Ubuntu focuses on mobile devices [LWN.net]

November 2, 2011

This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier.

As has become traditional, Mark Shuttleworth kicked off the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) with a keynote (video link) looking back at the last release cycle and looking ahead to the next release. Following the keynote, Shuttleworth jumped on a conference call to share his vision for Ubuntu's next release and beyond. The long story short? Expect more of an emphasis on mobile and cloud, and less on the legacy desktop.

Canonical and the rest of the Ubuntu project is now starting the development cycle for Ubuntu 12.04, which will be a Long Term Support (LTS) release. This time around, Canonical is planning to do a five-year cycle for the client and server release. Shuttleworth said that this is in response from customers who have large Ubuntu deployments, though he didn't specify which ones.

Shuttleworth said that 12.04 will "draw to conclusion" the "threads" that started since the last LTS release. For example, solidifying the Unity desktop and work on the cloud services in Ubuntu. At the same time, Shuttleworth is already looking forward to the 14.04 LTS and putting Ubuntu on tablets, phones, televisions, and other mobile and embedded devices. Ubuntu has been focusing on touch interfaces for some time, but now Shuttleworth said that Ubuntu "is in a position" to span "from phone to televisions, to car, and elsewhere."

That's quite an ambitious perspective, especially considering two things. First, Ubuntu is a little bit late to the game. Giants like Microsoft, Google, and Apple have already been jockeying for position for years. Android and iOS have already carved out a pretty enormous swath of the tablet and phone markets, and word around the campfire is that Apple is poised to release a TV in the not-too-distant future. By the time Ubuntu 14.04 rolls around, or even 13.04 with preview technology for mobile, other companies will be well into their Nth generation of technology in markets Canonical will just be dipping a toe into.

The second is that Canonical is a really tiny David in this David and Goliath story. On one side, Canonical faces the aforementioned industry giants. On the other hand, Canonical is also competing with industry consortia like Tizen.

Essentially, Canonical seems to be facing an uphill battle similar to that the company faced when it attempted to take on the desktop against Microsoft and Apple. Currently, Shuttleworth boasts 20 million users for Ubuntu. Leaving aside the fact that Canonical doesn't actually publish the information used to gather those numbers, 20 million users have not been enough to qualify as mainstream success on the desktop. Now the company is planning to enter markets where it's completely unknown and years late.

So I asked Shuttleworth why he thinks that Canonical will be poised to compete here? First, he acknowledged that Ubuntu would be late to market. However, he said that this market is a bit different. First, it's a highly contested market with no clear winner. Shuttleworth said that there is the potential for "dramatic shifts" in the market, and that has been the case in the past with the arrival of Android. He also said that there's potential backlash to Google picking up Motorola Mobility. The "Googlerola" deal might change the way that companies feel about Android, Shuttleworth said — which provides an opening to Canonical.

Tizen will not satisfy the need, Shuttleworth said, because consortia have "an inability to deliver a focused, concrete" solution. This point is rather hard to argue, given the string of failures (i.e. Moblin, Maemo, MeeGo) thus far. So Shuttleworth said vendors "have me on the phone to ask how quickly we can bring a mobile story with Ubuntu." Canonical has declined to identify particular vendors until there are products ready to go to market. That may take a while; if not as late as 2014 certainly not in 2011 and likely not in 2012.

Without products to hack on, how will developers be testing their applications, assuming interested developers want to get the next Angry Birds (or the current one) put together for Ubuntu on mobile? Shuttleworth said that in the interim Ubuntu will target existing hardware that ship with different OSes. "We'll target existing hardware that's available around the world, cheaply."

Developers can use HTML5 or QML to target Ubuntu for mobile, said Shuttleworth. For multi-platform, low-resource applications, HTML5 should be fine, he said, and Canonical will "make sure that HTML5 apps work beautifully on all devices." For games and native applications, Shuttleworth said that developers can have a "smoother" experience targeting Ubuntu using QML.

One key criticism of tablets, in particular, from the open source community is that they're essentially for consuming media — not for creating content or hacking. I asked Shuttleworth if Canonical had any plans to address this with Ubuntu's tablet releases. Unfortunately, Shuttleworth said that the 1.0 release will also be primarily focused on standard tablet behavior (consuming content), but of course an Ubuntu tablet will have a wide range of applications.

