Canonical Close To $30M Critical Mass; Should Microsoft Worry? 625
ruphus13 writes "Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, claims that the company is very close to the $30M mark, at which point, they will be a self-sustaining company. While people feel that this should not worry Microsoft, the real question is whether a 10,000 person effort on a failure like Vista can actually be the paradigm of a long-term strategy. From the article: 'Microsoft had 10,000 people [the article is unclear whether these were all developers, or administrative and support staff were factored in] working on Vista for a five year period ... huge profits in any given year can mean relatively little five years on. Canonical's self-sustaining revenue may not be threatening — but it leaves one wondering how sustainable Microsoft's development process really is.'"
No MS shoud not worry... (Score:2, Interesting)
Just like RedHat took off in its own direction, after being the darling Linux distro some years ago, eventually perhaps Canonical will see the same writing on the wall and abandon the focus on the Linux desktop. The money is in servers and support contracts, the Ubuntu consumer desktop serves to give a distribution a foothold, to give it eyeballs, to focus developer attention on it. But if Ubuntu is to truly become a business it needs to be a whole lot more than self-sustaining.
I also second comments that $30 million is nothing in terms of revenue. There are thousands of small businesses that do that kind of revenue every year, and yet we don't ask if MS is worried about XYZ business.
Re:Marketing MIA (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really. Ubuntu has really removed the need for a terminal. I can easily get a system working (more easily than a fresh Windows installation) without touching the terminal. Sometimes I go to it because it gives me a power and speed a GUI *CANT* provide, but everything that needs to be done in Ubuntu can be done in GUI.
Anything that really can't (fixing a package error, for example) is explained very very clearly and tells the user exactly what to do to fix it.
There's nothing you NEED to do inside the Terminal anymore for a normal user. Just powerusers.
Re:Marketing MIA (Score:2, Interesting)
Marketing is what's missing to Linux today.
The lack of marketing is what makes Linux so great. Linux is what it is because it's made by technically proficient people for technically proficient people. We don't need marketing. The fact that it is free, and technically excellent is all that is needed to attract the kinds of people that will make Linux even better.
Re:Sumbmitters? Editors? (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, you got me on using a redundant dollar sign
However, the point remains: $30 Million of what? Gross Revenue? Profit? It makes no sense to not specify what it refers to. You can have revenue of $30 Million and still be losing money hand over fist. You can have small sales, but still be pulling in a $30 Million profit margin. The summary makes no sense without this info.
Re:Um, no? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not the total dollar amount that would concern Microsoft, it's that a company can afford to compete with them on the desktop. Yes, RedHat already competes on the server, but so far Microsoft has owned the desktop. Now Canonical is competing in that space, on the same hardware, through the same channels, and it might be able to make a buck doing so. Microsoft hasn't faced competition like that since OS/2 died.
And before I get flamed by the Apple users, Microsoft doesn't compete on Apple hardware, and Apple doesn't compete through Microsoft's OEM channels. If Apple sold OSX separate from it's hardware, then it would be a serious threat to Microsoft, but for now Apple can't out-sell Dell, HP, Lenovo and all the budget brands out there.
Re:$30 mil? Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting though, that the most popular Linux distro right now according to distrowatch is headed by a billionaire.
Money talks, even in open-source/free world. I doubt Ubuntu would be where it is today if Shuttleworth had to work at [insert company here] to earn a living.
I'm not saying it's BAD. I'm saying that success is generally dependent on funding, whether you're talking open source software or commercial software.
Re:Marketing MIA (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a marketing droid. One of the things that has always been confusing to me is how I sign up. There seems to be lots of places where a developer can sign up, or even just start coding in spare time, submit a few changes etc. Perhaps I haven't looked lately, but I don't see any places that want my help. Sure, I can't offer free advertising or financial resources, but I can help write press releases, ad copy, design business proposals in powerpoint etc.
Actually the last sentence was somewhat in jest, as that seems to be what most techies think of marketing guys like myself. Really we do a lot of market research, helping to set what direction a technical business will take (e.g. the strategy), also a lot of what I do is explain what is possible to the business types, based on what I learn from techies, and in turn explain to the techies why they cannot build yet another friggin datamart for $2M. I have customer service skills godddammnit! Anyway, I'd hope to be able to help. Like I said, where do I sign up? Is it with Canonical, or is there a generic "Linux" marketing effort someplace?
Re:Marketing MIA (Score:3, Interesting)
If one more person asks me why they can't use their birthday or username as their password I'm going to ignite in an exothermic reaction.
Re:Ubuntu moves faster (Score:2, Interesting)
it's actually a well-done platform that's great for developers. You may dislike its single-platform outlook, but as programming languages, the .NET languages are top-notch.
Well said. That's precisely why it annoys me when people attack Mono. The only thing I dislike (and I do dislike it a lot) about .net is the fact that it's a windows only language. The mono guys are fixing that.
