Red Hat, Ubuntu and that blog post!

A lot of people have been totally and utterly wrong about me over the past fourteen years since Canonical-nee-Ubuntu hit the stands. Some people think I'm an Ubuntu hater, they couldn't be more wrong.

I think Canonical-nee-Ubuntu built one of the most powerful and cohesively inspiring communities/movements within the FOSS/Linux community the like of which I doubt we'll ever see again. You would have thought with all that commitment and community resources they would have dominated the [Linux] market but there was one fly in the ointment that everyone brushed under the carpet. Ubuntu was and is Mark's personal train set and with that in mind you could see where things were going, I could back in 2005/6 but everyone said I was talking out of my backside. Personally, I think it's a crying shame how the Ubuntu Community is but a pale shadow of its former self, oh I'm sure the forums are still doing a thriving trade but most RSS feeds are only spewing out stuff via OMG! Ubuntu! these days. I think the rot set in when it was revealed that decisions were being made behind closed doors, so much for "Openness" and "Its a community project." I'm not saying "I alone have the answers" but with over 40 years experience in sales and marketing hopefully, I've picked up one or two observational skills over the years even though I was accused of trying to be an all-knowing Sage Bwahaha

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Hands up all those who remember Ubuntu TV? this was supposed to be 'The Big Thing' for Canonical-nee-Ubuntu they were going to have Ubuntu on every TV, the likes of Sony and Samsung would be banging on Mark's door to have his software on their merchandise. Now I understand what the real agenda was and it wasn't actually about Ubuntu TV per say what it was about was getting the Ubuntu name out there in front of as many faces as possible and as a sales guy myself I can see the logic in that the problem was, Mark was trying to break into a market that was controlled by well established international market leaders who weren't about to let a little know operating system onto their products. You could argue that Ubuntu TV was just bad timing? Personally, I just think it was the wrong marketplace for Canonical.

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Mark did have a golden opportunity with his godforsaken Unity which only 40% of his user-base liked. Around the time he came up with the abomination that was "Aaarrgghh the buttons are on the left not the right like everyone else!" the Tablet market was just starting to emerge, Unity would have been perfect for those devices and if I had of been working for Canonical at the time you would have heard Pete's tagline of "We've got lorry loads going out the back!" being banded around the building. But for some weird reason, they only started to look at Tablets once the market was not only saturated but basically going off the boil! Very strange?

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Then Mark had this brilliant idea of getting into the Mobile phone market. I mean come on, seriously? You're going to break into a market that's been established for 45 years! with an operating system that nobody outside of the FOSS community has ever heard of? And then at the same time of launching the mobile phone, and this is just mind blowing, Canonical shut down Ubuntu One their cloud storage service and the Music Service! Two of the most important prerequisites of offering a mobile phone. The final nail in the coffin was the Ubuntu Edge crowd funding exercise where Canonical was looking for $32,000,000 to produce what it called "A cutting-edge phone with one of the first to incorporate Saphire Glass" the problem was, there was no phone. To add insult to injury, people were attending press releases with mock-ups in their hand purporting to be the real deal until it was revealed that the bricks in their hands couldn't be turned on, well they couldn't could they? They weren't real. It was probably and hopefully the last vaporware to come out of Canonical.

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The latest turn in the long-running story of Canonical-nee-Ubuntu is that Mark Shuttleworth wants an IPO, this is interesting given that he is also seeking backers by courting Venture capitalists. At the root of all this is money. Mark has been propping up Canonical/Ubuntu since 2004 with his own money, I'm not going to bore you with all the intricacies of accounting but in its most simplistic form Canonical Holdings is kept healthy by Mark's personal fortune while the satellite companies such as Canonical UK turn very small profits by comparison to say Red Hat but their overheads were and still are way too large to make it attractive to potential shareholders so this pipe dream of Canonical PLC won't be happening any time soon according to most business analysts.

So why have you written this then? The latest blog post by Mark Shuttleworth about the impending purchase of Red Hat by IBM raised my hackles slightly. After all these years and failure lessons that should have been learned we're still seeing the same old hype from Mark. I love the opening gambit: "Over the past two years, many prominent Red Hat customers have selected Ubuntu and engaged Canonical to build leaner, more efficient open source infrastructure and solutions for important new initiatives. " basically that's trying to say that Canonical has been pinching Red Hat's customers which if that's the case why did RH seem such a good prospect for IBM? the whole blog post is rather nauseating if truth be told, Mark is clearly trying to paint a picture that RH is losing business left right and centre to Canonical which if that was true IBM would have bought Canonical rather than Red Hat especially as they're both heavily focused on the Cloud and IOT which is why IBM bought Red Hat.

Ubuntu is a brilliant OS it truly is. It's polished, reasonably floorless and for me has that magic label of "It just works" I've actually used it at home pretty much since its inception, however, as a desktop it'll never be a money spinner for Canonical. Let's just hope their cloud services bring in enough revenue to maintain development because I would seriously hate to see the Ubuntu Desktop go the same way as all the other showstopper projects that have been killed off by Canonical over the years.