Journal tomhudson's Journal: Prediction - 2012 is the beginning of the end for Canonical 17
Next week, Canonical is going to try once more to generate a bunch of hype over some new deal or other - this time it's Ubuntu TV (to quickly be called "Who Gives A $** TV). So much for tablets, which they have totally lost the market to because they couldn't get Android to run.
Canonical has already been upstaged in the tablet field by another company who have actually begun shipping android color tablets at $52 each for the base model, and for $10 more, a gutsier model that can play hd video, better battery life, more ram and storage, etc.
The company doing this, DataWind, won a design competition held by the Indian government to supply every university, college, high school and grade school student with a general-purpose tablet - which, after the Indian government throws in their subsidy, will bring the cost to the student down to something like $20 - $30.
(on a side note, this also means that the OLPC project has just been locked out of the second-largest market in the known universe
So here's the thing - a company with 150 employees decides, basically on a whim, to try to enter the competition to supply Indias' education system with millions of tablets at the lowest cost possible, puts up the $100,000 bid bond, and in a few months produces both the hardware AND the customized linux and android software, and wins. Contrast that to what Canonical announced almost 3 years ago - that Ubuntu would be running Android in the "Ubuntu Android Execution Environment." Lots of hype, then quietly abandoned.
Does Canonical even have all that many real software developers on staff? All they seem to be doing is offering re-badged software and services (Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu 1 Music Store, etc). and fooling around with the user interface. Most of their "hundreds of employees" are either what are known as "peddlers" (independent contractors who work with a bunch of companies to "peddle" their stuff to other companies or get them to cooperate on stuff, etc.), university students making money at (heavily - 42.5% of pay and administrative expenses) government-subsidized call centers, or part-timers working from home under contract for specific tasks, not "real employees."
So basically, this is the year that the rest of the world figures out what some of us have suspected from the beginning, and known for a couple of years - that Ubuntu was about marketing hype as an attempt to cash in on the linux buzz, not linux itself, not software - just a market play that didn't pan out. The latest goal of "200 million users running Ubuntu in 4 years", set in March of last year is SO dead. There is NOTHING that Shuttleworth can do to change that. Why? Because even the most die-hard Ubuntunistas are realizing that there's not much behind the curtains
Ubuntu TV? Don't make me laugh. If I want comedy, I can already watch it without Ubuntu.
Nice link (Score:2)
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The great breakthrough of Ubuntu has been creating a friendly, welcoming, and generally helpful user community. Its other strengths are based upon that, facilitating the growth of that community and the improvement of Ubuntu.
The first problem is that Ubuntu depends upon a tiny company, Canonical, and especially upon one person, Mark Shuttleworth. This is where the "benevolent dictator" model that recurs in critical FOSS projects starts to show how dangerous it can be. Shuttleworth has been insistent that he
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Why? Because the same "we're fed up with being manipulated and lied to" attitude of OWS has come to the F/LOSS world. We're sick of the stupidity, the "I'm right a
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I was an ardent Trotskyist for years, and I rediscovered Linux just as I was leaving the Trotskyist group I'd been part of for years. So, classic FSF rhetoric fit very neatly into a empty space in my life, at least until I recognized some of the same problems in FSF politicking that I'd eventually admitted were present in the activism I'd been involved in, except this time it was not tragedy but farce.
That is, the basic problem I have with the zealot's approach is that they forget that they're advocating a
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Re: the canonical hate ... the users would have come to linux one way or another anyway ... all Canonical did was further dilute the market and create some serious problems over expectations for many new users by initially trying to claim that they could replace Windows. Most users can't.
Canonical was the one who was responsible for the Ubuntu Walmart $200 PC fiasco - a prime example of a product that was over-hyped, under-performed, and burned a LOT of people, ruined a lot of Christma
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No, Canonical did manage to get a lot of adoption with Ubuntu, took a lot of heat for it. Early on Debian purists were full of haterade, but Debian has come up quite a bit in usability since then. Maybe you don't remember the early days.
Mint is nice with its media playing and all. I used to use it a lot. But I'm just not going to install a Linux distro that defaults to Bing search. Ever. If they've sold out that much there's no telling what's lurking under the hood. I'd as soon use Novell's SuSe afte
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I look at the search thing as not that big a deal. Google has already admitted that they have a quasi-monopoly on search, and all of the search engines are intrusive as heck on everyone's privacy, because they all want to monetize ALL your online behaviour.
Back in the early days, even banner ads weren't as intrusive because they mostly didn't include code to track your behaviour - and when they did, they got called out on it. Google is the one who made this somehow "ok". The ideal ad should not have a
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In that case, you shouldn't be using linux, because it is contributed to by companies, such as IBM, who have been known to do the odd patent troll themselves. Same with firefox, because it takes money from advertisers (Google and Microsoft). Same with FreBSD, because they got money from Apple. Or slashdot, because they get money from Microsoft, Google, Oracle, etc.
The way I look at it, when a company like Microsoft has to advertise on a pro-foss sight, that's a big win, in two ways: 1. They have to
Well, this is depressing. (Score:2)
I'm one of the few people that publicly acknowledge liking the Unity interface. I've been concerned about the high-handed way Canonical has pushed it, and the lack of a proper response to community complaints. Apple doesn't claim OS X is a community project, but Ubuntu is supposed to be. And I've rather wished they'd just give up on Ubuntu One. So I've had concerns about the direction Canonical is taking, but I still rather like using Ubuntu, and I very much like the Ubuntu user community.
When the plan for
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Who among us has NOT distro-hopped? It's part of the meritocracy and "choice is good" memes.
And yes, when you read Shuttleworths' responses t
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My desktop is in pieces and the disks are wiped (well zeroed out anyway) - I have Debian 6.03 kde & gnome dvds downloaded for when I get it back together (and if it boots).
If that is successful, next up will be laptop getting an os makeover.
In the event Debian doesn't work for me, I may look at Gentoo, then Mageia.
I couldn't make Unity work for me at all - and I use many crappy interfaces, government job & all.
Ubuntu was good to me, but is time. Maybe we can still be friends, but it will no longer
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I like this comment in the thread: "Ipods are NOT exactly rare!"
There's such a mad dash to just keep adding features that a lot of stuff gets dropped on the floor. I'm currently back down to opensuse 11.4 after the upgrade to 12.1 bit me, and my laptop blew up due to the nvidia gpu flaw, so freebsd will just have to wait :-(
Still, I *am* able to get stuff done, and that's what counts.
That sums it up i
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Also in my 11.04 install & gtkpod you could pick a playlist and select randomise, this is no longer an option in 11.10 version of gtkpod. Is that upstream with Gnome or the gtkpod people? I have no idea but it sucks. Get an answer from anyone - no.
The big issue for me is that Ubuntu can't be relied on. Debian may have (has) flaws, but it can relied on to do what it says on the wrapper. It also has a very large support base.
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