 Ubuntu started way back in 2008. It has become one of the most popular open source projects today. So as a founder, how does it feel when you go to bed at night and wake up in the morning? It's energizing to be surrounded by people who care about a couple of key things. They care about technology. There's incredible technology in the free software community and ultimately that gets expressed in Ubuntu. And we aim to be a fantastic expression of all of the innovation that happens in the free software community. So that's great. But it's also energizing to be surrounded by people who care about people. The name Ubuntu, it's not Ubuntu Nix or it's not a technology name, it's a name about people. And so we tend to attract, as a community, we tend to attract people who care about the big picture, care about society, care about the way technology is used and the changes that technology can create. And that's pretty awesome. So I guess the two of those things kind of keep me excited from morning to night. The year 2004 is important in a sense that two tech companies were founded that year by the guys sharing the same first name. So when you look at Ubuntu and compare it with Facebook, what do you think? Facebook has been an incredible success. It's connected people in fascinating new ways. Ubuntu has been its own success. So we each pursue the things that we're passionate about or interested in. And for me, Ubuntu is an expression of both what I think the enterprise and commercial world can be about, this extraordinary free software platform delivered free of charge in an enterprise release every six months with rigorous cadence, rigorous engineering, rigorous quality, but on completely open terms, backed by really great services from a great company, Canonical. So for me, that's particularly exciting and I guess we all just explore the things that we love. Ubuntu's bug number one says Microsoft has a majority market share and I think here we are talking about the desktop market. But when we look at the desktop market, it's a very complicated market. People want to do a lot of different things with their desktops. Now a new class, a new category of devices is emerging. So when we look at the traditional desktop market, how much sense it makes for Canonical to continue to invest resources in the desktop market? Bug number one is not about Microsoft so much as it's about diversity and the benefits of diversity. And we know that in the Linux ecosystem, we really embrace diversity, the fact that there are so many distributions and they're fascinating. There's beautiful things in Arch Linux, there's beautiful things in Gen2, there's beautiful things in Fedora, in Debian, in SUSE and the other 500 distros that you'll find on DistroWatch, that diversity stimulates innovation, it creates a lot of energy. It also means that we don't have to be all things to all people. We focus on creating a really productive environment for developers and a really productive environment for office workers and a productive environment for school kids. But we're not focused on tons of different areas where other distros can serve people better. So that's what bug one is really about. It's about moving towards a world where people have access to technology on a much more open basis. There's a much bigger diversity of technology. If you're a smart technologist, you should try all of those things and find what's interesting and useful for you. I do think that the desktop remains a critical part of our everyday computing experience. We talk about smartphones as being kind of the PC of the future, but they're not. They are incredible handset devices. They are incredible in your hand experiences and they'll continue to get better. But the desktop form factor remains the place where we create, we produce, we apply rigor and discipline. And that's important to all of us, to various degrees. So what we're doing here, it's at MWC with bringing the desktop to the smartphone. I think it's really innovative. I'm sure some future version of Windows will do the same thing because it's a great idea. But I'm really proud that Ubuntu has brought that to the free software community before we see that in the proprietary software world. We have to lead and we have to innovate. When we look at the desktop, what do you think is the biggest obstacle in the adoption of Ubuntu? Whether it's the lack of applications or look and feel. Because people want to do a lot of things on their desktops. They want to stream Netflix. They want to use Flickr and Picasso. And most of these services and applications are not available on Ubuntu platform. If you look at other companies such as Google or Apple, they ensure that such services or applications are available on their platforms. And if the third party vendors are not providing these services, then they work with them and bring these services or applications to those platforms. That seems to be missing on Ubuntu. So how much is it your concern that an Ubuntu user does get access to such services and applications? So I think what has held the Linux desktop back in the past has been a combination of a couple of things. Before we get to apps, there's the user experience of the desktop itself. And so that's why we set up a design team at Canonical to really focus on how people use their computers, what they want to do and what they want to do today and also looking forward into the future how they want to use these devices. It's that design ethic that gave us Ubuntu for Android. It's that design ethic that gave us Unity. And we test that design with programmers who are using the computer very intensely every day. We also test it with people off the street from children to the elderly. So we have a very good idea of how usable the desktop is. And that's been the driver for us across all of the work that we've done. That's the first barrier in usability. And with Ubuntu 1204, we've seen fantastic results of people loving it. Even people who didn't like Unity initially coming back and saying this is fantastic. I understand it feels natural to me now. We've polished a lot of the little rough edges that held people back. So user experience and design is the first piece. Applications are the second piece and that is challenging. HTML5 makes a big difference. So we can deliver now the whole web beautifully. Whether it's with Firefox or with Chrome, we have the greatest browsers in the world and we have that experience in a very secure environment. We can let you browse the web with confidence, no malware attacks. And we can let you browse the web very efficiently, very fast. Whether it's on a laptop or a desktop or on your TV. As for native applications, I think that's an important story. So we're investing in making it really easy for developers to develop for Ubuntu. We've adopted Qt and QML as well as GTK. These