Canonical Founder Says Recent Changes In Ubuntu Were Necessary To Prepare the Company For an IPO (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Canonical was doing well with Ubuntu and cloud and container-related technologies, such as Juju, LXD, and Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS). In addition, its OpenStack and Kubernetes software stacks, according to Shuttleworth, are growing by leaps and bounds on both the public and private cloud. Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said "in the last year, Ubuntu cloud growth had been 70 percent on the private cloud and 90 percent on the public cloud." In particular, "Ubuntu has been gaining more customers on the big five public clouds." What hadn't succeeded was Canonical's attempt to make Unity the universal interface for desktops, tablets, and smartphones. Shuttleworth was personally invested in this project, but at day's end, it wasn't getting enough adoption to make it profitable. So, Shuttleworth said with regret, Unity had to be dropped. This move also means Canonical will devote more of its time to "putting the company on the path to a IPO. We must figure out what steps we need to take moving forward." That means focusing on Canonical's most profitable lines. Specifically, "Ubuntu will never die. Ubuntu is the default platform on cloud computing. Juju, MaaS, and OpenStack are nearly unstoppable. We need to work out more of our IoT path. At the same time, we had to cut out those parts that couldn't meet an investors' needs. The immediate work is get all parts of the company profitable."

Comments

IPO

[djbckr]

Somebody needs to explain to me why a company always feels the need to be publicly traded. It is never good for the consumer. It shackles the company to be profitable regardless of quality.

I worked for a private company that did very, very well. Then the owners jumped ship and through a series of events finally went public. Everything went to shit after that.

Re:IPO

[Anonymous Coward]

Access to funds to expand, without having to sell half your soul to a VC?

That's the answer for the Finance 101 final but not in reality.

In reality it is an exit strategy. And the way public companies are valued, you get much MUCH more going public than by selling privately.

Selling privately: it depends on the buyer's metrics BUT is may mean the they need to pay for the business with the free cash flows from that business in 5 to 7 years. OR they are what's called a strategic buyer and will pay something that costs less than what it would cost them to start from scratch.

Going public means you issue stock to the public who thinks that they can buy your stock at $20 per share and it'll go to $800 - for no business reasons other than there are dumber people willing to buy it at a higher price - all because of hype and a great public relations team.

Re:Best thing Canonical did with Unity

[TWX]

I've tried twice to use Unity as a windowmanager, and both times I've found a friggin' Microsoft UI to be more useful for managing the way I use Linux (ie, lots and lots of consoles for SSH) than Unity. I've used MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, CDE on HPUX and SunOS, Enlightenment, KDE, Gnome, xfce, fvwm, classic MacOS, OSX, and even twm, tab window manager, and all are more intuitive to use than Unity.

The only OS that I've had a harder time with was the command line on the Apple II, but that's because I have no idea what the commands are on an Apple II CLI. Even then though, I knew that I didn't know the commands, so my frustration was based on not having the literature. Unity seems like it should be familiar, it seems like it should work like modern GUIs, but it doesn't behave the same. Clicking and right-clicking do not do the same things. It's not obvious how to get to my applications, they don't seem to appear in any kind of sane heirarchical menu system. It just doesn't make any sense. When twm is easier to use then you know there's a problem.