 Okay, we're back with Brian Prophet. So what we were saying is, what? I think I was saying that I understand the idea is to make it compatible with a tablet and so forth, touch screens and all that. That's cool. But on my desktop, it seems very cumbersome, the great big giant icons and I couldn't get to where I wanted to go. I'm so used to all the menus and the functionality of the desktop. You've got iPhone and Android mobile operating systems and interfaces, but they don't actually try to put that on a desktop. Are the two things compatible or really should they have two different versions? Well, we'll have to see. If you really want to look at a real world example of how that's going to work, then probably the most current example that you would have would be looking at a Mac and looking at the current version of Mac OS X because there you're starting to see sort of a blend of the old interface and the new interface. So you have on one side the traditional windows and menus and toolbars and things like that. And then you're starting to see sort of what has the term has been coined as the appification interface where everything is a single icon app that fills up the screen. So you're starting to see a blend there and in Ubuntu land, I really think that Unity is starting to head in that direction. It's not remotely there yet, but I think it's coming to that point and we'll get there soon. When it first came out in this last version, which was roughly six months ago, when was it April, I guess? One of the first things when we finally did install it, we don't jump and install the new version right away anymore. We always wait a couple of months, we've learned it, but when we finally did install it, it was baffling because I still don't know how to do it. You start typing, you can start typing if you want Skype, SKY, P, boom, there it is, but there were things I wanted to find and I couldn't find them and I noticed that in the old interface, I can remember physically where the button is. I know it's under services administration and it's about this far down and I don't even have to remember the name of it, but I know where it is in my mind, but if I have to actually know the name and then type it into the keyboard, that doesn't seem like an advantage to me, it doesn't seem more efficient. To me, Mac OS X and iPhone is a great example, they started out completely different, one is optimized for the phone and one is optimized for the desktop and it makes sense to borrow from each other for things that make sense, of course, but only if it makes sense, but you don't try to put a car dashboard on a bicycle and vice versa, it seems like they're different and they should only borrow from each other when it really makes sense to do that. Right. Well, and I think what you've hit upon is one of the key points of debate because we have basically had a generation of users, you know, since the 90s basically, who have done nothing but use the quote traditional windows and menu oriented interface on their computers, but, well, I've got a side point to that, too. So you've had that, now suddenly we're transitioning to this whole tablet and phone thing and I think, you know, the iPhone really taught us, hey, you can type without a physical keyboard, you can interface with a device on, you know, its screen, the iPad sort of expanded that, now all the Android tablets are doing that and, you know, the Amazon Kindle fire. So you're seeing that in the mobile world and now you're looking back at the desktop environment and I think this is where people tend to split because I look at this and I see the desktop environment as it stands, the traditional one that we see in Genome 2 and also, you know, over in KDE, those are not necessarily the most intuitive interfaces for people who have never worked in a business environment or never really been exposed to computers. I mean, the classic meme that we have for new people using Ubuntu or any other form of Linux is, you know, can my grandmother use it? Right. Well, not only do they have to get used to the typing and the mouse and everything like that, but even the basic core desktop interface itself is not necessarily intuitive to them. That comes from the business world, file cabinets and folders and things like that. You know, we get that, we see that in the business world every day. Not everybody's exposed to that. So that's even more of a hurdle. So there is something to be said, I think, for making the interface simpler. And I think that's what Ubuntu is trying to do. I think the problem is you have old hacks like me who are running around who remember when you could customize everything, you know, even almost down to the pixel level and now we can't do that anymore. And I think we're sort of chafing about that. I think that you're, yeah, I know. And this seems to be a real universal debate, I guess, or issue, because I can see the same thing happening with iPhone, the same thing happening for Android. It's not only not only customization, although that's, you know, a big thing. But when you are a skilled, you know, person with technology, even, I mean, you don't have to be an Android developer, but simply like you downloaded something and you want to know where it is. I don't know where it is. There's no file manager built in. I don't know where the file is. Something's taking up my whole SD card. And I don't know how I got to find some third party app to even be able to begin to find it. That's not user friendly, even for somebody technical. There's there's both angles of it. So, I mean, I, I understand the idea that, you know, sort of protecting the newbie user that, OK, the app has its own data and you don't need it. I downloaded this stuff and you don't need to know where it is. You just know when you go in the app that it's there. But sometimes it really is important to know where something is stored, especially when the apps are not full proof. So you uninstall the app, but it left all this file structure and data or something sometimes. Yeah. And really, you that is probably depending on who you got