Ubuntu Edge will miss $32M crowdfunding target
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Mistake #2: Not making it dead clear that they can return your money if for whatever reason the phone doesn't get built or you don't like it. This is not typical of such crowdfunding campaigns, and everyone assumed they could be "risking their money" (in this case, a lot of money).
I bet a lot of people are now seeing that it probably won't reach the goal (also these articles rubbing it in their faces aren't helping...) so even if they considered it, now they won't bother because it looks like a dead project that won't happen anyway - game theory and all.
I don't think it's naive to price a high end phone above what is essentially the most mainstream phone available. Which they didn't considering theirs have 128gb memory.
http://store.apple.com/us/buy/home/shop_iphone/family/iphone...
4Gb of RAM and 128Gb of storage.
Is simultaneously too much for a phone and around the low end for any computer released in at least the last half decade.
They've gone the wrong way, it seems to me. What was impressive was the fact that you could move your user environment around in your pocket. They chose to make the hardware a small computer to accomplish that though. People already have computers at their workplace already plugged in, they've either got laptops or desktops at their homes.
You're not just asking them to get another phone, you're asking them to replace their computers.
They've decided to compete in both the markets at once - and that only works if you can leverage needs that overlap at the same time in both markets that they don't natively address. Otherwise, you just end up crippling your ability to optimise for both markets as individuals and the natives in those areas eat you alive.
A saturated marketplace where people rarely replace their hardware and where your features aren't impressive, I suspect - might be wrong, does not have those features.
To me that sounds like an incredibly tiny fraction of the smartphone market. If I were Canonical, I would use this as a survey, that tells you that you've got X amount of people ready to shell out $10M within 30 days of announcement. Surely the rest of the money could be earned from people who are aren't looking to change phone right now, and maybe wants to test the waters by seeing it in video reviews or in stores, and then pay the price. After all, isn't that what companies do? Take risks, and get rewarded if it works, instead of this extremely carefull investment (even Apple is more risky with its money for crying out loud).
It's a lot of F-22 fighters, though. And a lot of Christmas hams for one family (but not a nation).
How many times do 20k customers pool millions of dollars to go towards the development of a phone?
20k people willing to pay $800 per phone is a tiny market.
20k people who care enough to pledge $800 towards development of something that doesn't exist is a huge group of passionate early adopters.
>"That's 20k potential sales of a phone that doesn't exist, using an OS that's still in development, to a tiny subset of individuals willing to engage in crowd sourcing."
I think it's pretty clear what the parent means to say there. That demonstrating that much demand after accounting for multiple, large limiting factors could extrapolate to much larger numbers with those factors removed.
Cards Against Humanity collected $15.5K from 750 people via Kickstarter and went on to make an estimated $12M with wide availability [0].
The card makers of the world likely would have laughed at a game with 750 sales, but today I'm sure they'd all love to hold down the top 4 best-seller spots on Amazon [1].
Yes, phones and card games aren't a direct comparison, but the parent had a good point and focusing on one number is awfully myopic.
0: http://www.chicagogrid.com/enterprise/cards-against-humanity...
1: http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/toys-and-games/16623901...
1) lack of tiers - t shirts came way too late. They should have added phone docks and exclusive first preview to their convergence.
2) pricing - the sweet spot for the pricing was about 650. they priced the product way too high
Price versus demand is not the only constraint here.
It is an incredibly ambitious piece of hardware, so obviously more expensive to produce than say the iphone 5. The iPhone 5 costs $849 for the 64GB model. That's half the memory, and more expensive than the Ubuntu edge even at these higher price tiers. Unfortunately most people will probably compare the subsidised price from a carrier instead, or cheaper hardware.
Just because they could sell more doesn't mean it would initially be cheaper for them - there might be constraints imposed by their choice of supplier, who can only handle a certain volume of a new experimental device for the deadline. There are a lot of setup costs involved, and the greater the volume they sell, the greater the risk - many kickstarter projects have run into this issue - what is easy to do for a run of 10,000 just won't work for a run of 1,000,000, and if they had problems in their first batch, it could lead to serious damage to their brand if they have a huge userbase angry and waiting for hardware. So plenty of reasons for wanting to constrain supply.
So from Ubuntu's point of view, perhaps keeping the production run small was a requirement - that would explain the higher price tiers, because that imposes a higher average cost on them per device. They're probably making a loss on a $600 sale given this is a new device and the specs. Without knowing the demand curve in advance it must be quite hard to judge, but if nothing else I guess this campaign will give them a very good idea of the demand curve for a phone like this, so they will at least get that out of it if it fails.
honestly, i foresaw that ubuntu edge would fail when they introduced the new price tiers. If all the discounted price tiers would have sold out it would have generated a few extra million. Once those are sold out - the people would not buy a $825 phone and the campaign would be stuck
I would relaunch the campaign after knowing the elasticity of the curve.
Convergence might be the future, but the breakpoints in usability and public imagination just haven't been hit yet.
I think Android and iOS have a better opportunity to scale up and meet desktop needs without alienating users than Windows explorer, Gnome 2.0 or KDE have to scale down and take over mobile while keeping true to their core UI patterns.
