Shuttleworth stepping down as Canonical CEO

[Posted December 17, 2009 by corbet]

Mark Shuttleworth has announced that, as of March, he'll relinquish the job of Canonical CEO to Jane Silber. "Ive become very passionate about design and quality, and want to spend more time figuring out how we harness the collaborative process to build better, more insightful products. I cant think of a more interesting challenge, and luckily I couldnt think of a better person to take over my formal management and leadership responsibilities at Canonical than Jane."

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Shuttleworth stepping down as Canonical CEO

Posted Dec 17, 2009 21:12 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (13 responses)

http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/168-brian-proffi...

"... though Shuttleworth indicated that while this management change was not a specific cost-reduction plan, Silber's operational focus and strengths would also be matched by improving the financial performance of the London-based company."

Okay.. so what does "improving the financial performance" mean if its not going to be a cost cutting plan?

-jef

Shuttleworth stepping down as Canonical CEO

Posted Dec 17, 2009 21:34 UTC (Thu) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]

Well, the other way to "improve financial performance" would be to make more money. Maybe he thinks that he really stinks as CEO and is dragging the company down.

Shuttleworth stepping down as Canonical CEO

Posted Dec 17, 2009 21:50 UTC (Thu) by keybuk (guest, #18473) [Link]

Make more money ;-)

Shuttleworth stepping down as Canonical CEO

Posted Dec 17, 2009 22:13 UTC (Thu) by aryonoco (guest, #55563) [Link] (10 responses)

Well, mark says:

"As a former VP at General Dynamics, Jane has more experience of large
customers and large organisational leadership..."

So, it seems like Mark thinks she is better at sitting down with the big
guys than himself, which hopefully means more money.

Shuttleworth stepping down as Canonical CEO

Posted Dec 18, 2009 1:21 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (9 responses)

Yeah. And probably it's not as fun being CEO as he thought it would be, or
he is tired of it. He probably wants to muck around with the OS and be more
hands on.

Certainly putting somebody else with a higher drive and motivation to do the
CEO-y stuff is certainly good business strategy. Everybody has different
aptitudes and motivations so matching people with roles they are best suited
for will certainly make it more likely to turn a profit.

Shuttleworth stepping down as Canonical CEO

Posted Dec 18, 2009 1:55 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (8 responses)

Who reports directly to Shuttleworth now as an employee? Who does he have direct hiring/firing authority over? From a Canonical business operations perspective is his role anything more advisory now?

-jef

Shuttleworth stepping down as Canonical CEO

Posted Dec 18, 2009 3:36 UTC (Fri) by wtogami (subscriber, #32325) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, in a normal company the owner(s) have control over the Board appointments, who have the power to hire/fire the CEO. So one might wonder if this makes any real difference other than a marketing move in an attempt to right certain past embarrassments.

Shuttleworth stepping down as Canonical CEO

Posted Dec 18, 2009 7:52 UTC (Fri) by Requiem (guest, #51519) [Link]

It could also be an attempt to give Jane full authority over the other executives, and get people to mostly leave Shuttleworth alone.

Titles have a lot of power, if it says CEO on your nameplate, people are going to act differently than if it says VP.

Shuttleworth stepping down as Canonical CEO

Posted Dec 20, 2009 11:31 UTC (Sun) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link] (5 responses)

I thought you were active with Fedora, or in other words, why do you care?

You like to type, so please explain. And by explain, I mean what is your interest in "Who does he have direct hiring/firing authority over?". Why do you care?

Shuttleworth stepping down as Canonical CEO

Posted Dec 20, 2009 14:30 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

Jeff has got some kind of OCD, which causes him to comment on every canonical story, and often drag Canonical into comments on completely unrelated stories. Guaranteed that, for any Canonical story on LWN, at least 1/4, if not 1/2, of the comments will be from Jeff (I exaggerate somewhat, but only sligthly). His modus operandi is to ask questions, the answers to which Jeff believes are uncomfortable to Canonical.

While many no doubt respect Jeff for the energy he has put into Fedora, it is quite sad to see him also invest energy in this troll-bot-like behaviour.

It's also sad hence these meta-Jeff-OCD sub-threads arise here on LWN, of which this is not the first (and I'm sure there are many more). None of which have ever caused Jeff to usefully change his behaviour, even though they led him to somewhat acknowledge acknowledged the trollish nature of his behaviour.

Paul "When will LWN give us that jspaleta filter?" Jakma

Shuttleworth stepping down as Canonical CEO

Posted Dec 20, 2009 23:10 UTC (Sun) by deepfire (guest, #26138) [Link]

I don't know about others, but I thoroughly enjoy Jef's comments.

As much as in any forum, most comments on LWN are, quite frankly, noise; which is arguably a fundamental property of any news-related public communication channels. LWN is really different from most, because of its higher-than-average SNR, but there's so much to it.

Now, I find that Jef's contributions are never trivial or maliciously false, and that really makes it up for me.

I don't really understand people who seem to get touchy about his topic choices -- it's really up to him as to what to talk about, as long as he stays honest. And, as of yet, I don't have any reasons to doubt his honesty.

regards, Samium Gromoff

Jef

Posted Dec 22, 2009 9:05 UTC (Tue) by mdz@debian.org (guest, #14112) [Link]

@paulj: Isn't there a wiki somewhere which indexes this sort of information
so that it doesn't need to be repeated in innumerable comment threads?

Shuttleworth stepping down as Canonical CEO

Posted Dec 20, 2009 23:03 UTC (Sun) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

Hmm I'm not allowed to care about Canonical if I'm not an ubuntu member? That's a very interesting thesis.

I simply want to understanding why is this newsworthy. If Shuttleworth still has all the authority he did as CEO now that he's sitting outside the organization chart structure why is this worth broadcasting? What authority does Silber really have that Shuttleworth can't unilaterally veto?

Does Silber have the authority as CEO to court additional venture capital resources broadening the pool of financial interests diluting Shuttleworth's personal control? I could imagine Google or even Dell wanting to buy a stake in Canonical in exchange for having a stronger say in setting the roadmap for the company.

-jef

Shuttleworth stepping down as Canonical CEO

Posted Dec 23, 2009 20:31 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

since he still controls the money, and can fire the CEO, he could in theory veto anything.

in practice it's a very different matter. nobody is going to remain as CEO if they have the company owner/board of directors meddling in the running of the company.

this does get 'interesting' when a person is both the owner, and holds a position in the company other than CEO, but such things get worked out.

so this could mean absolutly nothing if shuttleworth wants it to mean nothing, and the new CEO is willing to go along with him, or it could mean exactly what it claims to mean, namely that Mark is stepping aside to put someone in the CEO position that he thinks will be better for the company than he would be (and it doesn't matter if that's because they will do a better job as CEO, or just free him up to work on other things)

Shuttleworth stepping down as Canonical CEO

Posted Dec 18, 2009 10:41 UTC (Fri) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link]

Apparently he has found a designer inside once he had 'Me Menu' created :)