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

Posted by msmash on from the inside-story dept.

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."

14 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. Best thing Canonical did with Unity by el_smurfo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Was introduce me to Linux Mint. Thanks Mark!

    1. Re:Best thing Canonical did with Unity by TWX · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
  2. In other words... by Junta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    To do IPO they brought in analysts, who made recommendations.

    I see a rough road for IPO at this phase. They've been a fixture for over 10 years and their repeated attempts to succeed as a business have been widely observed and have failed. While undoubtedly popular, it is painfully obvious because they are the most straightforward free option. They have not shown any hint of being able to parlay their status to significant revenue. Instead they have to keep hand waving less useful metrics about users of their software than any business relationships, and intentionally fuzzing things up by swapping the word 'customer' and 'user' as it makes sense ('user' to have big numbers and share, then pivot to referencing customers, to suggest the users==customers, rather than the reality that the vast majority of users of the platform will never become a revenue source).

    If they had IPOed 10 years ago, things would have been new enough for the investors to be enamored with the visions of what *could* be, but the passage has time has dashed pretty much all of the hopes.

    --
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  3. Re:Good while it lasted by dknj · · Score: 3, Informative

    For the desktop replacement, you still have distros based on debian which have fairly up-to-date release schedules.

    KDE Neon is Kubuntu with a different name.
    Linux Mint is Ubuntu with a streamlined UI.

    In both of these you can swap out to plain gnome2 or gnome3, xfce, enlightenment, or windowmaker if you want.

    For server, you're kinda boned. You can go back to debian, which isn't too bad. CentOS with epel is a functional cross, but theres no way you are running bleeding edge with a RHEL distro. The plus about RHEL is that rpm packaging is dirt simple and you can have a bleeding edge environment if you don't mind the upkeep (1% project overhead in my exp).

    My worry is that Ubuntu is going to follow the path of RedHat. Where Ubuntu takes over debian as the defacto fork and updates trickle back to debian. Usurping the debian development and testing in the process. Anyway I suspect tinfoil and pennies to be given away freely in this thread.

    -dk

  4. IPO by djbckr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:IPO by hackel · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    2. Re:IPO by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:IPO by bankman · · Score: 2

      The company doesn't feel a need to do anything. It's a way for management and/or the owners to raise equity capital and/or sell parts of their share where a private sale isn't happening for whatever reason.

      The pressure public trading and enhanced scrutiny by financial analysts, who rarely understand the business the company is in, put on the company is often either not understood by management or accepted as a requirement to raising equity. The problem usually is the incredibly stupid short termism exhibited by the markets (well, financial analysts) which leads to fewer, if at all, strategic decision making.

      Unless your expansion plans require vast amounts of capital for your successful business an IPO doesn't really make much business sense IMHO.

      --
      I feel so sig.
    4. Re:IPO by organgtool · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So instead you chop your soul into millions of pieces and sell those pieces to thousands of greedy psychopaths rather than just one. I honestly don't know which is worse.

    5. Re:IPO by bws111 · · Score: 2

      OK, so you worked for a very profitable company. That has nothing to do with public vs private. There are public companies that treat their employees equally as well, and there are profitable private companies that treat their employees poorly.

      It sounds like the problem with your company is that once the founder left there was no direction. That is quite common, and has little to do with public vs private (although that can be trotted out as a convenient excuse).

  5. Re:Canonical makes money? by prunus.avium · · Score: 2

    Enterprise support contracts. Specifically the enterprise cloud support.

    Large companies are completely wiling to pay to have a guaranteed response time for service calls. Especially when they don't have to buy the hardware.

  6. Re:Good while it lasted by LiENUS · · Score: 3, Insightful

    > For server, you're kinda boned. You can go back to debian, which isn't too bad. CentOS with epel is a functional cross, but theres no way you are running bleeding edge with a RHEL distro.

    I gave up trying to get bleeding edge anything on those distros. I just run docker and run my bleeding edge service within docker.

  7. This will go poorly. by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 2

    Publicly owned businesses become focused on one thing and only one thing: profit. This is not good for Canonical or it's users because some very unpopular decisions will be made in the name of profit. Then again, perhaps it's time for Canonical to die because their past decisions haven't been much better.

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  8. UTF-8 on Slashdot !!! by DrYak · · Score: 2

    (Or did Slashdot suddenly turn UTF-8 support on ? "éàöü" ?)

    Øh ! göð !

    That is the real top news of today !

    UTF-8 finally working on /. (with the editor silently turning it into HTML numerical refs)

    Soon we will be able to invoke Zalgo's name and spread the corruption.

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]