The end of the road for the Nexus One [LWN.net]

The end of the road for the Nexus One

Posted Jul 22, 2010 1:34 UTC (Thu) by karim (subscriber, #114)
Parent article: The end of the road for the Nexus One

I think this is close to the mark. FWIW, here are some tweets I posted last month around this topic:
http://twitter.com/karimyaghmour/status/16948577211
http://twitter.com/karimyaghmour/status/16476123955
http://twitter.com/karimyaghmour/status/16475358717

That last is the most important one I think. Basically, the issue is that what consumers expect of their "touch" phones has very little in common with most OSS apps ever written. Jobs makes the point that all desktop apps need rewriting for touch and I think he's on the mark there. Given the the vast majority of touch apps are not OSS and that most OSS apps evolved by and for a specific community, the question then becomes of whether the developers of the former (should) have an inclination to OSS and whether the developers of the latter have a strong enough inclination to make apps they themselves may feel are too basic for their own needs. My bet is the former care for selling apps regardless of the license and the latter can't feel compelled to create apps of little use to themselves.

That said, I do hope Android and Meego the best.

My 0.02$

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Ubuntu

Posted Jul 22, 2010 6:23 UTC (Thu) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]

I think we are underestimating the willingness for Ubuntu to become a major player. They were in the Intel wagon until Intel went Fedora for Moblin 2, and are definitely trying very hard, now part of Linaro.

I know Ubuntu is not Debian, but it's as close as it gets compared to Android and iOS...

Ubuntu

Posted Jul 22, 2010 20:12 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

End of the day... Canonical is not a hardware company...and that is significant. Canonical can try very hard and still not execute well enough to be picked up by device manufacturers. Canonical could have objectively the best set of technology for ARM hands down and still not win contracts when competing with Android or whatever ChromeOS evolves into as a product offering.

End of the day... its the hardware companies that make design decisions about the usability of their product. Why do you think HP snapped up WebOS? It makes a lot of since to control as much of the UI of your device as you can if you want to produce an integrate..distinctive experience. That's the lesson of Apple as a hardware company teaches us. This market reality puts Canonical in a weak position exactly because they aren't their own hardware company. They have to continue to prove to hardware vendors that they are the better value choice at the price points the hardware vendors require. Tough tough business..especially with Android out there as a competing value proposition.

For all the benefits of Ubuntu that certain linux enthusiasts see...end of the day.... Canonical has to show to hardware manufacturers that they bring better value to the table or device manufacturers aren't going to choose Ubuntu. Canonical's ARM initiative has been slow in comparison to the speed at which Google has been able to get Android workable across the ARM space. Speed of execution sort of matters a lot in this space and this is playing itself out in this year's device chatter.

All the chatter right now is about Android based ARM devices. Lenovo, Dell ...even freakin' Cisco are going ARM and going tablet and going Android.

Linaro might be a great incubation project to start getting linux on ARM into a cohesive shape to help streamline how OEMs can leverage linux in the future..but its far from clear that Canonical is going to be the software vendor that services the devices. Far from clear.

-jef

Ubuntu

Posted Jul 29, 2010 2:12 UTC (Thu) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]

You are saying then that Canonical is a *software* company?

I'd say that first and foremost, just as Google is not a search company
but rather an advertising company, Canonical is not a software company,
but rather a marketing company.

And therefore their promises of great new software, absent community and
upstream, should be taken with the bushels of the grains which they deserve.