Most of you guys are missing the point, this is not your premium device of an existing manufacturer, so its moot to compare prices with nexus 4, s4, or any other premium device.
This is similar (but definitely not same) to the idea of supporting tesla by buying their very expensive models when they first came out. Those people who paid premium price for their car, because they were supportive to the idea of Tesla's vision of clean electric cars. Because of these early adopters, tesla today exists as a company and has a product.
While Ubuntu Edge is not as revolutionary as Tesla, it has some unique ideas, made by a company that is loved by most of Open Source and Linux community. By buying an comparably expensive device, you are supporting open source platform and giving chance for another serious option besides the present duopoly.
Whether you agree with this vision or not is a different story, whether you think one open source option (Android) is enough is another story. But if you are comparing Edge with current mainstream device with price and feature, then this device is clearly not meant for you, but if you are supporting this device with your money because of philosophical reasons, then this device is for you, and you are the type people Ubuntu is asking for support.
> made by a company that is loved by most of Open Source and Linux community.
I believe this to be a false statement. A lot of the open source and Linux community is in fact quite unhappy with Canonical, over things like their shoddy governance of projects they partnered with others on, unreasonable and sudden copyright assignment requirements and contracts, propagandistic and dishonestly comparative PR practices and willfully bringing about tech stack fragmentation. Irregardless of whether they manage to provide value to their users: A fair and reliable member of the greater community they have most certainly not been.
> Irregardless of whether they manage to provide value to their users: A fair and reliable member of the greater community they have most certainly not been.
Yeah, I think it's good to explicitly separate the idea of the linux developer community from the linux user community. Because as you mentioned, end users do seem to like the value ubuntu brings to them. And I agree that 'bringing users value' is totally orthogonal to the company being a "good" one (case in point: apple).
That being said, how is what Canonical's done in any way not an improvement from the likes of the status quo (i.e. google/microsoft/apple)? From what I see, Canonical might not be totally ideal, but certainly a step up from apple/microsoft, so why all the strong opposition? I know we all love radical idealistic revolutions, but in reality, most change happens over the course of several baby steps, and Ubuntu seems like the best baby step we have the option to embrace right now, so it's frustrating to see the linux community self-sabotage itself over things that are smaller than the greater cause of 'open-ness'.
However, I and many other content ubuntu users are not linux devs, so it's possible that the arguments against Canonical just haven't been articulated in a way that would make the consequences of their actions seem substantially significant from the user's perspective. I mean, I understand the risk of fragmentation and all that, but do I think that trumps the importance of furthering OSS? No...
I would struggle to characterise a company that brings a lawsuit claiming exclusive ownership of the very idea of graphical user interfaces as a good company.
This is all purely my own opinion of course (and you’re free to disagree), but it was based on the parent comment's branding of Canonical as a dubious company on ethical grounds when he mentioned fragmentation / community cooperation / governance / propaganda / dishonesty / etc. Apple is a great company if the metrics you're looking at are the concrete financial/economic ones, but “ethically”? I’m not a fan.
Over the years the list has become much too large for me to even remember it all personally, but some concrete examples of this off the top of my head would be:
A) how the company is structured and how it views its employees [1],
B) general overly intense secrecy (read: proprietary mindset) everywhere
C) rejecting apps without explanation and creating their own versions [2]
D) inconsistent app review process [3]
E) refusal to give to charity during the entirety of steve jobs’ run
F) patent abuse [4]
G) needless limits on products you supposedly "own" (e.g. ipad syncing being limited to 1 computer)
H) tracking users' locations without their knowledge/consent [5]
I) and most recently, the unusually long silence and delay after having a security breach in their developer portal (which I was a member of for some past work, believe it or not)
[There’s also the whole labor situation in china, but I don’t believe apple’s uniquely at fault there]
This is all fairly consistent behaviour, and it exhibits ‘personality’ traits that mirror those of an ultra-proprietary narcissist (read: steve jobs). None of this should be earth shattering to anybody, it’s always been out there in plain view. The only thing one could really disagree with is in how to react to it. Most people don’t care as they don’t see it affecting them, and that’s cool. But I do see how it can affect me, as it has already bitten me multiple times in the past, so I’m not neutral to it anymore. And I have a feeling that a lot of the people that are pro-linux/ubuntu/OSS have similar sentiments.