I'm personally still excited about the idea of Ubuntu Mobile, but I never had an interest in the Edge because I just don't think the crowdfunding model works in the phone space. I have less than zero interest in paying $830 (or even the early $625 price) and receiving a phone a year from now that has very vaguely defined specs at the time I'm paying for it.
But when Ubuntu Mobile is more fully baked I'll give it a lengthy try out as my "daily driver" on my existing Nexus 4 (or whatever I may have after the N4 that is also supported, depending upon time frame).
They made compromises to the desktop UI to meet mobile demands in the name of 'convergence' -- justifying the use of the same brand... but as a result, UI experience has suffered on both form factors.
I would agree that the compromises they made for their desktop versions are a negative, at least in the way they did them.
They could support both models fairly well (eg. in Microsoft's case with a few tweaks to bring back the proper start-menu and an option to just not see the metro screen for desktop users who really don't want it), but both seem to have adopted the modern "Apple" style of making things as simple as possible with no option for advanced usages, which I think is a mistake lots of companies (including Google) are making these days.
The value to me of old Google products, old Microsoft products, and older Ubuntu (which lives on in other Linux distros) was precisely that they weren't Apple-esque in terms of dictating to me how I'm supposed to use it for the sake of ultra simplicity. Now that they are attempting to be Apple-esque they are losing the hearts and minds of people like me, and not gaining much with the other group (AFAICT), because no matter how bad they try to be Apple, Apple is still a much better Apple than they are.
It is still in development, but the entirety of the plasma development framework is around fixed size apps that on the desktop occupy popups from a widget bar and on mobile run as full applications.
Additionally, qt makes it very easy to develop for mobile since it uses a plugin based native toolkit system that skins your app according to the ui conventions of the target. A qtquick 2.1 app on Android looks Holo, on Windows looks Aero, on OSX looks Cocoa, etc.
That is probably the reason Canonical picked qt for its sdk.
It is very easy in modern qt paradigms to have a qml app that self-manages its scale based on screen size - physical dimensions, that is - so you can have your interface shift to "mobile mode" when the display it is rendered on is smaller than, say, 11" in size, and runs in a window with mouse / keyboard UX above that.
On Linux it's a different matter because there's decades of support for different types of CPUs.
There are some good comments about the rewards like "the early adopter bonus shouldn't have been a cheaper phone it should have been a more expensive but exclusive colourway"
If it gets funded, they get to make a showcase device.
If it doesn't, they still get better publicity than they could have bought, and Canonical gets to be the company that tries new and interesting things.
32 million = ~45000 phones pre-booked? It doesn't sound impossible...
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j166z/hi_im_mark_shut...
IMO they should be able to get 100 of the Fortune 500 companies to fork over $80,0000 for an exclusive access to the new shiney thing in mobile.
Heck Marissa Mayer alone may just reimburse every Yahoo employee who decides to get one going by her thirst for mobile ... and pr.
There are only 50 of those $80k bundles available. (Also, only 50 of the $10k)
> Heck Marissa Mayer alone may just reimburse every Yahoo employee who decides to get one going by her thirst for mobile ... and pr.
Why? What's in this for Yahoo?
I don't think Ubuntu existed a decade ago. So I think that from nothing to being one of (if not the most) popular Linux distros on desktops can probably be considered headway.
"I can buy an Android phone for $300"
Yes you can. It is unlikely to have 4Gb of RAM and 128Gb of storage though.
"neckbeards"
You got me. I'm going to go and shave.
The last Ubuntu release I really liked was Hoary Hedgehog, but I can agree to disagree.
With a $300 android phone, I'd probably still have enough left over to buy a 4GB/128GB netbook. A $300 phone, a $300 netbook, and a $100 ssd only comes to $700.
Ubuntu Edge is just at a weird price point these days.
The fact that you need to insult to get your point is not good man.
See, this is why I hate cynicism: it's intellectually lazy. It doesn't bother looking at the actual detail of any particular case, just hand-waves away details with a suggestion of naivety for even considering them.
Give me a solid reason why Canonical should not be considered as a social enterprise?
What's wrong with selling commercial software? I could understand it if you were all about Open Source, but you're clearly not. Redhat certainly sell proprietary software solutions. Debian don't, but then that's their raison d'être.
They've given back a whole OS to people. They've released plenty of their own software under the GPL. Fine if you think that's not enough, but it's far more than many companies have done and accusing them of not giving back at all is flat out wrong.
Regarding upstream patches, whatever your feelings about it, this is the nature of the FOSS beast. They're not obligated to do such a thing, but upstream contributions are only one way they can contribute to the open source movement. I'd argue that their other contributions (marketing, usable n00b friendly desktop Linux) far outweigh their lack of upstream contributions. I would, however, love it if they'd make this a priority also.
I hope Canonical becomes increasingly financially successful. I don't know how profitable they are but it's hard to give your product away for free and make a healthy profit in the process. As of 2009, they had at most $60k of revenue per employee, which almost certainly indicates a loss.
> Canonical simply shows an attitude of taking from the open source community and not giving back.
Speaking of which, I should probably go donate something after using Ubuntu for years.