to the number one or number two problem with Unity as well, that whole fighting applications thing, we really did get used to things being hooked to expanding cascading menus. And now, as you say, you have to sort of type it. And, you know, if hopefully you've got the name right, and it comes up and then boom, there it is. And then unfortunately, it's not terribly easy to actually stick the app icon on the Unity toolbar. Yeah, that's another thing. It's very it used to be in the old Nome setup. See, this is the other thing, too. If I want to teach my my grandmother to use this, first, I need to know how to use it. And I didn't really invest enough time to figure it out. It's not it's not easy for me to figure out how to use it. I mean, to me, my test is if I can figure it out without looking it up, then you know, that's cool. But if I have to actually do some research and look it up, I really have to decide, is this worth my investment of time? And so the first thing we googled was how to turn that off. You know, so now we know there's a hidden setting, you just hit a check mark and boom, Unity is gone. And everybody's happy we're back to the old way and you can do that. So my thing, here's an idea, I'll just throw this out there. I think if they're going to stick with Unity, there should be a great big on off button like a toggle red, blue, or whatever blue, green, you click it and you've got Unity, you click it again and you've got the old style so that, you know, if for two different types of users or for two different types of platforms, like if I'm going to run this on a tablet, then maybe I want to always leave Unity on. If I'm going to use it on a desktop and I really like the other style, because obviously they're including both apparently right now they're including both because you can check mark, turn it off and you're back in classic Ubuntu. So they're delivering both anyway. Why not make it really easy to switch between one another? And they may keep doing that, but at some point Canonical may not want to throw the resources there and do that. And now, and that's really some, that's we're getting in the crystal ball territory at this point because it's difficult to say if or when they would actually split or I'm sorry, keep, you know, supporting both because at the end of the day Canonical's commercial entity and they've got to make, you know, money and, and, you know, use their resources wisely. I would prefer they do it your the way you suggest the way that they're doing now. I hope they keep doing that. But then they also have to understand that a lot of the people who are using Ubuntu, the power users will probably vote with their feet and just either make those changes on their own, whether or not they, you know, Ubuntu officially supports it or not, or they'll vote with their feet and, you know, walk off and go to some other distribution. Right. So they have that too. Speaking of Canonical being a business, it is a business and its, you know, business model is providing support and services and training and all those kinds of things, especially to corporations that need their, you know, the need consulting and services and training and so on. So I wonder how their customers, how their corporate customers are receiving unity as a desktop interface. I'm not. Well, I don't know. I mean, I haven't talked to any corporate people who are using it on the desktop. I know that a lot of, I know that a lot of Ubuntu's business is, you know, any enterprise and it's, you know, really on the server level, there's been a lot, there's been a lot more movement in the cloud arena. But as far as their desktop, you know, a lot of them might be still using the LTS additions, you know, the corporate users. And the LTS, if I'm correct, has not shipped it over to Unity yet. No, because it only comes out. Well, LTS is only, what, like every five years. So it hasn't, it's not on the schedule for that yet. Yeah, the next one's coming up in April of 2012. That will be an LTS addition. Ubuntu 12.04. So that may be the first time we actually see real corporate uptake for the Unity interface. And I'm not saying there hasn't been a, you know, corporate uptake now. I just, I think that we'll see it in more numbers. But this sort of plays on my own background, because I used, once upon a time, it used to be a configuration manager working in a development shop. And I also got tasked with hardware and deployment configuration management. And one of the things that I've always appreciated about any form of Linux is the ability to lock things down and keep users from installing software that they really shouldn't be installing, that they bring in from home and keep interfaces relatively uniform. That seems like a very draconian thing to do from a creativity standpoint. I, you know, don't like it. But from a business standpoint, there's, there's, there's a lot to be said for that level of efficiency. Sometimes it's important, yeah. Right. So Unity may answer, you know, a lot of those questions if it can get some of these kinks worked out. Because I think some of the things that you pointed out earlier in this discussion about it's hard to find apps. It's hard, you know, there's, there just, there's some gaps there that need to be addressed. This is more than just, you know, we don't think this is pretty, or we don't like the color scheme. This is, these are actually real usability things that I believe they have to address. Yeah, really, like they're gonna have to train me on how to use it first before I can teach anybody. The, if you're, I tell you what, if you're in the audience and you're listening, if you're a corporate user, whether you've made use of canonicals, consulting services or not, send us an email to feedback at onlyonetv.com. It's all spelled out. Feedback at onlyonetv.com. Or you can also send an SMS text message if it's short enough to 646-580-0099 and let us know what is your take on this, on the corporate uptake of Unity. Is it gonna be, is it gonna fly on the corporate desktop? So, the, so how do you do that, by the way? If you