Don't get me wrong though, from the user’s perspective Apple does the whole customer satisfaction facade amazingly well (and they deserve credit for it), but that's not really an ethical thing when it's so obviously in their best economic interest to do that kind of stuff anyway (which is why I think more companies should follow it). And by "that kind of stuff", I mean those stories you always hear about people taking in their totally-burnt-to-a-crisp 9yr old macbooks into a genius bar, and Apple 'super generously' gives them a brand new fully-upgraded macbook pro with a free iphone to compensate, no questions asked. Sure that's a bit of an exaggerated scenario, but you can see how that would look amazing from the consumer perspective. The issue is that it’s purely a tactic to keep you loyal and faithful to the [proprietary] Apple brand. There was a study somewhere about hotel guests being significantly more loyal and likely to return to the same hotel chain after they've had a bad experience that was handled well by the hotel they were staying in -- same deal here. Apple had the marketing brilliance to intentionally craft that notorious cult-following mentality in its fans.
On it's own, that really isn't all that negative though. The problem is, that Apple is clearly (IMO) using it to push a dubious proprietary agenda that goes against almost everything OSS stands for[6], thus amplifying the influence of their questionable views exponentially. That's why something as benign as not having removable batteries on their devices is a lot more worrisome coming from Apple (if you're invested in their ecosystem). That design choice carries no ethical significance on it's own, but if the actor implementing it has a history of dubious motives, you better believe the significance of the move is no longer null, because it is but a vehicle to convey their greater intentions. This Edge phone for example doesn't look to have a removable battery either, but Canonical is not generally known for being closed about things, so such a design decision wouldn't worry me too much about investing in their platform.
The important thing to realize is that when you vote with your wallet, you're voting on more than just 'features', and these other less-visible aspects can and will affect you at some point.
I’m sure this rant is gonna get nit-picked and analyzed to hell, possibly missing the forest for the trees and all that, but it is a large reason why I don’t find Canonical to be a bad option to support -- and that’s really the main issue here.
[1] The book ‘Inside Apple’ is a really good read if you’re interested to know what it’s like in there: http://amzn.com/B00C2IFS3W
[6] I’m aware that they do have lots of OSS projects of their own, www.apple.com/opensource/ is always the first thing that’s pointed out to me when I go on an anti-apple rant. My point is that the company’s overall intentions aren’t aligned with that of the FLOSS community, and that those dubious intentions can and will bite a large segment of consumers in the ass at some point.
Basically they're building their own X replacement even though there is one in the works (Wayland) that they admit fits their needs (or could if they worked on Wayland), simply so they can have control over it. They also admit that they aren't going to bother to make it work for anyone but them, nor are they going to worry about a stable API for it (because in their minds it's only used internally, they don't care about external people who are trying to build compliance with it).
Let me report a specific example I've witnessed from the sidelines.
Some time ago, Canonical collaborated with others in the desktop space, among them the KDE community, on a specification to make system tray menus work over the D-Bus IPC system. The upshot is that it allows menus to be rendered by the shell implementation you're running instead of by the app backing the icon, improving visual consistency and giving the shell more control to e.g. tune the menu for a particular form factor. This specification was implemented for a number of toolkits, and the Qt implementation, used by KDE, was set up as a Canonical project, with code contributions from both within and outside of Canonical.
Then Canonical decided to require signing a copyright assignment contract before contributing to their projects and decided to retroactively apply this to codebases already in flight, such as the library in question. Copyright assignment is a hotly debated topic in the community and there is a widespread belief that mandatory copyright assignment is a Bad Thing in general, but in this particular case the contract they ran with was very badly crafted and deemed unacceptable by many, including a KDE developer who had contributed to the library. Canonical therefore decided to kick out the bugfixes he had contributed -- and then Ubuntu ended up shipping them anyway in the form of patches to their package, with the packagers exploiting the loophole that Canonical doesn't require holding the copyright for such patches. Other distributions were left duplicating the same work on their end.