They don't. They use AGPL for most of the newer stuff, and do so specifically because they want to make money of cloud services. They want to control those services, too.
I'm not sure what led to the conclusion you have that Canonical is a social enterprise (other than their marketing copy), any more than redhat (which also release software on the GPL) is a social enterprise.
Canonical, from what I see, tries to take advantage of this position (in the same way redhat used to), but I see absolutely nothing to suggest they are any different from any previous company in this space.
If you are going to suggest they are different than every previous company, i would suggest that you bear the burden of showing that.
anyways:
i'd phrase it as "i can buy an $800 computer that doubles as a phone." ever since smartphones appeared, having a really portable computer has been more appealing to me than having a phone that is a computer. indeed, i continue to use a dumbphone, a cheapo mp3 player, and sometimes (gasp!) pen & paper to duplicate all the functionality i ever really used my smartphone for. of course, phrased that way, it might make more sense to shapeways-up a really stylish case for a raspberry pi than buy a $800 phone, but the point is that i don't really agree with the way that you've framed the decision to begin with.
but even phrased that way, i /still/ disagree, because android strikes me as more of art of the state than state of the art: i think the vm (dalvik, i think?) is wedged in at way too low a level. large parts of the window system and other core components are written in java rather than C, which, coming from GNU-land (clean-shaven, thank you) strikes me as rather strange.
i mean, i like intents, content providers, and all these other high-level parts of the system design, i just wish more of the implementation were in C so that it would be more portable. i'd like to be able to bind whatever language i choose to the code that's flinging surfaces, at least, even if not to the window toolkit. although there is this scripting layer, which might be a good start, but i haven't used it as it advertises itself as "alpha quality."
Hmm, that seems a little harsh. One of the biggest names in desktop Linux, and the third largest Linux distro on production web servers[1] seems like making significant headway. Searching "Linux" on duckduckgo, which should avoid any bias from me having visited their site before from Google, they're the first distro to come up and third result overall.
[1] http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux/all/all
Ubuntu, though annoying, is a general purpose operating system.
I know that what is 'promised' for 600-800 dollars is great but they should have proposed this phone with more solid specs. An actual demo phone would have been nice to see. I also think it would help to have more of an idea of how powerful the not-yet-named processor that I'd get next year will perform versus a trend of the Edge's current competition's processor power growth.
Finally, to me, it seems easier to add the ability to make phone calls to my favorite laptop/netbook/tablet than it would be to constrict my computer usage capabilities to an smartphone on steriods performance level.
The interesting underlying question:
Does creating a data-based model about the future, predicting the future and publicly circulating this prediction invalidate the model itself (and thus the prediction) or not?
The critical thing I want is to maintain my working context wherever I go. Browser tabs, open documents, and so on. I'm not necessarily going to be doing the same tasks when I'm out and about than when I'm at a desk.
I definitely don't want to be limited in terms of processing power and RAM to what I can carry around in my pocket.
If there were Edge phones on the market in six months time, when my phone runs out of contract, I'd be interested.
But I do not have $700 completely spare to buy a phone that I will not get my hands on until then.
To be fair, if Ubuntu Edge is truly the F1 of phones, then it should be marketed to people that don't bat an eye at spending $830 on a device they have never held and have little guarantee that it will actually be suitable for their needs. I just think that the intersection of those people and Ubuntu users is significantly smaller than Canonical thought it was.
Anyhow, I'm happy as long as it's installable on phones that are already available...
> I don't know why anyone would want to use an Ubuntu smartphone, excluding the obvious free software implications.
So... you do know why.
> It's guaranteed to be worse than virtually everything else on the market.
This is a personal guess you made.
> And why would Canonical even want to get into this business. You're competing against Apple, Google, Microsoft and Blackberry. They cannot win.
This is what I don't get from the HN community: you want to have your cake and eat it too. How many comments and posts over the last few weeks have been all about the NSA snooping on your data with these big corps handing everything over? Yet for some reason, you ONLY want Apple/Google/MS/BB to run the phone market!
They cannot win if the world was full of people who thought and acted like you, but I'd put my money that it isn't and that organizations like Canonical can (and should) compete against big tech companies.
Oh shit, did I accidentally click on Reddit?
>How many comments and posts over the last few weeks have been all about the NSA snooping on your data with these big corps handing everything over?
I don't know, I haven't written any of those comments.
>They cannot win if the world was full of people who thought and acted like you, but I'd put my money that it isn't and that organizations like Canonical can (and should) compete against big tech companies.
They can't win if the phone market is in any way based on merit. Canonical's only hope lies in the massive success of a truly awful phone like the Galaxy S series.
2: Direct development. When your phone is your computer there is no hassle with remote debugging or simulators.
3: Familiar native environment. All the software I already run on my ubuntu laptop can be run on my phone. I don't have to learn new tools, make multiple versions of my software or manage communication between my phone and laptop.
All of these things are sort-of possible already but it's awkward and difficult and you have to make lots of compromises. Having an easily programmable, always-on device in your pocket with the full power of a laptop and access to new emerging interaction hardware - that's going to be something new.