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Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET)
Over at CNET, Stephen Shankland has a fairly lengthy interview with Canonical's new CEO Jane Silber. "But is there more urgency about profit now?
Silber: There is a sense of great opportunity right now. When we started Ubuntu in year one, we didn't put a strong push on trying to sell Canonical services, not because we were not interested, but it's hard to build a business around selling services around an operating system that nobody is using. We knew we needed to gain a user base and momentum before we could sell services. That user base is now there. There is urgency and momentum around that at a level we hadn't necessarily seen in the first couple years."
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Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 11, 2010 18:04 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Okay... Silber cloud management as a defining revenue stream for Canonical.
Can anyone...anyone..Canonical employee or not..articulate to me what Canonical's Landscape offers for cloud management that a service provider like RightScale isn't already providing customers?
How does Canonical's Landscape really compete for cloud management service dollars for managing Ubuntu instances against Rightscale's management service?
-jef
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 11, 2010 18:12 UTC (Thu) by sharms (subscriber, #57357) [Link]
Ford employee or not... articulate to me what Ford's Fusion offers for
driving that a auto manufacturer like General Motors isn't already providing customers?
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 11, 2010 18:34 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]
RightScale's white paper has an example of a client running RightScale on Amazon EC2, where the RightScale line item in the budget is more than the Amazon one. RightScale does do some interesting stuff, but they do look pricey compared to other ways of doing cloud -- maybe in the long run it's one of those things that makes more sense as a feature than as a product.
After all, why should Red Hat include KVM when "everybody" is already using VMWare ESX?
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 11, 2010 18:46 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Yes RightScale's management services is more expensive than the utility costs that Amazon charges. Is that really shocking? Are you suggesting that Landscape is going to compete in cloud management services based on cost? Have you looked at what Landscape costs per node? I'm not sure that holds.
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 11, 2010 20:18 UTC (Thu) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]
The Canonical-snark aside, I don't think the comparison between service providers is necessarily that relevant - the name on the box is often as important as the feature-set, and I'm sure people can name a hundred different products which should have succeeded but lost out to less well-designed competitors.
It does strike me that Canonical is a bit late to some of these markets, Ubuntu One being an obvious example. I only barely grok the mobile/netbook play (makes sense to link up with the litls of this world; seems limited though), and Landscape I'm not sure what to make of.
The Ubuntu-onlyness of some of these services is probably going to be what makes or breaks the strategy; e.g. will people pay up for Ubuntu One when they could use Dropbox? For some it will depend on if they need it to work on Windows, for others the deeper integration/support on Ubuntu. But that aside, they seem to be continually late to the game rather than changing the game somehow - I don't recognise Silber's descriptions of the company being either disruptive or visionary, from this vantage point.
I've written my thoughts on giving away Ubuntu before; I still think there is a basic problem there of underwriting the development of something they only monetize indirectly. I hope they can announce break-even in a couple of years, and I'm not an Ubuntu user...
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 12, 2010 8:11 UTC (Fri) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] It seems to me that Canonical have already missed their chance for profitability. They had the opportunity to be the OS shipped on a new sort of platform -- the netbook -- and they under-resourced that effort. The window of that opportunity closed before Canonical had a compelling product. Worse still, they didn't even try to match Microsoft's wooing of netbook manufacturers at the time when both manufacturers had less than ideal offerings and so it was customer relations and pricing which was going to make the sale.
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 12, 2010 19:01 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (subscriber, #60281) [Link]
Well... I think the netbook situation is more complex than that.
On one hand, you have the Acers, Lenovos, and so on of the world, who put together laptops and sell them.
On the other, you have Microsoft, their most important supplier. Microsoft sells them something they can't get anywhere else: Windows. They can always find a new hard drive supplier, but there's no second source for Windows.
As you might expect, negotiations between camp #1 and camp #2 are neither free, nor fair... nor open to the public. Maybe company X drops their Linux netbook offering, and then 3 months later, they get a 25% discount on Windows on all their systems. Anti-trust laws might prevent the worst abuses, but anti-trust suits take years to grind through the courts. And the penalty is often a slap on the wrist.