A repository on Gitorious.org was set up as a staging area outside of Canonical to have a convenient place to host the fixed version of the library, but making this repository the new canonical (heh, sorry, pun unintended) upstream was deemed not an option because the Canonical-employed developer who had written most of the library would be unable to get approval from his employer. Eventually, if memory serves right, said employee ended up independently rewriting the KDE developer's patches to yield the same bug fixes (which, given knowledge of the original patches, sounds potentially legally sketchy to me, but IANAL) for a second round of needlessly duplicated work.
Episodes like this one are why there's not a whole lot of appetite left for collaborating with Canonical or relying on projects they steward. There's just no trust for Canonical to display any regard for the needs of their partners, or perform well in a governance role.
To be fair, the KDE team knew that they were dealing with a corporate entity that would want to retain some sort of control over how software it creates and distributes is licensed.
Signing a CLA is nothing new, in fact the FSF do exactly the same thing so they can shunt their projects to the next GPL without having to contact developers.
If developers have an issue with such an arrangement, then they shouldn't be contributing to those companies and organisations in the first place.
Note the point about starting to apply a CLA after the fact to an existing project. KDE certainly consciously took a risk when deciding to try and collaborate with a corporate entity, but that doesn't mean the community can't be disappointed at the outcome. Nobody is complaining about a CLA they knew of in advance - because they did not.
And personally I don't think a CLA makes sense for the specific code in question, which is purposefully designed as an interoperability solution and so implicitly multi-stakeholder.
No, sadly. This involves a number of private companies, and legal issues.
Let's just say that in private, canonical has taken an interesting view of the rights it has in the open source software that makes up ubuntu, and this view is, IMHO, not particularly in line with what are likely the broader expectations of the open source community.
These views are not simply restricted to trademark issues.
With the edge you have to also factor in the one year wait after putting your money down, which kills the value proposition for me. Who knows what other cool phones might be out before then? Moto X, something entirely unrevealed, etc. A year is a long, long time to wait.
It is more that Canonical is asking for trust. They gave preview specs and made the claim they would improve the hardware near release if they took too long and better tech was available. You just depend on them actually putting the good stuff in the phone.
The point is that the _aim_ is to ship a high-sec device. Normal-spec devices will be available from other sources.
We don't know what the final spec of the Edge will be, and the CPU hasn't been chosen. However, it will be able to use parts that are available for a small production run (40k) but not a large one (4 million etc).
Judging by the article's numbers, the market is vanishingly small. There are many ways I imagine the community would support Ubuntu / Canonical. Designing and manufacturing hardware is not that.
> While Ubuntu Edge is not as revolutionary as Tesla
WAIT WAIT!!! Stop right there. Name one phone other than iPhone that is as revolutionary as the Tesla.
The whole entire problem is that Ubuntu for phones derives no benefit from having this hardware, and this hardware is unlikely to be revolutionary.
I'm not "comparing Edge with current mainstream device with price and feature" I'm saying it is just exactly like any other moderately high-end phone, except it will be a little thicker and heavier because Canonical can't afford cutting edge packaging technology. Probably not as good as what Samsung will have on the market next year. Same chips. Same screen. So... why?
So, the software is different, and possibly better (I have no way of judging). How is this an improvement over porting the software to an existing phone?
It's probably even doable to make it run on the Android kernel. See, for example, Hellaphone (https://bitbucket.org/floren/inferno/wiki/Home), which is an Inferno port to Android. Take the Nexus 4, or some other nice phone, flash it with the updates, and resell it.
SUGGESTION: please show the rate at which the total is growing, e.g., in dollars/minute, and compare that to the rate necessary to reach the fundraising goal. Otherwise, it's hard to see whether the total is growing at a sufficiently fast rate just by looking at that chart.