are fantastic tools that make it really easy for app developers. There are also tools that are already being used by app developers. The Adobe Creative Suite uses Qt very heavily. There are big international software companies that produce lots of software for the Mac and lots of software for Windows. And we need to reach out to them and use tools, enable tools that they'll be familiar with. And then we've also put a lot of work into the publishing process. How you take your app, how you package it and deliver it up to Ubuntu users. Historically, what makes Ubuntu great is you can get 20,000 packages in one command. Any of 20,000 packages in one command with all the dependencies and updates that come with it. We're extending that to say, well you should be able to get all of those things and anything that a software manufacturer out there wants to deliver to you even if it hasn't been packaged by us. So the whole developer.ubuntu.com story is really important and we've made great progress in the last two years. If we look beyond individual developers, there are big companies whose services are not yet available on Ubuntu platform. Let's take example of Flash. They have decided to not support Linux anymore. Now Google came into picture and ensured that Adobe's Flash is supported on their Linux platform which is Chrome OS, which is not the case with Ubuntu. Ubuntu users will not be able to use a lot of services which use or rely on Flash. So what is your strategy towards such problems or challenges? Well, I'm confident that Ubuntu users will continue to be able to use Flash on the desktop whenever they need it. The developers of commercial applications choose to target environments that are used in commercial environments, used in professional environments, used by people who are willing to spend money on software or to support a business model in one way or another. Whether it's streaming video and the adverts that potentially go with that, whether it's advertising, whatever the case may be. We have to show that Panoo Linux can represent a viable platform for those developers. That's a function from our side. That's a function of making it really easy to use so that users adopt it. And from users' side, it's a function of using it in a commercial kind of way. You can't expect people to write software for you that you won't buy. Unless they're also part of the free software ecosystem. So we've got to support the free software ecosystem. And we also have to show that it's commercially viable for developers to target the platform. We have now so many millions of users on Ubuntu. From the enterprise through to emerging markets, there are increasingly software developers that treat it as a first-class citizen. And while there are always some developers coming and some leaving, the trend very strongly is for Ubuntu to be a first-class citizen that's certified and supported. Just in the last little while, VMware, Citrix both certified Ubuntu for thin-client usage, for example. And we're hard at work with the other thin-client vendors as well. So I really do believe that we can as a community create a viable platform for everyday computing. 1204 is going to be an RKS version. And it was expected that with this release, it will be mature and it will stabilize. And the team will focus on other pressing problems such as availability of applications and services. But then you introduced HUD, which means more work for developers. It also led to some confusion. So I have two questions for you. One, is HUD going to replace the traditional menus completely? Or is it going to be supplementary? Second, what role does HUD play in the overall Ubuntu experience? How does HUD redefine the desktop? So clearly we've said that we're interested in the new form factors, phones, tablets, TVs. We've shown the TV, we've seen the desktop interface. We will in due course show the phone and the tablet unity with Ubuntu experiences as one coherent family. And there's a lot of innovation that goes into developing and designing those experiences as one coherent family. We believe we've led the world there. The desktop, you know, a lot of the rest of the world is saying, well, the desktop's boring, the desktop's not interesting. But we believe the desktop is what most of us use most of the day. And so there's still a lot of room for innovation there. So we've done a couple of things. We've focused on design and user experience of the shell. We've focused on bringing personal cloud services to the desktop. We were the first in Ubuntu to have personal cloud services fully integrated into the operating system. Head of Apple, head of Microsoft, head of the competition. And we've focused on bringing aspects of these new form factors, the mobile form factors into the desktop. So overlay scroll bars and so on. But there are other areas where we can innovate as well. The HUD is an example of us saying, looking at the desktop experience and saying, here's an interaction pattern which has many good things about it, it's well understood. But it's also slow and awkward in certain ways. And it doesn't map to a world where people are using new software applications every day. They're changing software applications much faster today than they did 15 years ago. 15 years ago, you know, you had to go down to the store and buy software and then come home and install it. There's a lot of friction and you wouldn't do that very often. But today, we're getting software every day and new software is on and off every day. So it's worth our while to explore new user interface paradigms. So we looked at the menus and that's where we started with the HUD. The HUD will go much further than just menus. It's completely complementary, so menus aren't going away. We think that if we really can innovate with the HUD the way we believe we can innovate with the HUD, that you'll never use menus and so one day in future, if they disappear, you won't notice. But they'll probably always be around. Mainly we want to focus on helping people get what they want to get done, done quickly. And there are two stories there. One is heavy users. You know, if you're a heavy user of a digital video editing or the GIMP or if you're a programmer and you're a heavy user of multiple terminal windows and the console and so on, we want to make you more productive in that professional kind of context. The other is the other end of the spectrum. It's a very lightweight user who is just trying out an app and doesn't want to have to learn everything about the app. Doesn't want to have to map out the whole functionality of the app. They just want to try and get something done. And the HUD really is the first bit of user interface innovation we've seen that addresses both of those opposite spectrums in a very nice way. What's shipping in 1204 with the HUD is a first cut just to signal the