"We're just doing all of the driving for the demos for now simply because we understand how the experience works"
This is a pretty limp excuse. I wish they'd just drop the PR-speak and say that it's not quite ready yet.
This is a pretty limp excuse. I wish they'd just drop the PR-speak and say that it's not quite ready yet.
Re: lack-o-source code: "We don't want users to install it on hardware that we're not sure it can support"
Not really getting off on the right foot with the tech community either, IMHO.
I can't begin to emphasize enough how much I want this to succeed. (One open-source OS to rule them all, and what not...) It's a bit sad that its birth feels like another canned industry event rather than a true hacker love-child. But hey, at least it's progress, right?
Anyway, it is really doubtful that they will get much traction against iOS, let alone iOS + Android, even with a perfect launch.
Ubuntu is in slightly different situation, and people would more willingly forgive glitches as long as they are trying. Swartz's point (among others) about the Hollywood launch was that the more you set yourself up as glassy and untouchable, the more people want you to fail, and the bigger you usually do. So, if Ubuntu/Canonical suffers the same sort of articles as the Windows phone article from earlier it will have probably been because they took themselves so seriously that people became all too eager to point out their flaws. It's the Streisand effect on marketing hype. As soon as you say "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" everyone starts tugging at the curtain. "No touching" already works poorly for geeks (and at this stage, I think only geeks care about Ubuntu on a phone), and even less well for a company that built all their offerings on free software.
As for traction, I think Android could work to Canonical's advantage. I don't know how much Google "needs" Android, but they even might benefit from outsourcing the platform. (Those Android phones could pretty easily become Ubuntu phones.) Dalvik's open-source, so there's no reason to think Ubuntu wouldn't be able to run Android software out of the box. Ultimately platforms are less fertile than the standards they embody, so if Ubuntu becomes only "another Linux phone" it's still fine by me.