Crowdfunding an Ubuntu smartphone (right now)

kardan kardan at riseup.net
Fri Aug 23 04:08:47 CEST 2013


On Thu, 22 Aug 2013 21:46:28 +0000
Bob Ham <rah at settrans.net> wrote:

> On Thu, 2013-08-22 at 23:30 +0200, joerg Reisenweber wrote:
> 
> > If this Shuttleguy really been interested in 
> > building a Edge , he'd simply DO it instead of starting nonsensical 
> > crowdfunding. 
> > Don't you see this is a marketing gag, nothing else?
> 
> No, I don't.  It was indeed a wonderful marketing campaign for
> Canonical's mobile efforts but that doesn't necessarily mean they
> didn't want the phone to be made.
> 
> We can speculate about why Shuttleworth was not prepared to invest his
> own money in the project but that's all it is, speculation.

I can't oversee Canonical's budget but it looks like the strategy was to
keep specifications and calculations closed for greater
opportunities, be it for negiotiations or even profit.

They started with 1.600$ and offered 300$ per phone for early birds
(without giving the whole community the chance to know about) but
instead of a safe calculation they fired up the second community phone
campaign in 2013 at least doubling the target of the fairphone.

What is this? A shoot in the sky with the aim to be best, not?

If they really wanted to build Mark's "labour of love",
they would have filled the gap (60%) to sell the rest as in Triple LTS
Ubuntu Gold Pack Full Featured Anything with 10 years warranty and user
support (think something attractive for Ubuntu fanatics here). Instead
his comment was "they didn't want to get into the hardware
business" [1]. I'm holding my sides ..

And from his comment I can't read any disappointed but the attitude
"Hey, it was a cool exercise. Now we know how many of you trust us
and what it's worth." - "Thousands of you clearly want to own an
Ubuntu phone and believe in our vision of convergence, and rest assured
you won’t have much longer to wait."

Now I am confused what that is supposed to mean.

Kardan

[1]
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/feature/2284272/canonicals-crowdfunding-of-ubuntu-edge-stretches-credibility-to-the-breaking-point

-- 
Kardan <kardan at riseup.net>
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