Cloudy with a chance of Linux: Canonical aims to cash in (ars technica) [LWN.net]

Ryan Paul takes a look at Ubuntu on the server. "As Ubuntu's presence in the server space grows, it is showing up in some unexpected places. Weta Digital, the New Zealand company that did the special effects for Lord of the Rings and some of the 3D rendering for Avatar, reportedly runs Ubuntu on its 35,000-core render farm and virtually all of its desktop computers. The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the popular Wikipedia website, rolled out Ubuntu on 400 of its servers in 2008. We even use Ubuntu ourselves on several of the key servers that power the Ars Orbiting HQ."

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Cloudy with a chance of Linux: Canonical aims to cash in (ars technica)

Posted Mar 26, 2010 19:38 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (2 responses)

Summed up as.. click and drag while performing mouse gestures to expose advanced window manager actions.

Naive question, are click and "drag gestures" effective on touch sensitive inputs like trackpads and touch screens? I can sort of see doing this on my thinkpad because it has mouse buttons near but separate from the trackpad. For track pads that are required for tap to select will drag gestures be difficult to perform?

-jef

Cloudy with a chance of Linux: Canonical aims to cash in (ars technica)

Posted Mar 26, 2010 20:22 UTC (Fri) by sharms (guest, #57357) [Link] (1 responses)

Wrong article Jef :)

Cloudy with a chance of Linux: Canonical aims to cash in (ars technica)

Posted Mar 26, 2010 21:14 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

Apologizes. I guess there's no way for an editor to magically move this over.

But since I'm here. I might as well say something on topic.

This is pretty good news for Canonical. I still have questions about how they plan to monetize this, but it does get them a foot in the door into on-premises infrastructure in a way that other OS vendors can't directly compete with. Red Hat's stayed out of the game of providing a turnkey private cloud solution. My understanding of Delta Cloud is something more abstract that lives on top of public/private clouds. And Novell's Studio doesn't really address on premises infrastructure directly...just guest appliances.

-jef

Cloudy with a chance of Linux: Canonical aims to cash in (ars technica)

Posted Mar 27, 2010 1:19 UTC (Sat) by lwkejrlej (guest, #64237) [Link] (10 responses)

The article claims that

As companies that deploy Linux cultivate better in-house support capabilities, they want commercial Linux support options that are more granular and less expensive. (...) [T]he Linux server market is big enough to accommodate a plurality of players with very different models.

So let's follow where this logically leads -- for Canonical to get anywhere near the revenue numbers of Red Hat, they would have to sign up many more paying customers than RH (due to the lower revenue per customer). Even though the Linux server market is growing, is it a large enough pool to provide the required number of customers to Canonical ?

Granted, perhaps Canonical is not looking to be the size of RH, however it is still not known to be profitable (i.e. it's losing money). What happens to all the paying customers when Mark Shuttleworth (1) gets bored with his pet project, and/or (2) gets sick of losing money through Canonical, and hence decides to stop financial support ? Isn't there something like 2 years left on his self-imposed deadline of break-even ?

It's also not only the paying customers who are at risk of being left out in the cold -- all the people who use the "free" version will no longer have security updates, let alone new versions of Ubuntu.

If Canonical (and by extension Mark Shuttleworth) was serious about breaking even in the near future (and hence provide assurance to paying customers that Canonical is not going to disappear anytime soon), it would probably be less risky to simply clone RH's strategy. (This works for Novell when it comes to their Linux division). The "cloning" approach has the advantage of adapting something that is known to work, in contrast to the highly uncertain "search for revenue" approach (i.e. experimentation) currently being undertaken by Canonical.