Laptop vendors can't afford to flip Microsoft the bird, because Windows is so important to their core business. Despite their recent popularity, netbooks were still only 20% of laptop volume in 2009, and only 10% of sales. (The low sales number is because of the low prices of netbooks.) More than anything else, they probably used Linux as a bargaining chip to get Microsoft to knock down their Windows XP prices.
Also... in the long term, cheap Android-based devices are probably going to eat a lot of the netbook market share.
I'm sure Mark Shuttleworth is well aware of these realities, and he's trying to fight the battles he can actually win.
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 12, 2010 19:17 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
And don't forget the next wave of ARM based netbook devices...which has a vastly different set of market realities. Windows doesn't have a defacto partner advantage there. But at the same time Canonical can't just swoop in with a product constructed primarily by others. And then there is Google with its Android ARM OEM beachhead already.
For Canonical to win the ARM-race against Google they are going to have to be a lot of deep engineering work underneath the UI polish and integration layers they've articulated as their strength. The sort of engineering they didn't have to heavily invest in for intel, the work that was being done by others on intel.
So the question is... how is Canonical's ARM work coming along? If Canonical's major ARM OEM partnership end up being embedded servers like Sheevaplug deployments while Google gets the majority of the consumer UI oriented devices like ARM netbooks...that will be ironic.
-jef
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 12, 2010 19:44 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
In the netbook market, Google are pushing ChromeOS. And much of ChromeOS's underpinnings
are... being produced under contract by Canonical.
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 12, 2010 19:48 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Much of the underpinnings? What exactly? Were Canonical engineers part of the transition away from debian packaging to Gentoo's portage system? That would be even more ironic.
-jef
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 13, 2010 13:32 UTC (Sat) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]
You can look at the gitweb from chromeos and see.
It does surprise me that they do this OEM-style work without much fanfare -
It's the same with litl. It started off as Ubuntu, but apparently now has a
Proper market regulation Posted Mar 15, 2010 11:54 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]
What you've described highlights the need for proper regulation of the market. Clearly, with Microsoft stoking "consumer demand" for Windows and able to tell vendors not to think of shipping anything else - with netbooks, vendors could argue that there wasn't a suitable Windows product, but this is an exception to the general situation - the market is no longer able to effectively regulate itself.
Thus, a regulator could usefully intervene and stipulate that a choice of operating systems must be offered. Unlike the issue of the "browser chooser" where the shark is ordered to "play fair as pool attendant", an external solution means that the incentive for Microsoft to punish anyone is reduced - it becomes a choice of complying with the law or colluding with Microsoft to break the law - and if retailers had to offer the choice, Microsoft would have to go down the well-travelled road of "exclusive dealing" and marketing-related antitrust violations to preserve their monopoly. The difference between that and where we are now is that the former is not so easy to obscure behind the smoke and mirrors of technological jargon and would thus be more readily punishable.
Proper market regulation Posted Mar 15, 2010 19:29 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
The OEM's used Linux against windows in the netbook space. Windows outside netbooks is $85, shipping it with a netbook costs $8-10 (XP, Win7 costs about $40). That's nearly free, the only reason it costs so little for netbooks is that Linux took a strong early foothold and the OEM's used that against MS to get price concessions. At so little cost Linux simply can't compete. The biggest selling point for Linux to the vast majority of consumers is price, MS wacks the price down to negligible and the broad acceptance of the Linux desktop disintegrates under cost/benefit.
Make no mistake the reason MS dominates the Netbook space was a deliberate monopoly sustaining price cut. Regardless of what actions Ubuntu did/didn't take they wouldn't have been able to compete against the eventual $8 oem price for XP. The only area Linux netbooks have a chance is on ARM simply because MS can't offer XP on ARM.
Proper market regulation Posted Mar 15, 2010 19:46 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Do we have a good current picture of what the OS market share is in the netbook space? Dell's last report that I saw was that ~1/3 of their netbook units were shipping with Ubuntu. And credit where credit is due, Canonical seems to have built a solid business relationship with Dell.