decide to use Unity, I mean, seriously, I played with it for like five minutes, maybe 10. And I said, Mani, get this off of here. I want, I want my menus back. And what I used to do, by the way, all you used to do is on the launcher, you just right click and say, add the launcher panel. And see, I don't necessarily want Firefox there. I don't necessarily want the ones they have. You know, I might prefer Chromium. So I would put Chromium, whatever I wanted them to use, I'd put Chromium and then Chrome and then Firefox or whatever. And, and then Skype and things that are not necessarily installed, pre-installed and things. And I would customize that panel and sort of recreate their icons. Of course, they're smaller, but I cross the top of the panel. And I would do that custom configuration, which took two seconds, you know, and just this is what I want you to use. These buttons are right here at the top. And for a novice user, they just know they go to this button, this button, this button. It's really just as simple. But I still have my dropdown menus and I knew how to navigate. I hope and pray that Canonical, being in the support business, you almost have a natural incentive. And I hope this isn't the case. But like Microsoft in the old days, we used to say, the M-A-B-F-N-A-R, I forgot how you pronounce it, but an acronym that said the new version of Windows, again, moved all the buttons around for no apparent reason. It doesn't do anything more or better. They just moved all the buttons around and called them different things for no apparent reason, apparently because they were doing so much corporate training, that they would have to sell all this new corporate training on the new version of Windows. When nothing really changed, all they did was rename things and move the buttons around. You know what I mean? There's almost an incentive to make it more difficult if you're training people. Sure. And Canonical has their own training division as well, but I hesitate to put that on them. I mean, having met a lot of the people on the development team and even on the corporate side, I'm not really convinced that that's what they're doing, that they're changing things for changes sake. I think that there, you know, I think one of the things that we, a lot of pundits in the industry are slowly starting to clue in on and I have to admit it took me a lot of clue in on this, is that Mark Shuttleworth is playing a very long game here. And he, we did think that he was making these changes for no apparent reason. I mean, you're changing where the buttons are, the basic interface, all these color changes, you know, things like that. And I think for a time we all initially thought that he was just changing things just to shake things up. But now I'm really more convinced that he had this in mind pretty much all along. He and this might have been the only direction he could have taken Canonical. You have red hat in the picture and red hat just completely dominates in the enterprise arena on the server side and quite a bit on the enterprise desktop side. Sousa was in there to until Novel basically, you know, blew up. And then we have attached mate, but Sousa's got some skills. Sousa is really good in the development and the appliance arena. Now that's going to be their niche. So Canonical had to find an edge. This may have been it and this may have been the direction that they were heading the entire time. So, you know, I kind of hesitate to put that on them that they were changing things. This is sort of shake things up. Yeah, people have enough trouble with adopting Linux anyway. I can't believe Canonical would shoot themselves in the foot and make it harder to adopt. Yeah, I agree with you. I don't think they would do that, at least not now. I mean, I don't I don't think they would do that until they get to be as big as Microsoft. Then there's an incentive and hopefully that doesn't happen. But they're truly evil. Then we'll be looking for another another distribution. So I but I do like the idea, my idea of a tablet mode, instead of calling it, you know, unity versus GNOME, call it tablet mode or desktop mode, just a little toggle on off tablet mode desktop mode and have both. It seems like they've already got the GNOME interface down pad. It works great. And unity is there. So and if they're distributing both, then how much how much maintenance overhead, you know, would it take for them just to have a quick on off thing that you could just select, you could go back and forth, you can even set it in in one mode for your spouse and then the other mode for you. I think to me, it makes a lot of sense. And they may very well do that. It's really, I think that's a great idea. I just I always hesitate because I just don't know what the resources are going to be. You have to support two different methods. When you do notification, anything that's going to be different, you're going to have to support it both ways and stuff. Right. Now, if you do it anyway, for a tablet, I mean, you're going to touch screen, you can't do you can't have it do both. You know what I mean? Even Mac OS X doesn't support touchscreen interface, does it? Not yet. I think they're talking about it. Okay. So now the other thing is we're talking about it being ideal and optimized for tablets. What about smartphones? I've heard talk about an Ubuntu version for phones. Is unity that or is it something completely different? I think unity is a precursor for both. I think unity is going to be the prototype model for Ubuntu on a phone or an Ubuntu on a tablet and Ubuntu on wherever else they decide to put it. Maybe they'll get in good with, you know, a device manufacturer and have an interface that sits on like a set top box like the Roku box, not necessarily Roku, but, you know, something along those lines. I think I think that they would really appreciate having that kind of flexibility to put it, you know, on any one of those platforms. So the short answer to your question is, yeah, I can see unity being customized and, you know, tweaked up for a phone as well, because if they can keep