For example, as I write this, the campaign must raise an additional $28.5 million over the next 30 days, equal to under $40,000/hour or around $660/minute. So right now it would be helpful to see if the total is growing by at least $660/minute.
Labelling the x-axis would also be kind of useful. And what does the note in the legend mean? "first day @ 12p.m. curve flatlines after $600 - deal ends"?
I don't see how it's deceptive. It was a short term promotion. Is it deceptive that Walmart doesn't show last week's price on every product in their store whose price has gone up? Further, it would clutter the sidebar with an unchoosable option and make the correct price harder to find.
Agreed.
But what else to they have up their sleeve? They might add new levels that turn out more attractive, if they determine it is needed to push it past the finish line.
yeah. they don't want psychology to get in the way: 'oh man, i missed the 600 offer, not going to pay 830 for that phone'
they did not plan their kickstarter project carefully. they need to have more rewards in the lower tier and upper tier: t-shirts, stickers, custom color on the phone, extra customization, extra ram, extra cpu etc.
Still a great kickstarter - if they raise the amount = they can show manufacturers that there is demand for ubuntu. if the don't, they still gain quite a bit of awareness of the ubuntu mobile OS.
Agreed on the "more rewards" front. I want to back this, but I don't have the money to drop $830 for a phone in a year, and the $20 one seems relatively inconsequential. I'd pay a slight premium for a shirt though.
The chart starts at 12pm on the first day, because thats when the author started grabbing information..
If you look on the curve, you can see that at $3.2 million, the curve kind of flat lines, or at least levels out a bit. This is when they ran out of the 5,000 phones they were offering at $600.
So, can we expect the funding to fail? Do we have similar charts for other like fundings?
Personally, even the $600 watermark is too high. Perhaps I and my colleagues are not the right market, but either
* we've been fooled by prices on Google's Nexus devices
* the extra power doesn't justify the cost or isn't necessary for our needs
* we might as well get Lenovos -- half our guys have a history of dropping their phones or otherwise damaging their phone
At the end of the day, I connect to numerous remote hosts to get work done, which negates the purpose if I just need a shell and terminal multiplex and browser to run on my localhost. I'm not going to want to run my RDB, search DB, KV store, cache store, messaging bus, etc from that phone. The specs are nice, for a phone, but it's not a workstation.
I don't think so. This target for this crowdfunding project is an order of magnitude larger than the infamous Pebble watch.
I'm not sure we can apply the same rules. On one hand I think it will be even harder to reach the goal. But on the other hand I think the sheer audacity and scope might have some unexpected benefits.
Nonetheless, I'd say in the end we'll consider it a successful fundraising campaign. Even if the goal isn't met and the phone never gets created what's happened so far proves that there's an opportunity for Ubuntu to find a niche that's underserved with their vision of convergence.
It was really a bad move to have created the $800 level without adding anything to the $600 package. Even adding only a small thing would certainly have improved the funding. Another factor is that in lot of minds $600 is the price point for high ends smartphones, pricing above is really really risked.
35 minutes ago they updated the perk list with the "double edge": two ubuntu edge devices for $1400. Stil a better bargain than one piece at $830.
I do think that when you're going for this kind of money on a crowdfunding website you kind of know what you're doing.
The update also states that they'll be having plenty of other updates during the next weeks.
No matter how it ends, this is going to be a really interesting experiment for the marketing guys at Canonical and for crowdfunding in general.
Yeah, this was basically my thinking. I'd love to support a high end phone with an OS not intended to collect every iota of my personal data and use it for advertising. However, while $600 is a price I'd pay to have it now, $600 for the given specifications in a year is too risky.
But at the very least they've got some price validation. Seems like reasonably robust data for a highly visible campaign at both $600 and $820 price points that should give at least moderately good data on the price-demand curve.
They just announced a new perk, 2 phones for $1400 ($700/phone). I was wondering how they were going to offer future discounts without pissing off those that have already pledged $800. This is a kind of neat approach since you'd probably need a friend to buy-in with you which should also enhance the viral plan.
