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Comment by oracuk | Hacker News Reader

I hope this isn't unfair but..

Does this mean that Canonical either don't believe enough in Ubuntu Edge to raise the $20m difference themselves or that Canonical do believe in it but are not able to raise $20m?

I have to admit I am skeptical about the commitment of a large, established, company to a product that they are not willing to put their own skin in the game to develop.

However, I can understand and have participated in crowd-funding for smaller companies who are trying to play a bigger game.

I just wonder which one Canonical is.

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I believe the point of the campaign was not to raise the $32m they needed, they have enough money to do it themselves. The point was to prove to the mobile/carrier industry that there is $32m worth of demand for a change in the way the industry works.

With $12m raised, I think they made a significant step towards that, even if they didn't finish it.

You're assuming that the $32m would have been enough to fund the project entirely, but that's not necessarily the case.

Imagine a scenario where Canonical budgeted the project at $50m, deciding that they'd be willing to invest up to $18m of their own money in addition to the Indiegogo cash.

In this case, they would have plenty of skin in the game, and yet they wouldn't be willing to go even further to shore up the weak campaign results.

They would be amortizing the R&D over a small number of phones, and their goals are ambitious for a company with no hardware experience. Even in the circumstance of a fully funded campaign, the project would have real potential to be an endless money pit of delays and frustration.

It would have had to been because:

"The Ubuntu Edge is an exclusive production run, available only through Indiegogo."

Unless they want to lose money or plan to monetize some other way.

I don't think it's unfair, IIRC they were quite explicit about the fact that they were using crowdfunding as a way to measure the market. They would quite definitely have had to "put their own skin in the game" (I want to know what games you've been playing) alongside the crowd funds, but now they know that there isn't a keen enough market outside of nerds and they haven't wasted their money. As a nerd I'm disappointed that the product won't make it to the market, but as a businessman I think they've found a sane way to determine what punters are prepared to unfold their wallets for.

Not those sort of games:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skin_in_the_game

Thanks! It's not a phrase I'd previously encountered, and I love this sort of word wrangling.

"Does this mean that Canonical either don't believe enough in Ubuntu Edge to raise the $20m difference themselves or that Canonical do believe in it but are not able to raise $20m?"

Given that Mark is a billionaire, he could put that amount of money with just a telephone call. In fact he has done that with Ubuntu as more than this amount has been given to Ubuntu by him over the years.

They were just testing the waters with this project. Mark always wanted to make an Ubuntu laptop so Ubuntu Edge does not surprise me. But the project has to sustain itself.

Entrepreneurs have this concept of "pivot": Mark last Mark's words: "and we’ve learned a lot of invaluable lessons about crowdfunding. ". I certainly believe they will pivot with what they learned somewhat in the future.

Yeah I was hopping on at least an extension of the campaign. Would have bought one. O well in the end I think it is better that a established manufacture releases a Ubuntu phone (I hope based on the edge) than that Canonical is handling warranty and all that :)

how much does canonical make in profits per year? i don't think enough to spend its capital to enter a new market, on a space they have little experience in.

crowdfunding would atleast give them an idea on the demand for Edge, and help generate buzz in the process. of course, if they were confident enough that there was demand for Edge, they would've funded it themselves.

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