Mark Shuttleworth On Ubuntu's Lack Of Marketing

The LugRadio team writes "In the latest episode of LugRadio, the fortnightly Linux radio show, the team interview Mark Shuttleworth, head of the Ubuntu project. Mark talks about where Ubuntu is going, how (and whether) Canonical plan to make any money on the Ubuntu project, his role in the project, and (most importantly) why marketing isn't a good thing and what they're doing instead."

be easy to use..

[gl4ss]

..with understandable docs that are easy to find when you need them.

for what's it worth, one non-geek friend of mine finds ubuntu easier than mandrake.

Marketing 101

[EnronHaliburton2004]

why marketing isn't a good thing

Marketing 101:

Some marketing is a good thing. For example:

Who is Mark Shuttleworth, and why should I care.
Who/what is Ubintu, and why should I care?
What's Lugradio? Do I really need to download and listen to a big audio file to find out why I should care?

Re:Marketing 101

[aztektum]

Ubintu? I thought this was about Ubuntu?? Someone needs to get some better marketing! for those that need it.

Re:Marketing 101

[aztektum]

Woops that was spose to be "/joke for those that need it." my fingers got ahead of my brain.

Whatever happened to the interview?

[danielDamage]

Didn't slashdot ask a bunch of questions of Shuttleworth a good long while back? Did that interview get posted and I just missed it? They were good questions. I like Ubuntu and really wanted to see the answers. Also, I requested they ship me a bunch of CD's (for free) and just got 10 copies in a neat little sleeve with the liveCD in one folder and the installation CD in another folder. Popped in the live CD...looks very nice. No cleavage on the desktop though.

ubuntu's theme

[loomis]

In my opinion, and this is in no way a troll or flame comment, Ubuntu's theme/mantra might actually turn people off to the product.

I found myself so distracted by the strange mesh of the African name, earthy color scheme, and "we are the world" esque startup screen that I immediately couldn't help but be turned off to the product.

To me, and maybe I am being incredibly anal (I dunno), computers and "tribal" go about as well together as shrimp and licorice. I simply don't like a product that--despite its si

Re:ubuntu's theme

[dtfinch]

If you install the ubuntu-calendar package, you'll get a monthly wallpaper featuring a nude woman in front of an earthy brown background, except for January, which features a guy in shorts.

Or if you simply don't like the theme, you can change it.

Re:ubuntu's theme

[Twylite]

I have to admit that the name and colour scheme put me off, but on the other hand langoustines flambed in sambuka is a really great dish -- you should try it sometime!

WARNING

[QuantumG]

The show contains british gits swearing and ranting about open source.

Re:2004

[dtfinch]

2004 was the year of Linux in the desktop. It didn't happen.

It depends on your expectations. Nobody expects Windows to be toppled for a very long time. I finished the switch from Windows to Linux early last year. I only use Windows at my job now, but I still have it installed in case I ever get the urge. I'm currently running Ubuntu, and I'm pretty impressed. For example, I run this program called Synaptic and I get to browse through a repository of 14000 packages (most from Debian), including the latest

Romans

[squidsuk]

It depends on your expectations. Nobody expects Windows to be toppled for a very long time.

Exactly. It's not something that happens on some specific date. What date did the Roman Empire fall? But it was falling, for an extended period of time, and that's what we're seeing with MS and Windows. It's observable, though like the Romans it's easier to recognise in hindsight.

It may well not be the case, anyway, nor be desirable for MS to be utterly wiped out - it will be sufficient for the OS market to bec

Re:2004

[poofyhairguy82]

2004 was the year of Linux in the desktop. It didn't happen.

Thats funny you said that. I just switched to Linux last year, mostly because of the creation of Ubuntu. I liked it so much that I am tempted by no OS, and this "new craze" is lasting. I am using the Hoary development version, and it does everything I wish with minimal headache. Thats just what I want out of an OS. Not something odd like brand trollish loyalty.

First Impressions

[Tesral]

Yep, I have a copy. One of the members of MDLUG dropped by at the December meeting with a stack of the disks. I dropped the Ubuntu Live disk in my Thinkpad 600X and rebooted. It kernal panicked in under 10 seconds. And it repeated the behavior the three times I tried it, even from a cold boot.

Now my thinkpad 600X is no one's power machine, but with 320 meg of ram it certainly met the requirements for the Ubuntu Live CD. The hadware is many years old and should not be a mystery either. SuSE 9.0 instal

Re:First Impressions

[Domini]

Same happened to me!

It was a new AMD Athlon desktop with an NVidia 6xxx card.

I needed to format an external USB drive as FAT, and could not do it under XP (long story... read about it on MS's site: FAT cannot do > 32Gb by default...)

So I decided to give Ubuntu Live a test... and it cored.

Mandrake Move worked.

-shrug-

Ubuntu has a friendly cover... should do well regardless then. ;)

Re:First Impressions

[swv3752]

Recently the HD in my old notebook failed so I put in an Ubuntu Live disk. It worked and even got the battery monitor working, but was a major pain to use a usb key with. I tried Mandrake Move, and it just worked (except for the battery monitor).

Re:First Impressions

[mrBen]

Honest answer? The Ubuntu LiveCD is a bit crap.

However, Ubuntu itself is a different matter. And it works fine on my Thinkpad T41

Re:First Impressions

[nine-times]

I'm not an authority, but I seem to remember a little bit of an acknowledgement from the Ubuntu team that this release (Warty) was a little rough around the edges. As in, it should work fine, but maybe there are areas that are less polished than FC3 or Mandrake 10. The next release (Hoary) is supposed to add a lot of polish.

However, this is being typed on an Ubuntu system. I get a bunch of "fatal" errors when I boot, but haven't encountered any problems as a result. Its choice in packages and Synaptic

Re:First Impressions

[Pandora's Vox]

the "fatal" errors are a well-known ugliness in the boot process. it's completely harmless and will be fixed in Hoary.

Re:First Impressions

[nine-times]

yeah, I know. I'm just saying it's an example of how Warty, while definitely good, still lacks a certain sort of polish that some other distros (Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake) have. But, all those distros have been around for years, while Warty was Ubuntu's first public release, so I find it pretty forgivable.

Re:First Impressions

[Anonymous Coward]

P.S. Only problem, doesn't install a firewall by default! Easy to set it up though, but beware!

My Favorite Distro

[Snipes420]

I just wanted to say that I really like Ubuntu. The learning curve was perfect for me. I downloaded the cd's (install+live) and they both worked first and everytime in my computer. I found the forum a great place to learn how to do all the usual things a person would need to do with a desktop computer in terms I can understand.

It is now my desktop of choice. Previously my choice was windows:(. I fell in love with Gnome because of Ubuntu(or was it the other way around). It reminded me of a Mac how smooth ev

Snyde Remark

[polyp2000]

Nah ... We're not doing marketing - surely we didnt jump at the chance to do a radio interview promoting ubuntu... not - us !

On the other hand I've tried ubuntu - I like it I've not really switched yet but Im certainly watching out for it as it seems to be quite a fast moving project.

Nick ...