Mistake #1: Pricing it over $600 unlocked. I know they feel very strongly about the 128 GB of storage, but if doing that meant pricing it over what seemed like the sweet spot of $600, then it was killer mistake.
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.
Imo the mistake is exactly the price. If it were $600 unlimited they would probably quite easily meet their target. Besides what's the point of $775, $780 and $790? Are they trying to everyone "hurry" and order $5 cheaper? The pricing seems really odd, like they didn't want to meet the goal.
The iPhone is priced at over 600usd unlocked. From 720usd in Hong Kong, which match US pricing very closely ( can't find it on apple's us store unlocked)
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.
Computer hardware has a low replacement rate. And this:
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.
One could also argue they are discovering a niche (developers who need to get on the go really fast, really often), so they're entering a tiny fraction of one market only. I guess it all comes down to perspective.
I think the problem is that this niche, is really only worth the maybe $10M that have roughly been given so far. The niche consists of developers, who are happy to produce all the apps they need for themselves (since the app market is at 0), they like Ubuntu (since this is really what they have now chosen to buy into, they want to give up their current phone and laptop setup in no less than 30 days max, and last but not least; is ready to shell out $800+ for a non-existing phone, that could be out of date by the time its in their hands.
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).
I'm not sure if this is a real niche. For the device to be any use to a developer, you'd really need an external monitor and keyboard. So you're looking at a developer who for some reason can bring a phone places, cannot bring a Macbook Air or something places, and has monitors and keyboards available everywhere they bring the phone. Does this actually fit anyone's situation?
Maybe it'll become useful in the future with thin, flexible screens. You could carry your 21" monitor in your backpack and your computer in your pocket.
I get the impression (I am just speculating) that Canonical is running an enormous focus group. Whether they hit 32m or just 16m, they have evidence for the device manufacturers that there is a demand for a convergent and powerful phone running an open OS.
Surely missing the target would demonstrate a lack of demand? It's pretty hard to spin "We couldn't even get 30,000 contributers" asz success. Especially given the strong existing brand, the news coverage, etc.
Again, I'm speculating but; hitting 16m at around 800 a phone equates to 20,000 phones. 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. That's pretty impressive if you ask me. Imagine how well a carrier-subsidised version would do?
Not very easy to extrapolate from that, but Blackberry sold 2.7 million of their Z10 and that was considered a failure, so I don't think 20,000 phones will prove anything.
>"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.
I imagine there is a very significant number of people who would be customers, but not backers. Suppose x% of customers would be willing to back rather than buy, and they reach $22MM in funding. If x is 10%, that would mean $220MM is up for grabs if the phone is brought to market. That might still be worth getting out of bed for.
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.
I agree with your points. I think to succeed they need a higher kickstarter goal to have the economies of scales.
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.
Canoical has made the same mistakes Microsoft did by branding their phone and tablet OS "Ubuntu"... It hurt Ubuntu desktop in the process with Unity.
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 don't agree that either the Windows or Ubuntu names are really a negative for the phone brands offered by each. I do think the phone OS market is a tough nut to crack given the extremely wide penetration of iOS and Android, but that persists regardless of OS name. You could call Windows Phone anything you want and it still has all of the same problems with lack of apps, lack of widespread handset maker support, etc, same with Ubuntu Mobile.
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).
I don't think that the desktop brand is a negative for the phone.
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.
Ah, yes, I misunderstood the point you were making, sorry.
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.
How exactly they can meet desktop needs? Android apps are not good at talking to each other and using each other api-s, they are sandboxed. From what I know iOS is the same.
HN discussion from two days about the report directly, not an interpretation via the Guardian. The Guardian does have some updated data. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6132686
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"
I guess it doesn't really matter. It's win-win either ways.
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.
Mark Shuttleworth said in his Reddit AMA that if the project was not successfully funded he would not close the gap. Are you suggesting he would let the project die, only to reintroduce it later?
I don't think anyone is suggesting that he would let it fail and then reintroduce it later. From what Canonical has said, if it fails, it fails. They specifically say in the video that they are not getting into the hardware business. This is a one-time thing. This is sort of Canonical's "Nexus" device, it isn't their primary strategy, just a demo.
He would have to fork over something like 10% of the contribution to payment and Indiegogo fees. Probably a lot to spend, if he has to throw in a couple of millions.
Pretty sure they are coordinating with corporates behind the scenes and have few million lined up in commitments that will turn into actual $ as we get closer. That in itself makes this campaign unpredidented - I don't recall another campaign with a $80,000 contribution level.
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.
Lets see I can buy an Android phone for $300 that runs an operating system that is state of the art and one of the world's largest tech giants is currently spending a billion dollars developing. Or I can buy a $800 phone for neckbeards that runs Ubuntu, an operating system that hasn't made headway in approximately a decade.
"an operating system that hasn't made headway in approximately a decade."
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.
> I think that from nothing to being one of (if not the most) popular Linux distros on desktops can probably be considered headway.
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.
Lets see, you can use an OS that a single company has spent a billion dollars in order to control it, or you could use a real operating system that tens of companies(like IBM) had spent tens of billions of dollars developing.
