My guess at Canonical's business model

Posted Aug 24, 2008 0:01 UTC (Sun) by salimma (subscriber, #34460)
In reply to: My guess at Canonical's business model by rgmoore
Parent article: In defense of Ubuntu

Since their key profit center is serving ads, not search, they could probably be profitable even without a strong public brand.

Not quite; without the brand, people would not use Google by default (Yahoo and MS Live are arguably as good as Google), and so they would not reap so much ads revenue. Google leveraged its technological lead at the time to create its brand; once the brand is secured, it does not matter if the competition catches up technologically; barring a major mishap, in most people's mind, Internet search == Google