[bratsche]

Everyone has a desktop. That doesn't mean everyone is buying desktops. It's a shrinking market right now, and there's no escaping that. Why should Canonical invest in a shrinking market instead of an expanding one? When I first started working at Canonical it was when they were jumping on the whole netbook bandwagon. The future was a world where everyone was using tiny toy laptops, and Ubuntu was going to rule that world. There ended up being numerous problems, not least of which turned out to be that netbooks were just a passing fad.

They want to be in every consumer market, but they're too late to them all. Desktops are shrinking. They're having trouble finding a phone manufacturer that will do hardware for them. Probably the same with tablets. I can't even begin to imagine what all is involved in television. That's the market they want into that still hasn't been totally cracked by Microsoft, Apple, Google, or Amazon. And that fact alone should probably tell you that the odds of Canonical cracking it are not fantastic.

I'd love for Ubuntu to become huge on desktops and make them tons of money. And maybe it will happen and I'm just not seeing the big picture. But where you see every business running at least 1 computer and consider that an opportunity, I unfortunately see it as a missed opportunity. That's a computer they already bought, and if they're going to get rid of it and switch to something else what makes you think they would choose Ubuntu (something they've never heard of) rather than Windows 8.1 or an iPad?