it very pure and very, you know, a clean version of Linux, I think what we may end up seeing is a lot of sharing in between applications between the Android environment and then the Ubuntu and Ubuntu mobile environment. I think that is a possibility like an Android compatibility layer for Ubuntu or something. That would be cool. Exactly. So you can run Android apps on an Ubuntu smartphone. That would be so cool. Right. And if you want to get an idea of what that future might look at, keep an eye on the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, which is Android, although a very heavily customized version of Android, and see if they can achieve real app compatibility from pure Android over to the Amazon Kindle Fire. If that happens, you may see a model for what canonical might be trying to do. Well, you're saying Amazon Kindle Fire is running, well, it's running a customized version of the pure Android. Exactly. So it's still Android, but it's very customized. So the apps, you know, I haven't read too much of the details. It's my understanding that porting from pure Android to the Amazon's version of Android is not very hard. I think, you know, but I think it would serve as a potential model or use case for, you know, a later sharing between Ubuntu and Android applications, because that is more than the interface itself. You can build the prettiest interface you want. If you don't have the applications, you're in trouble. That's what went wrong with WebOS, because WebOS is a great platform. Yeah. But there are no apps. Yeah. You know, the same thing with, oh, I'm completely blank now. I've got to pull a Rick Perry. But you're going to say really? But you know, if you don't have applications, then you've got a serious problem. Sure. You got a business with no customers. Exactly. That's no good. Yeah. Okay. I see. So but and it also, it seems like it's Amazon that has the Kindle Fire you're talking about. Amazon is going to have a very large incentive to make those compatible, to not give nightmare headaches to the app developers, because if the app developer has to do lots of customization to make it work, they might not do it, and then they're not going to have that app base and they're going to lose the value. Right. So, you know, they've got the they've got the Android kernel. So that's going to make things easy. And I think that, you know, yeah, you're right, they're going to make that really easy to pull applications from one environment over to the other, especially if the Kindle does take off as an entry level tablet in the market. It's coming in in a very low price point compared to, you know, all the other tablets that are out there or were out there as the case may be. So this has the potential of really selling a lot of units. And if that happens, developers will be very interested in it because they will want to get, you know, all those eyeballs and all that cash revenue coming in their way. And that Amazon fire is pretty cheap, isn't it? Is that that? Yeah, it's it's going for $199. Yeah. I saw an Android tablet at the drugstore the other day behind the counter. How much was it? $120 or $129 or something like that? Some generic Chinese brand I never heard of. Right. Behind the drugstore, like at CVS or one of these and I was like, what? Can I see that? She's like, what? And they never heard of it. You know, but I just wanted to read the box and I was like, wow, the specs were pretty impressive. And I was but anyway, I didn't buy it. But yeah, so Amazon sent me one of those fires so I can review it and play with it. And that actually is that's a completely different topic. But that's why devices like that are why Android would not open source version 3.0 honeycomb because the manufacturers like you were talking about were taking, you know, the two dot series from, you know, the gingerbread version of Android slapping it on tablets where it really had no business being and calling it done. And then people were complaining about it because it was really just a hack job. It was like giving Android a bad name. Exactly. Well, now, okay, speaking of that, because I'm glad you there's a perfect segue to my when I was going to ask you next and as is are the current versions of Android completely open source, are they completely licensed that Canonical could actually take it and include it in an Ubuntu? Well, yeah, but I don't know if that would that would have to be the case. I mean, the problems are going on with Android right now in terms of how does it fit in the open source arena is, you know, there are two types of licenses, really. There there are copy left licenses like the GPL, which basically say you're going to open source everything and you have to keep it open source if you make changes as opposed to licenses like BSD and Apache, which are not copy left and Android is licensed under the Apache software license. They say you don't have to open your code. If you do open your code, this is what you have to do. OK, but, you know, this is the way you're going to do it, but you don't have to open your code. This is one of those things that people really kind of, you know, got upset about with Android until, you know, you go back and read it and say, uh, no, they actually don't have to do that. So it's open. But not only a canonical could use it and canonical could, you know, do whatever they wanted to do with it. I don't really think that they need to do that because I think it would just be a straightforward port for Android developers and say, OK, all I have to do is recompile my application in a certain way, and it will be ready to run on an Ubuntu phone because the Ubuntu phone OS would be would just maintain compatibility is all basically. I mean, there's going to be differences, especially really down in the low system levels and I don't want to get very technical power management system calls things are going to be different. I mean, Android is not Linux. I mean, it used to be, but it's, you know, it's it's I wouldn't say fork, but it's kind of wide, wider than it should be. And that's OK. But, you know, it's