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Ubuntu Edge Draws Nearly $13M, But Falls Short of Indiegogo Goal
Nerval's Lobster writes "The crowdfunding campaign to build an Ubuntu-powered smartphone has fallen short of its ambitious goal. Canonical, which works with the open-source community to support Ubuntu worldwide, decided to fund its Ubuntu Edge smartphone via crowdfunding Website Indiegogo. The funding goal was set at $32 million, and at first it looked as if the project had enough momentum to actually succeed: within the first 24 hours of the project's July 22 launch, some $3.45 million had poured in. But that torrent of cash soon slowed to a trickle. In the end, the campaign managed to amass $12,809,906 by its August 21 closing. Nonetheless, Canonical did its best to put a brave face on the situation. 'While we passionately wanted to build the Edge to showcase Ubuntu on phones, the support and attention it received will still be a huge boost as other Ubuntu phones start to arrive in 2014,' the organization wrote in a posting. 'Thousands of you clearly want to own an Ubuntu phone and believe in our vision of convergence, and rest assured you won't have much longer to wait.'" Update: 08/22 16:14 GMT by T : Oops -- headline edited to reflect that the Edge was an Indiegogo project, rather than Kickstarter.
I use Linux for a living (I'm a physicist; all our machines run Linux). Most everyone was using Ubuntu (with a few on Scientific Linux) before Unity came out. Now it's Mint, mostly, or Kubuntu.
IMO, the goal was deliberately set too high to meet. Now all the money goes back to the donators.
Huge amounts of free advertising, hype generation and likely leverage in existing negotiations with hardware vendors, care of the interest $13m worth of donations the "chumps" who bought into it loaned to Indiegogo for a couple months.
Smart. Very smart.
No one trusts Canonical outside of the die-hard Ubuntu fanboys.
Maybe, but...
Canonical forks everything due to their NIH syndrome. They released the buggiest, ugliest and most uselessly incoherent Desktop imaginable (Unity) and then sold their userbase to Amazon.
We're talking about *phones* here. The bar is far, far, FAAAAARRRRRRRRRR lower than you give it credit for. Seriously, the bar is buried down a mineshaft somewhere. You'd have to get a mole machine just to see it.
The main competitors are iOS and Android.
Forks/NIH? CHECK!
Well, iOS is more or less their own thing with their own language and their own API and everything. Android pretends to be Linux but for some reason they keep fucking with stock Linux is strange and incomprehensible ways which make it work less well. Oh and inventing totally new and broken APIs which then need fixing. Android is stuffed to the gills with NIH, compared to Unity.
then sold their userbase to Amazon.
Remember the BIGGEST competitor is android here. Basically you get to choose to sell yourself to google.
The Edge could be the greatest thing since sliced bread, I still wouldn't give them my money.
Who would you give money to? I mean your points are correct and they apply to desktop systems. But phones are SO bad by comparison that Unity really is a shining beacon of standards and openness.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
A netbook isn't good enough for web browsing? The only reason I can't use a phone or tablet for 100% of my internet use, is that some youtube videos aren't allowed "on mobile" for some stupid reason.
I used a netbook as my primary development and home usage machine for several months, simply to squash my ego somewhat (before that I'd always gone for the most powerful machines I could). It was actually surprisingly usable. For doing more engineering oriented work I did need to remote into more powerful computers though, so now I have an ultrabook.
which is totally what she said
I think Canonical's mistake was limiting the campaign to a single month. I am sure there were a lot of people that wanted the phone but did not have the liquid cash to purchase one with only a month notice. If it was a three month campaign, I could see them reaching their goal.