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Ubuntu Edge: founder says failure isn't the end of the dream

The Ubuntu Edge crowdfunding project has missed its $32m target by nearly $20m, winning $12.6m of pledges and a total of 17,215 phones out of the 40,000 it needed to be funded. All the money will now be returned; IndieGoGo is forsaking the usual cut that it demands from failed projects.

But the failure hasn’t deterred Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, which was behind the project. Speaking exclusively to the Guardian on Monday, he said ahead of the deadline that if it failed, “It’s definitely set a record for the most money raised, but also for the most missed in a campaign.” The total pledges were almost $2m ahead of those raised by the Pebble smartwatch on Kickstarter – which did, however, hit and exceed its funding goal.

Shuttleworth insisted that despite the failure, carriers and handset makers are definitely interested in building handsets which will run the mobile Linux – but that they will not be the top-end “superphones” which the Edge project hoped to produce.

The Edge would have been a smartphone with 128GB storage, running both Android and Ubuntu Mobile, and capable of working as a desktop computer when plugged into a large screen. If the $32m total had been hit, Canonical said it would begin providing them from May 2014.

Speaking on Monday, Shuttleworth was still hopeful that there would be a last-minute intervention by a handset maker or industry player who would kick in $20m and kickstart the program. “We have had a number of interesting approaches from industry players which get us closer,” he said at the time. “But if we get to the end and there is no significant change, it will end there.” The approaches never appeared, and the clock ran down.

Linux challengers

Looking ahead, Shuttleworth was dismissive of the Firefox OS and Android, and said that Ubuntu Mobile would be ideal for “the 25% of people who buy a smartphone but only use it as a phone” – and that the idea of the Ubuntu Edge, of a smartphone that would be powerful enough to also work as a PC, would eventually win people over.

In the end, though, only Bloomberg came forward as a company prepared to put substantial money into the project, pledging for one of “Enterprise” slots which would have cost $80,000 and given it 115 phones. Three other unnamed organisations pitched in for “Enterprise Starter” slots costing $7,000 and offering 10 phones.

But the majority of funding came from individuals pledging to buy a phone at between $600 (the first-day price, where 5,044 were snapped up) and $830, with a number of prices in between. In the later stages, the per-handset price was set at $695 – thanks, Shuttleworth said, to promises from manufacturers if the scheme went ahead.

“We have had behind-the-scenes approaches from industry players,” he said. “But the clock [on the funding] is about what needs to be raised, and that’s driven by the manufacturing costs of a high-end device.”

He said though that his experience suggested that existing smartphones are overpriced. “If you look at something like [Motorola's] MotoX, and the next-generation devices out there, it seems that there’s quite heavy loading on the cost of devices just so it can have a brand on it. We’re still seeing [profit] margins in the mobile hardware industry that we certainly don’t see in the PC industry – it seems to just go on the maintenance of the brand and distribution. It isn’t as efficient as the distribution that we see in the PC industry.”

He said that “there is an effective duopoly in mobile between Android and Apple. BlackBerry and Nokia are both struggling. Then there’s the three mobile Linux OSs – Firefox OS, Tizen and Ubuntu Mobile. The impression we have from conversations with manufacturers is that they are open to an alternative to Android. And end-users don’t seem emotionally attached to Android. There’s no network effect from using Android like there was with Windows in the 1990s, where if some businesses starting using Windows then others had to follow. It’s not like that on mobile. They all interoperate. Every Ubuntu device would be additive to the whole ecosystem of devices.”

Targeting the 25%

The target of the “Android alternative” for carriers, he suggested, was “25% of users demand a smartphone but use it just as a phone. They don’t buy apps or content. They’re expensive to service, because they’ve got these smartphones, but they don’t generate data revenues or much content revenue.”

That 25%, he suggested, would be ideal users of Ubuntu Mobile.

But, I asked, doesn’t that mean that Ubuntu Mobile would be aiming at the low-end user, rather than the high-end who had been targeted by the Edge project? “We’re talking about mid- to high-end phones – none of these is a superphone [like the Edge]. The Edge is a concept car, not quite like Formula 1, which 40% of people could drive. But we’re also working on putting a phone that’s the equivalent of a mass-market car on the road. I would very much like to see the Edge but I didn’t expect that the majority of Ubuntu Mobile users would come through the Edge – but through retail. Frankly, we’d see handset makers rebadge their Android phones and put Ubuntu Mobile on it.”

He says that Ubuntu would be preferable to Android, Firefox OS or Samsung’s much-delayed Tizen: “Android is fragmented. Each model comes with modifications made by the manufacturer. And Android has struggled to build a clean, coherent user experience. The carriers feel the 25% could want an Ubuntu phone.”

Meanwhile, he says that Firefox OS has the weakness that “everything it does is in the browser, and that isn’t necessarily going to be recognised by websites as a mobile browser – so you get the desktop site on your mobile screen. Ubuntu uses a WebKit-based browser [like Apple's MobileSafari and Google Chrome] so you get the mobile one.”

Shuttleworth cited a number of branded handset manufacturers which he says have shown off prototypes of Ubuntu Mobile phones to US carriers. “We have 12 carriers who say they want Ubuntu.” But he acknowledges “they haven’t said that they will ship Ubuntu phones, no.”

What then is the USP – unique selling point – for Ubuntu Mobile? If Apple offers “a computer in your pocket and a galaxy of apps”, and Android offers the same built around Google’s services, and Nokia is offering the best-quality pictures with a smartphone, what is Ubuntu Mobile’s USP? “A crisp clean experience that does everything you want in a basic phone, and is part of the portfolio of experience of desktop and tablet,” replies Shuttleworth.

Enterprise support?

Did the lack of support from enterprises – with only 1 of the offered 50 “enterprise” slots, at $80,000 each – suggest failure by Canonical to persuade potential clients ahead of the scheme? Most organisations can’t get the approvals required for $7,000 or $80,000 pledges within a month. “The Bloomberg gesture [of taking up the first, and only, enterprise slot] was fantastic,” Shuttleworth said. “I think they got involved because they could see they could restructure their IT. They’re quite an impressive shop in the way they do IT themselves.”

He insisted too that the key idea behind the Ubuntu Edge – of a phone that could also double as a desktop – was one that would come to fruition. “Four years ago, McKinsey did a survey of people and asked them if they were going to stop carrying a laptop in favour of their smartphones, and the figure saying yes was surprisingly high. Now, they do that survey every year, and that number has gone down.”

But isn’t that because the 2009 survey predated the iPad – and that since then tablets have become the second mobile device, so that people don’t need to think about their laptop, but can carry a tablet instead? “We think as people work out how to get a productive experience, they’ll want to put their phone down by a piece of glass – some sort of screen – and what you type appears on the glass. You can hook up a keyboard and you can work right there.”

Yet the reality seems to be that the price was too high for the perceived usefulness of the device. The Ubuntu Edge will now go down as a project which aimed high – but ultimately fell to earth.