Cloudy with a chance of Linux: Canonical aims to cash in (ars technica)

Posted Mar 27, 2010 1:58 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

"So let's follow where this logically leads -- for Canonical to get anywhere
near the revenue numbers of Red Hat, they would have to sign up many more
paying customers than RH (due to the lower revenue per customer)"

I don't see why. Going by
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6681/2/, Canonical's support
contracts are more expensive than Red Hat's and although it follows the
model during that old Red Hat Linux of selling support in a optional manner.
The open question is whether that model scales well. It did not for Red Hat
but the market is very different now and I personally think, there is room
for experimentation here.

Cloudy with a chance of Linux: Canonical aims to cash in (ars technica)

Posted Mar 27, 2010 4:05 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (3 responses)

There maybe room to experiment... but my concern is that other corporate interests are beating Canonical to the punch at providing the high value services that potential Ubuntu customers are willing to pay for.

For example in the cloud, its still not clear to me how Canonical plans to position Landscape as a competitor with RightScale's cloud services. Even if UEC is rolled out widely through Dell.. what's to stop RightScale from beating the snot out of Canonical for the real value add cloud management contracts?

Even more worrying is that in the latest Ubuntu Server survey it appears that respondants ranked interest in commercial support from Canonical and commercial applications support low if you believe The Register article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/24/canonical_ubuntu_...

"Nearly all of the respondents said that package update management ranked high on their list, too, as an important reason to choose Ubuntu, and good security and simple upgrades were cited nearly universally as being important or very important. The availability of commercial applications running atop Ubuntu or commercial tech support from Canonical or independent software vendors didn't rank very high"

Canonical hasn't released the full survey results, they've just released a pdf broadside summary which crows glowingly about Ubuntu adoption. Which is perfectly fine as a PR device.. if they are still trying to establish that Ubuntu is an adequate replacement for Debian in mission critical roles.

But wide scale adoption does not equal sustainable business model. They haven't publicly released the results for the full set of questions from their survey that include the ones that speak to the interest in support services. Clearly someone at The Register has seen that data though (yippie for transparency!) The selective reporting about the survey should raise some red flags. They do have data about Landscape adoption in that survey..but they aren't talking about it. They do have data about interest in commercial support services, but they aren't talking about that.

And just for comparison... if you look really closely at the recent Groundworks survey which puts Centos at 46% and Red Hat at 21% of Groudworks deployments...that shows that Red Hat is enjoying a nearly 1 to 2 paying customer penetration for every non-paying CentOS user in the Groundworks customerbase. Sure Ubuntu deployments look like a great slice of the pie at 14%.. but how many of those are paying Canonical for support?

That's the trick Red Hat learned...they actually have customers for their support services. Can Canonical claim anywhere near that sort of penetration of paying customers in ANY deployment scenario or through any ISV partner. What Canonical has done is peeled a way the portion of the market that is simply not interested in paying for support, but haven't really grown an honest to god customerbase. Good for them.
Everywhere I look..and I look...it seems like other businesses are leveraging the no cost acquisition model to cut Canonical out of the feedback loop which would allow them to build and sustain a strong ISV program...instead of helping Canonical sell their own support services.

-jef

Cloudy with a chance of Linux: Canonical aims to cash in (ars technica)

Posted Mar 27, 2010 5:13 UTC (Sat) by lwkejrlej (guest, #64237) [Link] (2 responses)

"... The availability of commercial applications running atop Ubuntu or commercial tech support from Canonical or independent software vendors didn't rank very high"

And it's no wonder since they're getting updates and security fixes at no cost. The big risk I see is that if and when Canonical goes kaput, it will reflect badly on Linux and open-source in general. Sure, there will be RH and Novell proclaiming that they have totally different business models, but the implosion of a conspicuous open-source shop (Canonical) is likely to send chills up CIOs/CTOs.

Cloudy with a chance of Linux: Canonical aims to cash in (ars technica)

Posted Mar 27, 2010 15:59 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

I dunno. We already lost a conspicuous open-source shop, more, one that
trumpeted its business-friendliness, and worse, they didn't just go bust
but went insane: Caldera. It didn't exactly lead to a great chill.

