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If you're just giving money to a company like Canonical then surely it's a donation rather than an investment. Maybe Shuttleworth should just make it a charity

by scholia 10y ago

If you're just giving money to a company like Canonical then surely it's a donation rather than an investment. Maybe Shuttleworth should just make it a charity and invite donations. I would guess that Canonical's current strategy is doomed because the cost of providing support (which depends on human wage rates) is rising faster than charges. [1] I can't see that changing unless someone develops an AI that can support Linux. [1] Be interested to hear contrary views from people who are actually involved in delivering software support, which I am not.

toyg 10y ago
You don't need an AI, "just" increased tracking and data analysis to improve troubleshooting, like MS and Google do. Unfortunately, Ubuntu caters to a community that is very much adversed to the idea. Another alternative is to dramatically restrict support for hardware configurations, like Apple does, and let the community deal with the rest. There would be some backlash but it probably wouldn't be lethal. To be honest I don't think support is the problem anyway. The problem is that monetization channels are not materializing at the necessary volumes. RedHat "is" Linux in the enterprise datacentre, where the big money is. Ubuntu seems to rule the virtual-machine arena, which is a world of cheapskate corner-cutting startups; and personal desktops, which are fully commoditized. Their saas offerings have failed, and there are limits to what they can extract from iaas providers. Where can they find real money? If I were Shuttleworth I'd try again with integrated services, but by acquisition and with better targeting. Ubuntu users are geeks, they won't pay you to save a few holiday pics. Buy and integrate dev-oriented services like spideroak and tarsnap; build some revenue-generating agreement with Jetbrains, Microsoft, Oracle etc to integrate their tools on Ubuntu; build a real appstore (i think they are working on something like that). This stuff won't generate bazillion dollars, but could create the space to find that one or two killer features that people will pay good money for.
- scholia 10y ago
  Thanks: good points. I as assuming that Canonical support would mainly have to tackle pretty tough problems, because users will solve the simpler ones themselves. That's very unlike Windows support, where quite a lot of people get stumped by trivia. I have met various Canonical staff in the past and they seem like nice guys, but I've never understood how they thought they could make enough money to support 600 to 700 staff. I don't see that there's much they can do that Red Hat can't do, and Red Hat had a 10-year head start....

by scholia 10y ago

toyg 10y ago

You don't need an AI, "just" increased tracking and data analysis to improve troubleshooting, like MS and Google do. Unfortunately, Ubuntu caters to a community that is very much adversed to the idea. Another alternative is to dramatically restrict support for hardware configurations, like Apple does, and let the community deal with the rest. There would be some backlash but it probably wouldn't be lethal. To be honest I don't think support is the problem anyway. The problem is that monetization channels are not materializing at the necessary volumes. RedHat "is" Linux in the enterprise datacentre, where the big money is. Ubuntu seems to rule the virtual-machine arena, which is a world of cheapskate corner-cutting startups; and personal desktops, which are fully commoditized. Their saas offerings have failed, and there are limits to what they can extract from iaas providers. Where can they find real money? If I were Shuttleworth I'd try again with integrated services, but by acquisition and with better targeting. Ubuntu users are geeks, they won't pay you to save a few holiday pics. Buy and integrate dev-oriented services like spideroak and tarsnap; build some revenue-generating agreement with Jetbrains, Microsoft, Oracle etc to integrate their tools on Ubuntu; build a real appstore (i think they are working on something like that). This stuff won't generate bazillion dollars, but could create the space to find that one or two killer features that people will pay good money for.

scholia 10y ago
Thanks: good points. I as assuming that Canonical support would mainly have to tackle pretty tough problems, because users will solve the simpler ones themselves. That's very unlike Windows support, where quite a lot of people get stumped by trivia. I have met various Canonical staff in the past and they seem like nice guys, but I've never understood how they thought they could make enough money to support 600 to 700 staff. I don't see that there's much they can do that Red Hat can't do, and Red Hat had a 10-year head start....