One potential snag is how Canonical is going to turn a profit on its mobile work when any vendor could just pick up Ubuntu and put it on its own devices without Canonical's blessing. Shuttleworth said that Android has shown that path to be "ultimately destructive" when vendors choose to go their own way. He didn't explain this in detail, but there are few Android success stories from vendors that are not partnered with Google. The notable exceptions are Barnes & Noble, which seems to be doing quite well with the Android-based Color Nook, and Amazon. While Amazon hasn't yet shipped the Android-based Kindle Fire, it seems to have been well received initially. Nevertheless, Shuttleworth said he's "confident" that many of the ISVs will want an engagement with Canonical for services, which will be one revenue stream.

The Ubuntu One framework and its services will provide another income stream, he said. Shuttleworth envisions devices shipping with Ubuntu and Ubuntu One services, which Canonical will generate revenue from. This may wind up being successful — during the UDS keynote, Shuttleworth mentioned that of 110,000 new users to Ubuntu One, 25,000 had never used Ubuntu before.

For the next Ubuntu release, then, expect the feature set to be fairly conservative. Canonical will be focusing on polishing Unity and improving the integration of OpenStack and the new cloud management software (Juju) that was introduced with 11.10. Unfortunately, this topic was not really discussed during the press call with Shuttleworth and my attempt to connect with the right person at Canonical on server plans was hampered by the ongoing UDS.

Shuttleworth and Canonical are taking on a steep challenge with the play for phones, tablets, and other devices. It's interesting that Shuttleworth spent little time talking up Ubuntu's strategy as an operating system of choice for cloud infrastructure, especially given the work that the Ubuntu folks put into Ubuntu's cloud tools in the 11.10 release. Perhaps Canonical has learned enough from attempts at desktop success to make a go on the next wave of devices for personal computing. It will certainly be interesting to watch.

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Ubuntu focuses on mobile devices

Posted Nov 3, 2011 18:53 UTC (Thu) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link]

It's seemed to me for a while that, intentionally or not, Canonical is headed down the same road as Apple. They are making similar UI decisions, they are focusing on similar platforms (ie: mobile and laptop are important, desktop and server are not), and they are chasing similar users (the technically less savvy).

There is a niche there, to be sure. The problem for Canonical, though, is that they may not be able to follow where Apple is going. Apple is heading for completely locked down appliance computing; to Apple, the future looks more like the iPad than it does the iMac. Apple makes its own hardware and their most profitable products are locked-down mobile devices, so it can drive the changes it wants to see.

Canonical doesn't have that.

On OSX, you can look at the UI damage they are doing to their desktop experience as part of a process of migrating all their users to locked-down appliances. As someone forced to use an OSX machine on a regular basis, the user experience since 10.4 has been one of gradual decay and dumbing down, culminating (so far) in things like the LauchPad launcher (which is basically the iPad launcher for your mac). Many of the banner features of Lion only make sense on a single-screen touch-enabled device.

Apple is also about to start enforcing sandboxing in everything that sells through the mac app store.

You can see where it ends; it's a fairly obvious strategy to funnel all their users into locked-down computing appliances. I think we're a few product generations away from Apple ceasing to sell "personal computers" to the general public. Whether they stop making them for app-developers or not is a question of whether they can get xcode to play nicely in the sandbox.

We're probably ten years away from that, but that's where Apple is headed, at least currently. They've long since decided that the professional market is worth a tiny fraction of the nonprofessional mass market.

Again, I don't see how Canonical can follow them there. People will still be trying to install Ubuntu on general purpose PCs, unless Canonical pulls support for that. Apple can drive their customers to locked down consumer appliance computing simply by adjusting their product lineup, but Canonical is at the mercy of whatever the downloader wants to install on.

I do think Apple is a very bad role model here, one that too many projects are following. What Apple is doing works very well for Apple, but in order to reap the benefits, you have to be completely vertically integrated the way Apple is.

Beyond that, Apple's designer-driven appliance computing model is one that I personally find unfortunate, the lasting effects of which are going to be very hard to shake off.

Aside: please, no more "David and Goliath" analogies.

The story of David and Goliath is a terrible analogy; people take it as a story of the triumph of faith over certain doom, when it's really quite the opposite. It's a story about an intelligent fighter winning a battle by choosing not to fight on his opponent's terms. If you'd actually been there for the battle between the two, you would not have been surprised in the least by the outcome.

I once took a course that considered ancient stories (the old testament, the illiad, the viking sagas...) as flawed but useful mirrors on the past. Part of the thesis of the course was that you could tell a lot about what a society was like by the things they glossed over, since that's what the authors would have assumed to be common knowledge in their readers.

