Ubuntu Mobile and Desktop Success Zooms Out of Reach

I had predicted long ago that Unity and Ubuntu Mobile would fail and fail it has, mostly because Shuttleworth ignored signals that were there from the community and industry for years and continued to dump a fortune into a fight that could not be won.

While Shuttleworth has made it clear that mobile is not in Canonical’s future, he also has not been clear about the future of the desktop other than to signal the move back to Gnome. So I’m going to drop another prediction out there and say that I believe Canonical will entirely abandon the Ubuntu Desktop in the coming years because, like mobile, has almost no chance of sustainable profits. So far as a desktop OS, it has not been able to compete proprietary operating systems like Windows and OSX. The simple fact is game and app developers are not flocking to Ubuntu to port over major apps and games from OSX which continues to leave a major gap in the Ubuntu Desktop that forces even the most die-hard Linux enthusiasts to dual-boot or have separate hardware with a competing OS on it.

I definitely wish this were not the reality and wish, rather than doing this expensive moonshot on mobile, that Canonical had invested that money into bringing mainstream apps and games to the desktop. That said, the future for the cloud and server space continues to be very bright for Canonical and is the bread and butter of the company. That is great news because where the desktop and mobile has failed, there continues to be great success and progress and that is key to the survival of Canonical and the Ubuntu Project.

Ultimately, I think the endgame for Canonical will be to focus on what it does best, which is enterprise server and cloud area and leave the desktop to community contributors and slowly reducing headcount of staff working on the desktop.
I still hope that Canonical will prove me wrong on desktop and finds some way to attract mainstream developers because we really do need a consumer viable Linux desktop and nobody has been able to achieve that yet so for now Ubuntu Mobile and Desktop have Zoomed out of reach of consumer and commercial viability.