I'm a little surprised this came so quickly on the second day but I guess the earlier it gets to a high value the better it is for visibility.
They see the same metrics that we do and can use it as a gauge on variable pricing to maximize the potential buy-in.
I have a similar script running and observed the same thing. Yesterday I thought that they were well on track towards making the goal, but it seems that the one day only deal heavily skewed pledges towards the first day compared to the average crowdfunded project:
Based on the %time vs %backing chart, the second day usually secures around the same amount of funding as the first day. However in the case of the Ubuntu Edge, it received above average percentage backing on the first day, but has already hit the trough.
The $600 vs. $830 funding levels seem like a really bad move. It gave their most enthusiastic supporters a chance to give them less money, which is the opposite of what you'd typically want. And for the next month, everyone who visits the project will feel like they're getting screwed out of $230 by not having been one of the early funders.
But since the $600 level was only available for one day, it served as a push to get those enthusiastic supporters to get into the pool right away instead of wavering back and forth for the next month.
If your goal for something like this is PR, you want a big first-day number you can give press to try and gin up a second round of stories about the campaign. So it can be worth it to potentially lose a little on those sales if by doing so you can get more of them into that first-day figure.
Personally, I don't think Ubuntu actually wants the $32M.
Remember, Mark specifically says that most manufacturers won't take you seriously unless you order 100,000 units. At $600 per phone, that's only 53k units (the volumes look worse at $830 per phone). They can't actually manufacture the phone as described for $32M.
So, this is, IMHO, a publicity stunt intended to get carriers interested in Ubuntu phone, and it probably was quite successful.
Quite successful? They got about 6500 preorders for a phone with better specs than anything on the market currently, for less than most of them.
A publicity stunt to get people interested on Ubuntu phone maybe, but I doubt that theses numbers are good for carriers...
Chances are, with a volume of less than 100k units, and with the Bill of Materials they're generating, I would be surprised if the cost of the phone were under $600. It's possible, but unlikely.
I would wager that they can't even buy RAM directly from Samsung without an order over 100k units.
So yeah, maybe $600 per phone is high, but maybe not. They're talking about a serious bill of materials, and although they're economizing on the CMOS and the LCD for the screen, I don't think that will reduce the cost much. The sapphire screen and the single-cut shell are both significant cost structures.
It's fun to argue about unknowable things, but given that (I assume) neither of us works for Canonical, I think the answer is probably that you're right. It would be hard for that phone to cost $600, but it won't be cheap.
Yeah, a $700-800 phone and a $800-1000 limited edition founders pack (phone plus some recognition) would have made more sense and been revenue neutral.
I looked at it, was interested but not sure. Now the $600 is sold out, I feel lees likely to buy one, even though that is partly irrational (I should just evaluate whether it is worth $830 to me, not be upset I missed out on the cheaper one).
You're right about the first part, but they've removed the $600 level from the page since it's over, so people coming for the first time won't be able to compare it like that. $830 is still steep for a phone though, even a nice one.
If they don't do their research they won't be aware that they missed the lower price point. So how large is the set of people who want a Ubuntu powered smart phone for $830, but who don't do a simple search before buying?
I calculated the average rate after current dropoff. The funding will fail and the total will be roughly around $20 million dollars. Still, that is quite a bit of money and at least some sort of validation.
They should have kept it at $600 and increased the total needed for the project.
You do realize that this makes every statistician cringe? Your sample size for calculation is too small to base any kind of reliable projections on it making this a pure guess.
Yes, if we had this kind of data for several campaigns, then you could compute a (normalized) <% of goal> vs. <time>, and from that estimate the final <% of goal> for this campaign.
The problem with your original calculation, is you're assuming the rate is constant, which it may be, roughly, for day 3 through day 27, however in these campaigns there's always an uptick right before the deadline. Really, it's that uptick that you want to estimate, based on previous campaigns.
I don't think kickstarter or indigogo release this kind of data though, unfortunately.
Your right, I did assume the rate would be constant going forward. However, I assumed that the rate of change (RoC) would be the highest now than later.