close enough that I think you could kind of port apps from one environment to the other, at least that may be what canonical is thinking. OK, now, speaking of that, with Ubuntu, the phone OS, are there drivers that exist for all the new phone hardware? Like, it seems to me like you'd have to have a separate driver for every kind of, you know, circuitry and interface and microphone and speaker and camera. And I mean, is it going to be a driver issue, a shortage of drivers or would it be able to use Android's drivers for those? Actually, that's a really good question. And I'm not really 100% of the answer. However, I keep coming back to projects like Mego, which, by the way, was what I blanked on earlier when I have my Rick Perry moment. Oh, yeah, because it really is a pretty interface, too. And, you know, Mego and now Tizen, which is what it's called. Now, those are that's a pure rep. You know, Tizen is going to be a pure Linux-based mobile platform. It will be a reference platform, which means you may not actually see a device with Tizen running on it, but it will Tizen will be the prototype for devices to come. And Tizen and similar projects may actually be the bridge that you're talking about in terms of making sure that, you know, the drivers and all the different hardware issues are settled. How do you spell Tizen? I'm sorry. How do you spell Tizen? T-I-Z-E-N. T-I-Z-E-N. I was Googling it while you were talking. OK. Yeah. OK. So this is a new project. It is. It's basically Mego was basically, you know, under the auspices of Nokia. It's still being stewarded by the Linux Foundation, who is actually my former employer. And so after Nokia made their deal with Microsoft, Mego sort of, you know, basically lost a lot of its corporate support within Nokia. But it has a huge amount of support within the community that the Linux Foundation was still, you know, working on it. And so they really had, you know, it's still going. So Mego sort of is transitioning now into Tizen. And Mego is a really sweet interface. But like WebOS, there aren't a lot of apps with it. So if we can solve that problem and maybe we may have to share with Android or maybe somehow we'll start developing apps on a, quote, pure Linux software platform. You know, you were talking about TV boxes earlier and one of my favorite our favorite one so far is Boxy, B-O-X-E-E box. The Boxy box actually is a device that D-Link made specifically for it. But Boxy has a version available for Ubuntu, which we played around with before. But we actually got ourselves a Boxy box that is, like I said, made by D-Link. And it's just basically a PC in there that has, you know, like a flash, memory, whatever. And it just turns on and has a really cool remote control. And literally you plug the internet into one port and you plug the HDTV into the other. And you can also plug in hard drives to it or whatever you want and just use this really cool remote control. Basically, the whole box is worth it just for the remote control. But you end up with the PC and the whole shebang. So we love that. And actually Boxy runs on Ubuntu already. And I believe it's completely open source. So it seems like maybe since all that development's already been done, Ubuntu could just, you know, incorporate Boxy in its features and call it Ubuntu for TV, you know? Something like that. I don't know if that's even necessary, but one of the reasons I like Boxy Box, I prefer it over Roku and all that is because to my knowledge, most of those others like Google TV, I'm not sure about Google TV, but Apple TV for sure, and in Roku last time I checked, you could not play local content. Like I want to plug in a terabyte hard drive and watch my own stuff that I have. And I couldn't even do that. I thought, well, what's the point of that? That's like 90% of what I would watch, you know, is my own content that I have, my own library of things, movies or whatever. And I know that you can do that on Boxy Box. That's what we do most of the time. I like it better because streaming is okay, but, you know, especially for a 30 minute show, but for something that's like a movie length, it's no good because if anything chokes up when you're like two thirds of the way through the movie, ah, and some of those apps, they don't let you scroll properly and it gets all messed up when you're streaming. I hate that. So I prefer just to download the content, put it on my hard drive and watch it when I have a chance and just basically watch it locally so that we can skip forward and backward just like it's a DVR. Right. So anyway, but the point of that was that Boxy, Boxy is, to my understanding, is open source software and I know for sure it runs on Ubuntu, so it's, and it's already done. It works really, really well. It seems like that would be a cool way to, if Canonical implemented that within Ubuntu. I don't know. But then again, they're back to supporting many different versions of their platform, but is Unity set up for touchscreen already? I believe they are incorporating that into the environment. I know that they've been working on it. I'm not sure how successful they've been. I've not really played with that on a touchscreen device, but I do remember reading about a year ago at least that they would be working on a touchscreen environment. So they're going in that direction and you're absolutely right about the set top situation. It's been done and that's certainly a path that Canonical could follow with Ubuntu, if they wanted to. It seems like, for me, Boxy owns that set top box area arena, or at least, and it's contenders, or competitors, and then for the tablets, I mean, does Ubuntu have a chance in competing against Android at this point? Now see, that is the $64,000 question, because will they really be able to do this? This is a thing that nobody's really sure about, because you're right, there are already good players in the set top field. There are already good players in the in-vehicle infotainment devices that I know ties and me go before it, we're trying to get into, so you have that. And then obviously we have really