Cloudy with a chance of Linux: Canonical aims to cash in (ars technica)

Posted Mar 28, 2010 22:34 UTC (Sun) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link]

That's a good point, but I don't recall Caldera ever having the sort of installation numbers that made their demise as a Linux vendor worth mentioning. My recollection was that they were smaller than Red Hat, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake--even Slackware.

My impression was they were great at getting press but pretty lousy at getting asses in seats. And that's a trait that didn't change when they took their great big drink from the Great Salt Lake.

Ubuntu cannot claim the numerical irrelevance that Caldera, er, enjoyed.

Cloudy with a chance of Linux: Canonical aims to cash in (ars technica)

Posted Mar 27, 2010 15:13 UTC (Sat) by mgedmin (guest, #34497) [Link] (2 responses)

It's also not only the paying customers who are at risk of being left out in the cold -- all the people who use the "free" version will no longer have security updates, let alone new versions of Ubuntu.

AFAIU the Ubuntu Foundation was established precisely to insure that Ubuntu lives on even if something were to happen to Canonical.

Cloudy with a chance of Linux: Canonical aims to cash in (ars technica)

Posted Mar 28, 2010 15:47 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link] (1 responses)

I believe the Fedora case shows that some "foundation" isn't enough, there has to be serious founding behind that to keep it working. And in this case, AFAICS the founding/hacker interest is going mostly into Debian. I guess that if Canonical folds, Ubuntu will soon melt away, mostly absorbed back into Debian.

Cloudy with a chance of Linux: Canonical aims to cash in (ars technica)

Posted Mar 28, 2010 17:53 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

And, of course, that's quite all right: the purpose of the Foundation is
to ensure that the work that went into Ubuntu is not lost and that its
users are not left in the cold. If it merges back into Debian, then the
work of the Foundation is done.

Cloudy with a chance of Linux: Canonical aims to cash in (ars technica)

Posted Mar 28, 2010 15:07 UTC (Sun) by arjan (subscriber, #36785) [Link] (1 responses)

"If Canonical (and by extension Mark Shuttleworth) was serious about breaking even in the near future (and hence provide assurance to paying customers that Canonical is not going to disappear anytime soon), it would probably be less risky to simply clone RH's strategy. (This works for Novell when it comes to their Linux division). The "cloning" approach has the advantage of adapting something that is known to work, in contrast to the highly uncertain "search for revenue" approach (i.e. experimentation) currently being undertaken by Canonical"

"Clone the market leader" in the software world often is a losing proposition. In a system where your product becomes more valuable as more people use it (for an OS, the more people use it, the more applications become available for it, and more potential employees are trained in it)... being number 2 is already a tough proposition.

If you then also copy the whole model, your chances of success suddenly greatly depend on the number one pissing off customers... after all, the number one product has inherently more value for the customer (due to its market size) and competing on price doesn't work well either (number one has a much larger base to spread the costs over).

Ubuntu got big and where it is today because it did NOT copy the model of Red Hat. Rather than having a broad aim, it decided to (originally) focus on one specific segment where the existing market leaders were weak: the desktop. And in that segment, it made a real difference by polishing their product and providing an awesome experience if something went wrong (the forums with good and timely answers).

Nowadays, Ubuntu is branching out some, and they can do that by building on their original success strategy.... but if it were to just copy the RHEL (or SLES) strategy it would completely fail with near certainty. In contrast, a "search for new revenue by doing new things" at least has a chance of finding something new where it can succeed.

Cloudy with a chance of Linux: Canonical aims to cash in (ars technica)

Posted Mar 29, 2010 7:49 UTC (Mon) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link]

> Nowadays, Ubuntu is branching out some, and they can do that by building on their original success strategy....

The problem here is that Canonical's original strategy isn't a success. Everybody knows that they're not profitable and that the current drive to find revenue has taken priority because this situation cannot go on for long.