I was at Canonical during the Ubuntu Phone thing, and it was wild to watch that play out. It started out with a bunch of good ideas... but somehow, every last one of those good ideas got overturned and reversed.
Like, "let's put the buttons at the bottom so the user can reach it with their thumb while holding the phone" got turned into "let's put every important button at the top left where it's literally the hardest place on the whole screen for an average user to reach during typical use".
Or, more importantly, it started out as something like... "Debian/Ubuntu has a rich repository of high-quality full-featured battle-tested popular programs curated by community experts, designed by and for users to empower themselves, so lets give users a way to run all those beloved programs on mobile devices". And then it became "let's get rid of the package repository and forbid users from running anything from it, and build a brand new system which is incompatible with everything, and instead has a commercial app store where corps can sell proprietary software and Canonical gets a big cut of each sale, and the OS has only a small set of proof-of-concept placeholder programs, and is designed to restrict the user so corporate partners can have more profit and control".
And then when it didn't work out, the company kinda doubled down on some of the worst parts of it and went all-in on Snappy.
Instead of bringing phones up to the level of a desktop, as promised... the company tried to bring desktops down to the level of a phone. And that trend has been increasingly popular in the corporate Linux world lately... "Androidifying" desktop Linux.
From an insider's perspective, the Ubuntu Touch thing looked pretty promising... and then management pushed everything sideways. The regular developers kept trying to fix it and make it good, but then upper management would step in and forbid it. The VP of "Future Engineering" in particular. Lots of stuff was forbidden because it "goes against the vision". So things didn't work, and couldn't be fixed.
The worst was one day at a big sprint... the VP of Business gave an all-hands powerpoint presentation right after the workday ended, with a catered dinner afterward. He looked and spoke like a caricature of an Italian mobster, and spent 45 minutes gleefully explaining exactly how we were going to screw the user to make more profit, by taking control away from the user and giving that control to phone corporations. Like, selling corps the ability to place ads directly onto the user's home screen. He was so excited he was practically vibrating.
Afterward, I just went straight to my hotel room and cried.
Eventually, the phone project was cancelled because it had failed pretty spectacularly, for exactly the reasons everyone said it would... and upper management laid off nearly the entire Ubuntu Engineering business unit, about a third or a quarter of the company. The people in charge had decided the problem wasn't a bad design... it was just all those uppity devs who wouldn't follow orders. They kept the managers who were responsible for making it fail, and got rid of all the devs who tried to warn management that the "vision" was broken.
At least sabdfl seemed somewhat aware of the situation... aware of how bad it was. A day or two beforehand, he started the day by giving everyone a pep talk. The talk was pretty somber, talking about how we were supposed to have a mature product to launch by now, but instead we were cancelling the launch and hoping for an optimistic scenario where some tech magazines would at least say it "showed potential". The best case scenario he could muster for the team's motivation was ... we might get a couple reviews stating that it could eventually be good someday, with enough work.
ToyKeeper · · focus · HN ↗
Like, "let's put the buttons at the bottom so the user can reach it with their thumb while holding the phone" got turned into "let's put every important button at the top left where it's literally the hardest place on the whole screen for an average user to reach during typical use".
Or, more importantly, it started out as something like... "Debian/Ubuntu has a rich repository of high-quality full-featured battle-tested popular programs curated by community experts, designed by and for users to empower themselves, so lets give users a way to run all those beloved programs on mobile devices". And then it became "let's get rid of the package repository and forbid users from running anything from it, and build a brand new system which is incompatible with everything, and instead has a commercial app store where corps can sell proprietary software and Canonical gets a big cut of each sale, and the OS has only a small set of proof-of-concept placeholder programs, and is designed to restrict the user so corporate partners can have more profit and control".
And then when it didn't work out, the company kinda doubled down on some of the worst parts of it and went all-in on Snappy.
Instead of bringing phones up to the level of a desktop, as promised... the company tried to bring desktops down to the level of a phone. And that trend has been increasingly popular in the corporate Linux world lately... "Androidifying" desktop Linux.
sigh
I'm tired, boss.
4thguy · · focus · HN ↗
ToyKeeper · · focus · HN ↗
The worst was one day at a big sprint... the VP of Business gave an all-hands powerpoint presentation right after the workday ended, with a catered dinner afterward. He looked and spoke like a caricature of an Italian mobster, and spent 45 minutes gleefully explaining exactly how we were going to screw the user to make more profit, by taking control away from the user and giving that control to phone corporations. Like, selling corps the ability to place ads directly onto the user's home screen. He was so excited he was practically vibrating.
Afterward, I just went straight to my hotel room and cried.
Eventually, the phone project was cancelled because it had failed pretty spectacularly, for exactly the reasons everyone said it would... and upper management laid off nearly the entire Ubuntu Engineering business unit, about a third or a quarter of the company. The people in charge had decided the problem wasn't a bad design... it was just all those uppity devs who wouldn't follow orders. They kept the managers who were responsible for making it fail, and got rid of all the devs who tried to warn management that the "vision" was broken.
At least sabdfl seemed somewhat aware of the situation... aware of how bad it was. A day or two beforehand, he started the day by giving everyone a pep talk. The talk was pretty somber, talking about how we were supposed to have a mature product to launch by now, but instead we were cancelling the launch and hoping for an optimistic scenario where some tech magazines would at least say it "showed potential". The best case scenario he could muster for the team's motivation was ... we might get a couple reviews stating that it could eventually be good someday, with enough work.
4thguy · · focus · HN ↗