I don't think the article was very good at explaining _why_ they've lost it. A lot of controversial decisions turn out to be good in the end.
I think the biggest mistake has been to neglect Linux power users, which has been their biggest grassroots evangelists. At one point some years ago _every_ Unix guy I knew ran Ubuntu on their laptops because it "just worked" (well, compared to other distros). And some of them had started recommending it to friends and family. Nowadays, many of the same people are running Macs, and guess what they recommend? Macs (or iPads).
Their second biggest mistake has been the "me too" attitude. Netbooks popular? Ubuntu Netbook Remix! Oh wait, tablets you say? Ubuntu for Tablets! Google and Apple launch TV platforms? Ubuntu TV! Oh, and don't forget that we have a phone OS as well!
To make any one of these succeed they would need to dedicate great salespeople and marketers to secure deals with PC, tablet, TV or phone manufacturers or operators. Or they would have to make them so insanely great that people would line up to get them. Google TV, backed by a big company is pretty much dead in the water.
I would LOVE for all of these products to succeed and to use well designed open source products. But it's just not going to happen this way.
>Their second biggest mistake has been the "me too" attitude. Netbooks popular? Ubuntu Netbook Remix! Oh wait, tablets you say? Ubuntu for Tablets! Google and Apple launch TV platforms? Ubuntu TV! Oh, and don't forget that we have a phone OS as well!
They think they're a content company trying to put their on OS on as many devices as possible (control a horizontal).
Really they're a platform company, and they should be trying to make exactly one most popular thing (my guess is Amazon instances running Ubuntu) run as well as possible with all their other services, like their package manager, their cloud, etc. They should try to own a vertical, like Apple does.
I don't know if that many devs are really into macs, most I know aren't and those who do are usually because their company uses/issues them one. In some parts its more peer-pressure than actual convenience. Still unity tries to copy a lot of OSX's look&feel to the point that its just awkward.
I would add that the problem with current ubuntu is that it tries to appeal to both casual and power users and manages to enrage both. Users coming from Windows (still 90% of all PC users) plain hate unity and find it confusing, it used to be that i out of 3 people I showed ubuntu to would install it but after unity I haven't been able to convince anyone because the first thing they see is an OS that makes no sense.
All power users I know prefer even gnome3 to unity, but most stick to KDE and xfce. A lot and I mean a lot have moved to Cinnamon, no surprise there since that environment is awesome, basically what ubuntu should be like. Of course if unity is too mac-like Cinnamon is too windows-like, but it manages to pull a lot of stuff that unity just can't while remaining fairly snappy unlike the sluggishness of the "dash".
Since Windows 8 started shipping, its users trying out Ubuntu for the first time may be more familiar with Unity due to them both having similar search functions and layout.
You cannot always be the first, especially when you aren't the one making hardware. I'd rather have Ubuntu doing what is currently is rather than thousands of Linux derivatives making slightly different variations of the same model on the same hardware it's been on since the beginning.
I think the biggest mistake has been to neglect Linux power users, which has been their biggest grassroots evangelists. At one point some years ago _every_ Unix guy I knew ran Ubuntu on their laptops because it "just worked" (well, compared to other distros). And some of them had started recommending it to friends and family. Nowadays, many of the same people are running Macs, and guess what they recommend? Macs (or iPads).
Their second biggest mistake has been the "me too" attitude. Netbooks popular? Ubuntu Netbook Remix! Oh wait, tablets you say? Ubuntu for Tablets! Google and Apple launch TV platforms? Ubuntu TV! Oh, and don't forget that we have a phone OS as well!
To make any one of these succeed they would need to dedicate great salespeople and marketers to secure deals with PC, tablet, TV or phone manufacturers or operators. Or they would have to make them so insanely great that people would line up to get them. Google TV, backed by a big company is pretty much dead in the water.
I would LOVE for all of these products to succeed and to use well designed open source products. But it's just not going to happen this way.