good performers in the mobile smartphone and tablet environments. So that is really going to be the question. And I really have no answer. I think that there's room, I think that you see the success, however marginally, of WebOS as an interface, because it got a lot of critical acclaim. I think you will look at that and I think you could actually say, yeah, there is room there, but for me, and I know I'm biased here, it's all going to come down to the apps. If there are no apps on any of these platforms, it's just not going to work. Right, and even if there are apps, I mean, well, I guess if you had enough apps, then that'll kind of guarantee its success. Right, and nobody, and it's such a, I always call this the magical pixie dust formula because nobody really knows. Is it a certain number of applications? Is it the right kind of applications? I had before WebOS was shut down by HP and this was literally like three weeks before this and I was out at OSCON, I talked to some people from Hewlett Packard, they were showing me the WebOS, and they were great people, but one of them said to me something just scared the heck out of me, which was, they were like really excited that they had 60, that's six and a zero tablet ready applications, and they were excited about that. And I looked at them and I said, really, just 60? I mean, that wasn't really enough. But their argument was, well, this is quality over quantity because these are tablet ready, they're expandable, they fill the whole screen, they take advantage of the entire interface as opposed to Android, which really, you know, even with the Zoom doesn't really have tablet ready applications. So that was their marketing push. Well, there is a point, they have a point. I mean, how many apps did the iPad have on the first generation when it first launched? I wonder. A bazillion, I don't know. I mean, seriously, it had to be close to, right when it first came out, I think that there were probably at least a couple of hundred that were coded in the universal model, which is what they call applications that can sit on an iPhone and an iPad and actually look good on an iPad. So I know it was somewhere in the hundreds. And it's behind there too. But we'll have to see how Ubuntu plays this. I mean, they may be perfectly content with building really good interface devices. They could come in, Mark Shuttleworth is a very smart person and he's got a lot of smart people working for him. I really think that they could surprise us and start putting Linux on devices we haven't even thought of yet. Try corporate kiosks or something like that or, you know. It probably already is. I mean, Linux is on a lot of devices. People have no idea. Every time they use Google search, they're using Linux. I mean, everything at Google is pretty much run on Linux. And I mean, even crazy things like Tivo and who knows, the elevator you ride it might be riding on Linux. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. So think about, and that actually may give us a clue of what's going on here because if you really look at that and see all the places where Linux is running now now some of that is gonna be really embedded Linux. And Ubuntu is not gonna fit in that. But by the same token, what if they could scale it down to where it could? What if you could see Ubuntu being sold to like the Otis elevator company and suddenly Ubuntu is the interface on those big fancy elevator screens that you have out there in the big city, you know? Or something like that. And suddenly canonical is making money hand over fist putting the Ubuntu operating system and based on a whatever interface they come up with in places that we couldn't even imagine that Windows is not going to go, that Mac will never go. So there's some a lot of room to play around there. I think there's a couple of several factors. One, when you talk about the number of applications I think that's probably at least half of it. If you're gonna only have 60 or 100 applications it does depend I think on which 60 apps. I mean if you had all the 60 most popular apps well it would be a good start. But the number of apps is essential. And the other thing is the distribution channel, the fact, the marketing and distribution. If you're spending $100 million a year on TV commercials or whatever Apple spends or Microsoft spends and there's a retail third party OEM manufacturers that are supplying that product already on it or in Apple's case it's completely tied to the hardware. You got a distribution channel. The other thing is that Canonical is not selling Ubuntu. Obviously it's open source. So they're not gonna make any money selling it to anybody because they're not charging anything. So their model is support. Also one other thing is that I think that any enterprise whatever it is they can be okay or passable in many things, many areas. They can be really good in a few or but they can only be great in one. You know what I mean? To be the best, I think that the company really has to focus on one thing and you can't really be the best on every platform. I'm not sure. I haven't seen that yet. Have we seen that yet? Apple's I guess closest with the iPhone and the, but now iPhone's losing sales to Android like crazy. Right. And so yeah, that division of resources, that division of labor is something that I've pointed out and a lot of my colleagues have pointed out as something that really could be a real problem for Canonical. They need to find one thing and do it very well. And they were at one point, the number one Linux desktop distribution. Now, depending on who you ask, that may not be the case. And, but then again, depending on who you ask, it may not even matter because they may be ready to move on to something else. I honestly don't know. I think that Ubuntu is a solid desktop platform. I would hate for it to lose a lot of the focus and a lot of the innovation. I don't think people give Canonical a lot of credit. They put in a lot of real work on these interfaces and the package delivery systems and whatnot. So they've really made it possible for a lot of people