The fact that you need to insult to get your point is not good man.
Yes. Of course. Why else would Canonical have used the GPL for the software they'd developed? Why else would they release their OS for free? Profits have clearly never been their overriding reason for existence and they look very much like a social enterprise to me.
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?
"Yes. Of course. Why else would Canonical have used the GPL for the software they'd developed?"
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.
The Amazon advertising fiasco? The commercial "Ubuntu Software Center"? The lack of upstream patches for many years? Debian maintainers and Red Hat wouldn't even thinking of pulling off that kind of junk. It's not about deeply analysing every possible motivation for every single thing involving them -- Canonical simply shows an attitude of taking from the open source community and not giving back.
The Amazon lens that everyone knew about and could be removed with one command? The whole thing was massively blown out of proportion, often by people who'd never even used Ubuntu.
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.
Fundamentally, Canonical is a business that's developing an open source operating system to compete with the likes of Windows and OS X, and they're making decent headway. They have bills and salaries to pay and affiliate marketing is one experiment they're trying in order to increase their revenues, albeit one I don't necessarily like or agree with. I have no issue with them running an app store, again, because they have employees and offices and stuff.
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.
I don't think being a social enterprise should mean that they shouldn't make profits at all. Given that they their major income is from support and services, I am quite sure measures like amazon ads were quite inevitable. Not to mention how long they had survived without making any profit to get some presence in a dominant space ( Ubuntu ShipIt! Remember? ). Even if they make smart profits, doesn't change the idea of the company and why they exist.
what's a neckbeard? i imagine you sporting a magnificent handlebar mustache as a result of this remark.
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 $800 phone, but the point is that i don't really agree with the way that you've framed the decision to begin with.
but even phrased that way, i /still/ disagree, because android strikes me as more of art of the state than state of the art: i think the vm (dalvik, i think?) is wedged in at way too low a level. large parts of the window system and other core components are written in java rather than C, which, coming from GNU-land (clean-shaven, thank you) strikes me as rather strange.
i mean, i like intents, content providers, and all these other high-level parts of the system design, i just wish more of the implementation were in C so that it would be more portable. i'd like to be able to bind whatever language i choose to the code that's flinging surfaces, at least, even if not to the window toolkit. although there is this scripting layer, which might be a good start, but i haven't used it as it advertises itself as "alpha quality."
> an operating system that hasn't made headway in approximately a decade.
Hmm, that seems a little harsh. One of the biggest names in desktop Linux, and the third largest Linux distro on production web servers[1] seems like making significant headway. Searching "Linux" on duckduckgo, which should avoid any bias from me having visited their site before from Google, they're the first distro to come up and third result overall.
The entire appliance model of Android, iOS, and the new App ecosystem is such a throwback that I'm surprised that you don't have to insert a cartridge to switch applications. Android is not a general purpose operating system, intentionally. It's a new false scarcity distribution model that's designed to largely withstand the pressures of the Internet's zero-friction instant scaling.
Ubuntu, though annoying, is a general purpose operating system.
Not at all for that kind of project - the 600 and 625$ sold like cupcakes - the problem is they overshot the price of the device. 600$ seems about right.
The price is simply too high for something that seems still too half-baked.
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.
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?
Given the nature of this campaign the boost at the end will probably be larger. There will be a lot of hype when the final day comes and everyone will want to get their phones before it closes.
If they don't hit the $32m, I'm pretty sure they have some deals with telecom giants lined up. This was probably an attempt to keep the ball in their own court
I sort of agree with some of the ideas behind this product, but I would have gone in a different direction.
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.
Crowd funding, at its core, is a pay first system. This means that it is also in some way speculative. You cannot price your device above what people are willing to live without if the project fails spectacularly (or simply fails to deliver on what they really wanted).
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.
I don't know why anyone would want to use an Ubuntu smartphone, excluding the obvious free software implications. It's guaranteed to be worse than virtually everything else on the market. And why would Canonical even want to get into this business. You're competing against Apple, Google, Microsoft and Blackberry. They cannot win.
> 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.
>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.
1: Wearable computing. We already have laser projectors, laser keyboards, HUDs and optical gesture recognition. 2014 will bring physical gesture recognition (Myo). Unfortunately most phones don't support HDMI or USB out and don't have the battery capacity to support this kind of usage. That leaves you using clunky, low-powered hobbyist hardware.
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.
Would have been something new if the N900 hadn't got there already, and then been piloted expertly into the ground by a flailing, incompetent Nokia. Bah, I loved that phone.
They will def. miss the target. I read on Kickstart or somewhere. If a project fails to meet 30% of the target on first day (or so), project will most def fail.
They should buy bitcoins on some money they raised: it will surely spark a new spike in price, but, hopefully, because they initiated it, they can later profit from people who follow the trend by buying and raising the price even more. That way, they can maybe reach $32m target and possibly even more.
There is no question involved. Taking a bunch of money which users contributed to fund a hardware project and using it for financial speculation would be grossly unethical (and would likely constitute fraud).
So they should take the money they raised, which they have to give back if they don't make their goal, and invest it in a horrendously volatile bubble asset? Sounds ideal.
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.