When we got to the story of David and Goliath, I remember the prof pointing out a couple of things; David was a shepherd in a time when one of the jobs of a shepherd was to keep wolves and lions from eating the sheep. The sling he used would have been a full-sized fighting sling capable of throwing a fist-sized stone hard enough to seriously inconvenience a lion at range. Those slings are shockingly accurate as well, once you get good with them. The prof from the course was a farm boy growing up, and he said it only took him a couple of months of practice to get good enough to cut a sparrow out of the air mid-flight.

David (sensibly) refused armor and a heavy weapon. So, you have an unarmored (and thus quick), agile person with a powerful ranged weapon.

On the other side, you have a beefy guy in bronze armor with a thrusting spear. Not a throwing spear, a spear that you hold onto and stab someone with.

The fight started at range.

I'd have bet on the lightly-armored nimble guy with the powerful ranged weapon, personally, rather than the slow stabber. If David had taken the heavy weapons and armor he'd been offered (and with which he was untrained), and engaged in a close-quarters battle with Goliath, the story would have ended very differently.

Ubuntu focuses on mobile devices

Posted Nov 4, 2011 0:03 UTC (Fri) by fuhchee (subscriber, #40059) [Link]

"I once took a course that considered ancient stories..."

Fascinating. Could you give a reference to the course, or some of the teaching materials?

Ubuntu focuses on mobile devices

Posted Nov 4, 2011 0:55 UTC (Fri) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link]

It was a (3rd year undergrad? maybe 4th?) course at University of Toronto, I believe the prof was Joseph Goering. If I recall correctly, the course was called "History of Warfare", which I suppose was sort of true.

The reference texts were The Illiad, the Old Testament, Machiavelli's "The Prince", The Song of Roland, and (IIRC) Harald's Saga, with a few other sources thrown in as well.

It was an excellent course; it might as well have been called "Prof. Goering grinds all his axes while taking questions.".

The biblical stuff was fascinating in a lot of ways, mostly because if you actually sit down and read the sources some of the things that happen are nothing like the popular perception. The example that sticks in the mind is that of Moses and the Red Sea. If you actually read the source, what happens is this:

The Egyptians are on chariots, and are closing on Moses and his people. Moses says "There's a sea, and the tide is out, so let's stand on the mud flats waiting for the Egyptians." The Egyptians drive out into the mud flats, their chariots bog down in the mud, and Moses and crew attack.

That's much more interesting to me than the "Moses snapped his fingers and God fixed everything" Charlton Heston version.

One of the things Prof. Goering pointed out at that point was that Moses' people destroyed the chariots. They didn't keep them, they chopped them up and burned them despite the tactical advantage they offered in battle. His belief was that they recognized that a chariot-based military requires an aristocracy simply to support the maintenance burden, and they weren't interested in living in such a society.

There was a whole section on the course about the Song of Roland, which is kind of an odd story because the core of it is a real story (a battle between Basque rebels and some of Charlemagne's forces that went badly for the Carolingians), but the 11th century rewrite recasts it as part of the Reconquista and changes the Basques to Saracens.

Machiaveilli's work was interesting. He gets a bad rap, but given when he was operating, his heart was in the right place.

Harald's saga was a lot of fun, and fit with the theme of the course quite well. The bit where Harald meets Harold Godwinson is priceless. Harald and his forces are waiting for a parley with the English, and a messenger rides up from the English side. Harald tells the messenger to tell the English King that he is there for lands that are rightfully his. The messenger tells him "The King says you are to be granted only six feet of English soil, or as much more as you are taller than other men.", and then rides off.

Harald turns to one of his people and says something about how the messenger was pretty mouthy for a functionary, and someone says "Oh, didn't you know? That was King Harold."

Machiavelli the troll

Posted Nov 10, 2011 0:24 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

My sources tell me that Machiavelli was just trolling, and it completely fits with what the book actually says. Pity that your prof didn't grind this particular axe, as Cracked.com is sadly not a reputable source.

Machiavelli the troll

Posted Dec 3, 2011 0:44 UTC (Sat) by Pageofswords (guest, #81668) [Link]

Actually, Rosseau was the first to propose that Machiavelli was, in fact, a troll. But also exposed by Cracked.com, Rosseau was a complete jackass. Not exactly a reputable source either. To most scholars, the "troll" theory is pretty much equal with "Machiavelli the immoral", "Machiavelli the amoral" (he was a pragmatic and a scientist, who didn't believe in what he wrote but wrote it how it was), and "Machiavelli the new moralist". Cracked probably should have mentioned these possibilities, but no matter how informative it is it's still a comedy website.