intent and to open it up so that other people can innovate around it as well. But this is a real area of research. It's super exciting. We've had contacts from user interface researchers from all of the major companies, from Microsoft through Google, and they're all fascinated by it. They think it's really powerful. So we're very proud of that work and we're very proud again that it's available first as free software. Ubuntu for Android is an exciting concept. But I think Motorola tried to do something similar with their web top OS last year. They did not succeed with it. Now given that Motorola controls the hardware, they failed to have an impact. So what makes you think that Ubuntu for Android will succeed where Motorola has failed? Ubuntu for Android is so surprising for people because it's this really beautiful desktop that comes from a place that they can't believe a desktop can come from. When you see people who play with it for the first time, the look on their face is fantastic. They love it. We're succeeding at that because we really care about that desktop experience. We're not just trying to sell a phone. We don't sell phones. We care about that desktop experience. We want it to be beautiful. We want it to be fast. We want it to be complete, productive, all of those things. So I think that's why we'll succeed in that convergence space and others haven't. The handset relationship is critical. The difference between Ubuntu for Android on a dual-core 1 GHz phone and a dual-core 2 GHz phone is huge, and the difference between a small GPU and a large GPU is huge. So Ubuntu for Android really gives people a reason to buy the high-end phone because they can use it as a full desktop in that environment. The media reaction here and the reaction from technologists, just people who love technology, has been amazing because they see how disruptive this can be, just how dramatically this changes the ecosystem. But when I look at it as a product, I try to think of some new cases. Mobility can be one, but then I need to carry an HDMI cable, a keyboard and mouse, and then I also need an HDMI-enabled monitor to be able to use Ubuntu for Android. It will be far more easier for me to just carry my laptop. If you look at Enterprise segment, a lot of companies do not even allow storage devices to be plugged into their systems, and here you're talking about employees bringing their whole computer and connecting to the company's infrastructure. So what kind of use cases are there? I can see that it can be very, very disruptive. So can you give us some examples of the use cases of Ubuntu for Android? I think there are two initial use cases that both the network operators and the handset manufacturers are excited about. The first is the Enterprise use case. We're seeing large numbers of Enterprise virtualize their desktops and run the desktop in the data center with a thin client on the desktop. And so Ubuntu for Android allows an Enterprise to provision a corporate phone, an Android phone, which is also the thin client, and it's also the desk phone. So instead of provisioning three devices per person, corporate IT can essentially provision a single device and then run Windows in the data center where it's easier to manage, can be done more efficiently, can be delivered to any desk in the Enterprise or over 4G networks, you know, anywhere in the world. So the Enterprise desktop is one key market. The other market is the emerging market first PC. For years the telcos have said that they want to be the company that actually delivers personal computing to you and that the phone is going to be your personal computer. Well, here at MWC we actually have the phone being a personal computer and that's different to having a smartphone. That's like having a real PC. So imagine a wealthy family in India. They may not have very good legacy copper telephony so they don't have a very fast internet connection and they may not have any prior history with Windows and with PCs. This is a way for everybody in the family to have a slightly more expensive phone which can be used as a PC just using the television and a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. So with very low friction, with very low additional requirements, some very beautiful computing experiences can be had for somebody who's just getting their first PC in an emerging market environment or someone who's working inside a managed enterprise. So we have folk from very large organizations, military organizations, government institutions and so on who care about security, who care about manageability. Very excited about this on the enterprise side and we have telcos who want to deliver that first PC to the next billion users. Very excited about it in the emerging markets. You have achieved a lot at Asian age. You have been to space and seen the world from up there that these small petty shoes doesn't matter if you look at the bigger grand picture. Then you also found it one of the most popular open source projects. So the question is now what's next as an individual or as a professional? Well there's so much yet to be explored and discovered with Ubuntu but I haven't really put any energy or time into thinking about other things. I think that in life we should pick a few things that are really meaningful for us that speak to our age and our interests and our energy levels and our skills and we should really just do those and be great at them and I don't yet think that I'm great at Ubuntu. I make lots of mistakes. I learn a lot as the leader of a big community, an open community and yes I'm proud of everything that we've achieved but I think there's still a great deal to be done. Ubuntu will be certified for the first time for enterprise IT use on the server this year and that's an incredible step for us. That takes us from a pioneer from being only a community distribution an expression of the will of the free software community to being something that can be used in settings where security is important where reliability is important, where business is at risk and I think that's an important step for our community as well to give people the ability to participate directly in a first tier world-class enterprise Linux platform that is of commercial grade. That's never existed before. To be an open platform where you've got company and community working together. So us moving into the commercial space together with our community growing the free Ubuntu desktop, growing the free Ubuntu server, growing Ubuntu in the cloud there's an enormous amount to be discovered there and I haven't run out of race track yet by any means. Will you buy a ticket to Mars if available and become Mars Shuttle World? I'd love to see deeper into the solar system than I've been privileged to see so far but for now Ubuntu keeps my feet on the ground and my head in the clouds.