in the IT industry to consider any form of Linux as a real viable desktop alternative compared to Windows and Mac. So, I think that they really could keep doing what they're doing. I agree with you. It doesn't seem like they're gonna be able to keep this multi-focused thing going for very much longer. And we may actually see a decision somewhere. Or Mark Shuttleworth may just keep hitting every target he could possibly do until he's done. Well, Mark, since you're watching this, call me up or email me and we'll have you on the show and you can explain exactly what you're thinking. But I wanna ask you, we've talked about the desktop. We've talked about phones, TV boxes, tablets, all different form factors, even embedded in elevators and other things. Okay, one thing we haven't touched on is seems to be the hottest thing of all. And that's these apps in the cloud, cloud-based things. We've got Chrome, what is it called? Chromebook, the idea of, which is basically a version of Linux that's tied down to web apps. Are we losing, I read, I don't know if it was yours or somebody blogged recently, an article about, is Ubuntu losing development energy and resources on desktop apps as people are focusing more on web apps? Is that the direction we're headed for all this? But yeah, and actually that was me. Who are you, okay. And basically it was really not targeting Ubuntu as, although I think I threw them as an example, but yeah, desktop Linux in general. It's been a long time coming that, and no secret that Google and Amazon and a lot of the larger content players would really prefer that we all did our computing out in the cloud. There are real advantages to that. I mean, you can get a lot more work done. Your data is transportable. If I pull up my phone, I can pull my email up, the same email on my phone when I'm in, visiting my in-laws in Minnesota, versus right here on my Linux desktop. So, and it can be the exact same thing. So there's a lot of really good reasons why we should be using the cloud. And I'm beginning to think that with all the focus that we see in Ubuntu on the interface, and how does it look? And oh, by the way, Ubuntu is a really big player out in the Amazon web services. I mean, Amazon web services runs on Red Hat Linux, but customers, when they go out and they actually buy cloud instances of servers, the number one distribution that they're using is Ubuntu. Really? Yeah. On the servers? On the servers. I would thought you were gonna say Red Hat. I thought Red Hat dominated that area. No, the actual physical machines that Amazon uses runs Red Hat. They run Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But when you go out to, I look at the stats for what platforms are selling where Ubuntu is the one that pretty much is the one to beat. What do you mean? You're saying that Amazon, for its server side services, they're running Ubuntu server? No, they're running, well, no. For their servers, they're running Red Hat. So what I'm saying is, if you and I were to go to Amazon web services, and we wanna put our website, for instance, out on AWS, okay? We have a choice when we go out there and they will ask you, well, what kind of server do you want to run? Do you want to run a Windows server? Do you want to run a Red Hat server? Do you want to run a Ubuntu server? And at that point, people are choosing Ubuntu more than any other option. Oh, so it's not necessarily Amazon, it's the users who are picking Ubuntu. Right, all Amazon's are. And I wonder if that has to do with their familiarity, they're already familiar with Ubuntu on the desktop, so maybe they're already familiar with Ubuntu server. Is it easier to use or something? I think so, I think Canonical's also done a pretty fair job marketing their presence in the cloud. I think that they, there are some, I think there are some things about Ubuntu server that makes it more friendly to work in a cloud environment. Certainly, I see Ubuntu being used in an appliance situation. I know I mentioned earlier that Sousa is very strong in the appliance space as far as that goes, but if you look at companies like Bitnami, where they basically, you can just get a fully configured stack that will run Ubuntu and then WordPress on top of that, and you can just have that ready to go in a virtual machine inside of 10 minutes. And again, Ubuntu is the platform of choice in situations like that. That's great. Yeah, I love, obviously I love Ubuntu, everybody. I mean, pretty much every machine here and our whole company is running Ubuntu except for two. We have one that we have absolutely machine critical software that was developed for Mac and we have to have a Mac Pro for that. And we have another one that is what you're using right now, Skype. Skype group calling pretty much requires us to use Windows for the way we have it set up. So we have one machine for Windows, one Mac, everything else is Ubuntu across the board. We have a dual boot so that they can come up into Windows, but we pretty much never use Windows around here or Mac except for that. So I love Ubuntu and I love the, you know, the software is obviously free open source and we're very happy with that and with our philosophy of open source, free culture and all that. And it's also once you know, it's like anything else, once you know it, once you learn how to customize it and set it up the way you want, it's really a no brainer to set it up. One, one, my guess, my two complaints would be, if they were complaints would be that sometimes you upgrade to a new version and it breaks things, which is really frustrating no matter what, I mean, commercial products do the same thing. You upgrade and now that video card doesn't work anymore and just the, you know, like one time I actually went back to the LTE version because I thought, well, that will work for sure. That one didn't either. So I had to go back because I went back to versions, back to the LTE to be safe, didn't work. I had to go back to one version behind, which was the one after the latest LTE, the video card worked, but then the current one, it didn't. And so anyway, these