Ubuntu focuses on mobile devices

Posted Nov 4, 2011 11:31 UTC (Fri) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

It's a possibility, but it may happen that a part of the mass market that Apple is after will be pissed off as Apple gets more confident and tries to tighten it's grip on their pockets.
All those people, if this came to be, will be grateful that there's a door out of the walled garden: Ubuntu. I'm not sure if this is the plan of Shuttleworth. It's too quixotic and unpractical for his way of thinking, but it's really where Ubuntu is going right now: to became an scape way for a fraction of a fraction of the mass market.

Ubuntu focuses on mobile devices

Posted Nov 12, 2011 3:59 UTC (Sat) by wtanksleyjr (subscriber, #74601) [Link]

Awesome comment and probably true -- but as an aside, cutting a sparrow out of the air is trivial and easily done by a first-time sling novice, as my brother discovered to his shame. Nesting sparrows hunt for insects to feed their young but aren't experts; they will therefore seek out moving objects without accurately judging their nature and danger, making them easy prey to sling pellets.

The takeaway

Posted Nov 3, 2011 21:46 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]

The takeaway from this is the phrase 'legacy desktop.' When you hear somebody put 'legacy' in front of a tech you depend on, don't be suprised when they hose you. So if you aren't planning to be on tablets or some other vapor in the next couple of years you should be planning a migration from Ubuntu. Because if you don't, WHEN (not if) you find yourself abandoned you won't get any sympathy from anyone with a clue who read the writing on the wall. Some would say Unity is already an abandonment of the desktop, which isn't far from the truth. Same goes for GNOME Shell.

Don't think we have ever seen lemming like bahaviour as bad as this. Abandoning all development on the desktop when it still has overwhelming market share and there is currently zero hardware available for running this future touch interface of the future on and pretty close to zero on the horizon. If ya really think touch is the future it certainly makes sense to be designing to work with it, but to just toss everything on some leap of faith that "If we build it, the hardware will come.. and the users will actually want it." makes no sense to me.

So now is the time to be investigating alternatives. Walk, don't run toward the exit. There is still time to get out in an orderly fashion since there are still supported releases that are usable on a desktop. The trick is to not wait too long.

The takeaway

Posted Nov 4, 2011 11:57 UTC (Fri) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link]

The beauty of Linux is that it's open. Ubuntu is just a distro. Few of the people who use it today, did so half a decade ago, and most can easily substitute a different distro if/when Ubuntu no longer satisfies.

I use Ubuntu, but the thing is, I don't really use *ubuntu*, I use Firefox. I use Eclipse. I use Thunderbird. I use php. I use gcc. I use a dozen other programs, but ubuntu itself isn't a significant part.

The distro needs only be easy to install, easy to maintain, and capable of launching the programs I actually use. Atleast half a dozen distros fulfill these requirements today.

Key lesson is that a software-vendor can only screw you over to the degree you've made yourself dependant upon software that is only available from them. Don't do that if and when you can help it.

The takeaway

Posted Nov 9, 2011 12:04 UTC (Wed) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

My wife is a fairly typical user and she got updated to Oneiric last night. Unity and gnome 3 got a (very shouty!) thumbs down. Like most users she wants her interface to just stay the same as it was before - not even change the colours, never mind how it all works. And not icons for everything, nor annoying slidy bars so things move around. It's all hateful, and, as you say, obviously optimised for tablets/netbooks/phones which is not what you want on a desktop/laptop.

The obvious escape direction is Debian, which isn't afflicted in the same way by 'UI designers'. Sadly that doesn't solve the 'gnome has gone all annoying too' problem, for which xfce seems to be the easiest way back to something reasonably familiar.

This is probably a pretty common reaction. But it's interesting to see non-geeks feeling pretty much the same about their UI as us geeks do when presented with all that annoying shiny stuff we didn't ask for. Apparently there are people who like it, I just don't seem to have met very many of them.

Disgusting analogy of the day

Posted Nov 10, 2011 11:22 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

It sounds like a prostate exam: they are extremely annoying at the beginning, but then certain people cannot get enough of it and it becomes something they do for pleasure. For the rest of us it remains extremely annoying. (I'm sure female readers can think of an analogy that suits their gender, but I think mine is disgusting enough for today.)

I'm only partly joking, partly trolling.