'Click System | Administration | Synaptic Package Manager.' Click the 'Search' button and type 'foo' and hit enter. Right click the 'foo-1.0' package and click 'Install'. When prompted, enter your password.

Re:Marketing MIA

[FishWithAHammer]

This post is a prime example of why you, and people like you, should not be involved in building user interfaces. That's not an insult, don't get me wrong. Techie types are valuable in areas where their expertise is useful. Trying to reason out how people actually use computers--that's not an area of expertise for most techies. I wouldn't have most UI designers writing code, either.

The GUI is less flexible, yes. That's a drawback. But for the majority of people it is far more valuable because it does not require prior knowledge to operate. A button that says "Do Foo" with checkboxes "Initialize 'Bar' Subsystem" and "Provide verbose output" is easily grasped by an individual user (especially because it's very easy to add tooltips to each of these in order to provide more information". A CLI command of "foo -Bv" is much less easily grasped by an end user who is not already comfortable with the command line.

"Microsoft Word has committed an error and must be closed" is about the most useful information for basic users. What information could you give them that's actually useful and valuable? The DLL that failed? Why will they care? What error did Microsoft Word commit? Again, why would they care? That information is available for me, as a technical user, if I want it--but I have to click a button to access it and it's out of the way of those end users.

Users don't want to know how their computers work. They don't care about that. Users don't want to have to learn how the CLI works. They don't care about that. Users want a quick, relatively efficient system for doing their stuff, rather than doing the computer's stuff. The CLI is not that system because the benefits of the CLI require more time investment and effort than users want to devote to their computer's stuff when they could be working on their own stuff. A good desktop environment tells the user nothing that they don't need to know and doesn't ask for the user to waste time on the computer's stuff, as far as that is possible.

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

[93 Escort Wagon]

I would hope that you would use Impress over Powerpoint when trying to drive people away from Microsoft. Else you really suck at your job.

Here's the whole "Linux problem" in a nutshell. We've got a professional in marketing who's offering his services - and he gets insulted by an FOSS zealot because he's apparently not pure enough.

Re:Marketing MIA

[Microlith]

In the 1980s everyone used a CLI even on home systems.

Home systems were still few and far between. Those who had them had every reason (and likely had the desire) to know a lot about what were effectively very primitive systems.

What do you think has happened since then has caused people to lose so much intelligence?

No intelligence was lost. The audience that owns computers has expanded outside of the extremely interested and geeks to basically be a requirement of modern society. It's the car of the age: most people own one in some fashion, but how much someone knows (and indeed, can know) about the nuts and bolts of the thing is limited.

Not everyone wants to have to fuck with xorg.conf just to get multiple displays working. Hell I don't, but you still have to, even in Ubuntu.

For Linux to be successful there needs to be a cultural transformation with regard to computing. The idea we are going to provide less information to avoid confusing people is a terrible culture.

We are never going to return to the days of the 1980s when anyone who had a computer could generally be considered knowledgeable about the hardware, software, and had a bit of coding experience (if even just BASIC.) We are already at a point where for most people the computer is as mystifying a black box as their car's engine is if not moreso.

But half of what is needed to make life livable for non-propellerheads is fairly basic gui interaction and human interface considerations. This is why OS X is so nice compared to Linux and is a route that could serve Canonical well if Ubuntu were to go that way. Solve the problems that force people to screw with config files, reduce the terminal to an optional path and not required, and then you have an OS X like Linux with even more capabilities.

Or we can fight it, and insist that the broken way is the best way.

I would have loved some way to look at a log file and figure out what was going wrong.

And you're also reading Slashdot which immediately puts you out of the target audience the DVR was designed for, people who will treat the DVR for what it is: a peice of AV equipment that should just work.

Ubuntu moves faster

[rolfwind]

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.

Re:Ubuntu moves faster

[Arainach]

Why not write it in QT, and have an application that can run on just about every platform out there WITHOUT bowing before Microsoft, who could eat your lunch should you write the "Killer Ap".

Because having developed in .NET and QT, .NET is far easier and more enjoyable to develop in. You may call it "crap", but it's actually a well-done platform that's great for developers. You may dislike its single-platform outlook, but as programming languages, the .NET languages are top-notch.

To many companies, being able to quickly and reliably put together code is much more important than supporting the tiny marketshare that represents Linux desktop users.

Sumbmitters? Editors?

[MyLongNickName]

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.

Re:Sumbmitters? Editors?

[JavaTHut]

Hey, guys, my car goes from 0 to 120 in 3! That makes about as much sense as the summary.

Was a car analogy really necessary?

Re:Sumbmitters? Editors?

[MyLongNickName]

Can analogies are ALWAYS necessary. The only problem is this one made sense. Mod GP down.

Um, no?

[dedazo]

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.

Re:$30 mil? Seriously?

[toganet]

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.

best quote

[je ne sais quoi]

The best quote in TFA (the original NYT one, not the one linked to in TFS):

In his personal life, he continues to test what is possible, requesting that a fiber-optic connection be installed to his house on the border of London's affluent Chelsea and South Kensington neighborhoods.

"I want to find out what it's like to have a gigabit connection to the home," he said. "It is not because I need to watch porn in high-definition but because I want to see what you do differently." (emphasis mine)

From that alone, you can tell he reads slashdot.

The second best quote from TFA:

"Look, I have a very privileged life, right?" Mr. Shuttleworth said. "I am a billionaire, bachelor, ex-cosmonaut. Life couldn't easily be that much better. Being a Linux geek sort of brings balance to the force."

Kudos on reaching the self-sustainable mark Mr. Shuttleworth! Let's hope you really do make the world a better, more free, place.

Why this matters

[Groo Wanderer]

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