Canonical wants to get thing right before releasing it
Your next PC will be your smartphone.
That’s the idea Mark Shuttleworth – creator of Ubuntu and founder of Canonical- sold us on October 31st, 2011. The convergence dream was very real, but the plan failed.
Ubuntu didn’t deliver that promise on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (April’14) as expected, and we’re still waiting for them to show what’s their real proposal. There are some early demonstrations of how Ubuntu will work on your smartphone to deliver a desktop experience, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.
That’s exactly what Shuttleworth explained recently on a Google Hangout in which he told us to avoid impatience:
I think that it’s important we carefully shape the emergence of Ubuntu so that it goes to people who are going to love it and contribute to it and be part of the ecosystem. I think it would be a mistake for us to try to go too fast because if we put it in the hands of people who don’t care about Ubuntu and don’t want to be part of it, right now they would be disappointed, we would be disappointed and the whole thing would be a mess. I think that the steady growth is clear.
That’s probably a wise position, but since Windows 10 is copying providing exactly that kind of dream with the exact same features Ubuntu wanted to deliver, one could think Ubuntu will arrive too late to the party. In fact, anyone who has tried Ubuntu Touch can confirm that this approach, although original -The Scopes are weirdly original and bold-, tries to distract us from the fact that the platform has almost no relevant mobile apps. And the ones they have aren’t really well done either in terms of design, usability and swiftness.
Let’s hope Ubuntu can really deliver what we all expect from them. We have to be cautious, though: Microsoft is a behemoth and even with their resources they will have a big challenge in the mobile space with this new philosophy. It’s probably their last chance to gain significance here, and Ubuntu is still far from what Windows 10 has accomplished.
Source: Ubuntu Touch on More Phones Would Be a Mistake Right Now, Says Mark Shuttleworth