Re:How does Canonical make money? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Marketing MIA (Score:5, Interesting)
Marketing has two meanings to people in open source.
The first is "advertising". Advertising is great, anyone can volunteer to do it. People donate to buy ads, create them, and do crazy grassroots activities like chalking a Firefox logo in the campus quad. Of course, it's crazy expensive to buy an ad in the NYTimes, or put the Tux logo on a race car [cnet.com].
The second meaning is "market research", and frankly, that's insane. Ubuntu is free of charge, as is Debian and a zillion others. Market research in corporations are used to direct investment. I.e. telling engineers what to do. This is not compatible with volunteerism. Sure Canonical employs engineers and tells them what to do, but the way they make money is basically through consulting. I know tons of software consultants; none of them need market research because they already have a market paying their bills. Open source basically operates sans market research, on the theory that the people who know exactly what they want are best able to make it happen ("scratching an itch").
If you happen to disagree, great. But you'll have to take a guerrilla approach. I've observed the Ubuntu marketing project for a while and the thing basically falls apart from two basic conflicts: confusion over whether marketing is "research to direct effort" or "advertising," and a fundamental lack of engagement with the people who's efforts to be directed. Dodging the first problem is simple and just takes motivation and a little leadership. The second problem is much harder; a lot of people with marketing experience don't correctly understand how Linux and OSS differs from their own experiences in the corporate world.
Re:Marketing MIA (Score:3, Interesting)
"Microsoft Word has committed an error and must be closed" is about the most useful information for basic users. What information could you give them that's actually useful and valuable? The DLL that failed? Why will they care? What error did Microsoft Word commit? Again, why would they care? That information is available for me, as a technical user, if I want it--but I have to click a button to access it and it's out of the way of those end users.
End users given more detail can be surprisingly effective at resolving problems. For example end user deletes:
abc.dll and then gets an "file not found -- abc.dll" so they think "better put that back".
Re:Still a long way to go (Score:1, Interesting)
My Plasma (Panasonic) uses Linux. And I bet they sell lots of them. So yes, Linux has already took of. Now, Linux as the mainstream desktop platform for users? I don't care, let anyone get what they want.
Re:Marketing MIA (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ubuntu moves faster (Score:3, Interesting)
I beg to disagree. At work we are developing a mixed application, I do my part in Qt and some other people are doing another part in .NET.
I end doing much more than the share we had agreed on at the beginning, because I'm so much more productive in Qt that they throw anything they cannot get ready on time at me. It's beginning to look like the small auxiliary part that was first assigned, at my urging, to Qt will end up being the main part of the system.
One example from our project: we had to get some internationalized text from an XML interface. This text was used to get data came from an Oracle db, in ISO-8859-1 coding, and the XML interface used UTF-8 coding. After three weeks of failures, the .NET team threw in the towel and I did it in half a day, using Python and PyQt. It seems that the challenge of handling a mixed set of accented and unaccented characters in mixed encodings, getting the data from Oracle, handling the XML, and printing it correctly to the screen was too much of a challenge to the .NET developers.
Of course, this may be more due to the lack of good developers in the .NET side of the project, but I have often seen this happen with .NET: really good developers sometimes don't like to work in .NET
Re:Marketing MIA (Score:3, Interesting)
Typing cryptic commands is very error-prone and disconcerting for users. You may think that the "click blah blah" instructions are long and complicated, but for most users it's what makes the most sense, and they have at least a slight idea of what's going on.
Maybe true for simple users. Power users don't type cryptic commands verbatim; they cut'n paste them directly from the source. Heck, simple users could do this too, if they understand cut'n paste.
Most likely we need a 'For Dummies' section of the community docs that explains cut'npaste on terminals and other such things you need to know in order to follow directions properly.
Re:Marketing MIA (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been using windows now for a little over a year. Coming from and exclusively Unix and/or Linux background since 1994. I am regularly told by the windows admins to go to the command line to do things such as recently ipconfig \flushdns I don't know for sure, but windows still seems to need a terminal for similar tasks.
Plus sudo apt-get install foo seems much easier than the windows version of get in your car and drive to the store and scan through the packages or download from some freeware site or research many vendors about foo to find a package for foo and break out the credit card in order for you to do anything.
What a huge investment (Score:1, Interesting)
10,000 people * 40 hours per week * 50 weeks per year * 5 years = 100,000,000 man hours. If a dev earns, say, $36 per hour, then this is $3.6 Billion just to run the workforce. Factor in other costs such as benefits, insurance, social security contribution matching, etc., and you've got a good $4 to $5 Billion spent to develop Vista. If it's true that Vista fell short of its sales goals, that is an enormous loss.
Re:Marketing MIA (Score:1, Interesting)
Yep, definetly a marketing droid.
More seriously, I hope you find a way to make a meaningful contribution. It would be good to see a system like ubuntu more widely used in schools. Could there be a marketing effort bring schools and ubuntu together?"