But I haven't seen anything market wide for the last two quarters I don't think. Are there any other major OEMs still shipping new linux netbooks other than Dell. Acer,Asus,toshibia,hp...any of them? Is linux pre-installs of +10% of netbook sales in the last quarter for anyone but Dell (and niche OEMs like zareason?) And I don't just mean US markets. Are the demographics in linux netbook sales in other locations vastly different?
-jef
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 12, 2010 22:44 UTC (Fri) by segedunum (guest, #60948) [Link]
I agree to be honest. They just didn't put the effort into the platform to sustain the early lead they had.
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 13, 2010 3:59 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
What more could Canonical have done? Pay OEMs to keep Ubuntu netbooks on their product lines?
-jef
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 12, 2010 14:33 UTC (Fri) by bocahenom (guest, #64338) [Link]
i'll move to open source because linux like ubuntu it's freeware....
go...go...open source
i like linux Posted Mar 12, 2010 14:38 UTC (Fri) by bocahenom (guest, #64338) [Link]
i wants to try it.....
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 13, 2010 0:26 UTC (Sat) by jmm82 (subscriber, #59425) [Link]
Open source does not imply freeware and freeware does not imply open source. Ubuntu is FREE($$ and freedom), yet this article happens to be about the services Ubuntu has been slipping into their disro in the hopes to get users hooked so they can eventually charge them.
With that being said good luck and enjoy, just don't hope fore more than 2 gig on your Ubuntu One account unless you want to fork over some cash.;)
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 15, 2010 11:04 UTC (Mon) by sylware (subscriber, #35259) [Link]
We need to be pre-installed on PC which people and companies buy.
But that will never happen while some company: - buy/threaten computer integrators. - get key people/key companies to belong to them.
The GNU/Linux desktop has been ready for *years*... and that's very true for office/internet use cases.
Those guys are toxic and dangerous. Now, they can be everywhere, like a terrorist cell waiting to be "activated", or "bought" if not assimilated yet.
What will happen if a company buys most of the rigths on the Linux kernel? (I doubt that the FSF will sell the rights on GNU...)
Presuming you wrote a critical piece of open source software, even protected with the GNU GPLv3, and one day a guy offers you millions of bucks for the rights to close your code, *what would you do?*
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 15, 2010 16:24 UTC (Mon) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link]
> We need to be pre-installed on PC which people and companies buy.
Botnets evolved the ability to post on lwn: TEOTWAWKI at 11
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 15, 2010 19:51 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
I'd take the million bucks, sell him the code and then fork it and keep going.
You can't undo a GPL license, you can never revoke rights already granted. Because the GPL allows forks it can never be closed up and taken away. That's one of the important constraints of the GPL BTW and the reason Oracle's purchase of SUN was and is not a threat to MySQL. RMS designed the GPL to allow hostile companies to acquire the source without it damaging the community.
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 16, 2010 10:12 UTC (Tue) by sylware (subscriber, #35259) [Link] I'd take the million bucks, sell him the code and then fork it and keep going.Do you realise that it will hurt a lot open source software since you give momentum to proprietary/closed version based on open source software? We have a worst case example with darwin/MacOS. In this case, even people like you do not have the protection of the GNU GPL to leverage some money The goal of many open source coders/supporters is to have optimal open source software installed on systems, not proprietary/closed version. That would mean accute betrayal for them.
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 15, 2010 20:59 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] What will happen if a company buys most of the rigths on the Linux kernel?How? They'd need to bribe hundreds of developers and their employers, and given that they're trying to end their livelihoods and that the developers talk to each other, either they'd have to lie to them and hope that not one gets suspicious, or they'd have to pay them an insane amount of money. This is... not practical. If they can get this many developers to agree, they can probably go for world peace next.
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 16, 2010 10:32 UTC (Tue) by sylware (subscriber, #35259) [Link] M$ has the money to do everything you said. Period. With that amount of money they can make it practical: what is a few hundreds of coders when you swim in money from an earth scale market. For instance, you have the secret services, they are thouthands! They have others means of leverage... but come on, billions of $ for a few hundreds.
Meet Ubuntu Linux's new CEO (Q&A) (CNET) Posted Mar 19, 2010 0:17 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]
We *really* need the equivalent of a KILL file in the discussions. You just proved it.
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