This is the data from the largest kickstarter "Pebble: E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android":
If you notice, the earliest part of the campaign has nearly the highest RoC. Towards the middle, it kind of flattens out. And, as you mentioned, towards the end (the uptick) the RoC resembles that of the beginning of the campaign.
If everything remained constant for the next 27 days, that "uptick" would have to be >$10 million dollars on that last 3 days.
Still, they will beat the largest kickstarter campaign ($10 million).
"They should have kept it at $600 and increased the total needed for the project." - The reason the curve levels off isn't (entirely) because the cost is $200 more. It's because the 'limited time' offer caused a lot of people to buy it FAST, people who may have not bought at all. Personally I did not purchase, but I was very close to almost entirely because of the "limited time" appeal that $600 offer had. If it was a permanent $600 price point I wouldn't have even considered it.
In the last 5 hours when I looked (roughly 4pm - 9pm in the eastern U.S.), they had raised $59,000. That's about $290,000 a day they are currently running at. They are going to need a very big push at the end if they stay at that rate for most of the month (since they need about $1 million a day).
This calculation also looks to begin at midnight. I don't think we can assume an even spending pattern throughout the day. You will have to take into account multiple days and weekends to test to see if there is a change in buying behavior by hour or day before you can make these assumptions.
And then there are press events most likely planned that could accelerate the buying. Or another event that could slow buying.
If this showed up on Dragon's Den, Mark would get kicked out head first. He has a vision, but how will he get there? The path ahead needs much better details. Right now he is selling a dream, but for $ 32 million he better explain how to get there. For example: on what estimates does he base the expected deliver date? What are the tasks ahead, and how far along is he already? It is impossible to judge what risk is associated with this project when there are so many unknowns.
He sells this to us the same way that wallets and pens are sold on Kickstarter. If he can get 32 million with no more than this, I am impressed.
PS: The project might be very realistic, but how can we know? For example, Pebble missed some certification that screwed German backers since customs stopped the watches. There are a million small things that can go wrong - how well prepared is Ubuntu to deal with those?
It would be pretty interesting to see what the funding progress chart was for other large crowdfunded projects (Pebble, Double Fine, etc) for comparison. If we assume that the rate of funding will not increase beyond the current rate, the project will not meet the goal. I don't know how valid that assumption is, though -- intuitively it makes sense, but it is possible that other projects have challenged that assumption. Especially possible if they managed to get a further round of press midway through the campaign.
People have posted a bunch of stats; the stories project starters on Kickstarter have posted tend to indicate that there's a surge of funding when a project is new, and another surge when the deadline is about to run out (people who were procrastinating start to feel time pressure). Not sure if there's a good law for predicting the sizes of these two surges, or how much the addition of new reward levels can add additional bumps in the middle.
A difference is that Pebble was funded very early on and just continued growing. There was not a need for a last push, instead they put a cap on in the end.
I threw together a quick version of this in Python and for Kickstarter projects instead of IndieGoGo in case it's useful to anyone. https://github.com/itstriz/kickstart_tracker
I was close to going for the $600 price point, but ultimately even that is too much (for me) for what is essentially preproduction-quality hardware of dubious utility (to me).
This is similar (but definitely not same) to the idea of supporting tesla by buying their very expensive models when they first came out. Those people who paid premium price for their car, because they were supportive to the idea of Tesla's vision of clean electric cars. Because of these early adopters, tesla today exists as a company and has a product.
While Ubuntu Edge is not as revolutionary as Tesla, it has some unique ideas, made by a company that is loved by most of Open Source and Linux community. By buying an comparably expensive device, you are supporting open source platform and giving chance for another serious option besides the present duopoly.
Whether you agree with this vision or not is a different story, whether you think one open source option (Android) is enough is another story. But if you are comparing Edge with current mainstream device with price and feature, then this device is clearly not meant for you, but if you are supporting this device with your money because of philosophical reasons, then this device is for you, and you are the type people Ubuntu is asking for support.