are, you know, I'm sure things like this are a pain. You know, everybody knows that in IT but it's not the kind of thing that you're, you know, your sister-in-law, your mother, your grandmother wants to deal with. But, you know, that's true of anything in IT. But, so there's that. I hate it when things break with a new version. The other thing that is unity is really, it's gotta be, if they're gonna make it easy to use, it has to actually be easy to use. It has to be easy to decide what buttons are gonna show up there. And, you know, I would, even if they drop GNOME and they go to unity, there at least should be some sort of a button to give us a dropdown menu interface as well as an option. Doesn't seem like it's that complex to have a menu system, especially since they already have it now. You know, I don't know, but if they're not gonna, like if they're gonna drop one, they should at least merge some of the features of both so that we could have that, you know, familiar interface. I'm not sure that the tablet style interface is appropriate on a desktop and vice versa. Yeah. You know, have you ever been on a tablet or a phone and you try and actually use a dropdown menu? It's like, with your finger or your fat thumb, you know, it's like, it's just not practical. And the opposite is true too. I mean, to have great big giant icons on your desktop seems a little, and then no menu seems a little weird. Right. And I think that above all, above any other, you know, platform, certainly not Windows, certainly not Mac, Linux can afford companies like Canonical to really explore and try new things. Yeah. We have, it has a very highly technical data user base. For the most part, we are very informed about what's going on. I mean, what other user base would be able to give you, you know, the full and complete code error report, you know, if something crashes. Right. Exactly. Something like that. I think that gives you a little bit more freedom to experiment. I think we saw the same thing a few years ago when the KDE project implemented KDE 4. And they said, you know, hey, KDE 4, guys, this is really a test version. And even though they warned everybody, people still complained about KDE 4. And it's deja vu all over again for me because I'm hearing the same complaints about Unity. Yeah. People are very vocal. They don't hide how they feel. And the other thing though that's good is that like you said, they're so technical that even if there were a quote unquote big blunder, if Canonical made a big blunder, within days the user community would be posting the work around. Here's how you fix that. Like for example, the how to turn off Unity thing. I mean, I had to Google it and I thought, oh, it's not cool that it's buried under two or three different menu levels and it's not something I could easily tell someone over the phone, well, depending on how technical they are. But I was so happy that I knew how to turn off that check mark or whatever, select classic Ubuntu or whatever, and boom, it's right back to where I want it to go. So they're able to come up with a work around themselves very quickly, which is very useful. Try calling Microsoft. One time I called Microsoft for support. What a joke. This was years ago, but I got somebody, I don't know whether it was Philippines or India probably and this guy, after being on hold for like 50 minutes, I finally got through and I was desperate. You have to be desperate to call them for support. But anyway, I actually got a hold of the guy and he's like, thank you, sir, thank you, sir, thank you very much, sir. Now, can you please spell this word Windows? And I'm like, is this Microsoft? He wanted me to spell the word Windows because he didn't know that word. That's the kind of support you can get from, I mean, but the point, I mean, even though canonical, and I mean Ubuntu is open source and there's no commercial support unless you buy it, of course, you still get better support because you go to the community forum and you ask a question and it's probably already been answered or people actually do answer it pretty well. I've had really good success, pretty much just Googling things. You can just Google. If you have, very, very, very unlikely that you're the first person who's had this problem. Well. Exactly, yeah, and that's one of the real benefits of working with the open source community. The trick is, and this is what I get concerned about with new users, is do they know the right question to ask? You know. Right, yeah, exactly. I know that's, I had a friend of mine called and said, my calendar's gone. It's just, it's just not there. I didn't delete it. I don't know what happened, you know, and whatever, just silly things that they don't even know what it's called. They may not use the right terminology and they won't even know what to Google. They don't even think to Google in the first place, but then if you put in the wrong search term, we all know you're not gonna get where you wanna go. So, yeah, I mean, it's great if you're technical but if you're supporting other people, then that's why they call you. Well, thank you so much, Brian. Really, we've gotta do this again on a regular basis so we can keep up with all the Ubuntu gossip and everything. And you guys, check out Brian's website. It's profit.com, right? No, profit.org. It's profit, by the way, with two Fs and two Ts, P-R-O-F-F-I-T-T.org, right? That's your main website. That's where you'll find pretty much information about anything that I'm writing. About you. And you're doing a lot of writing also for IT world, which is ITworld.com. Exactly. If you frequent ITworld.com, you'll see a lot of Brian's writings there too. Brian Prophet, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for, it was a pleasure to talk to you tonight. Let's do this again. All right. All right, buddy, take care. Thanks, everybody. That's the first edition of the Ubuntu show so hope you'll join us again. Click subscribe and all that jazz and check out OnlyOneTV.com. All spelled out O-N-L-Y-O-N-E-T-V.com. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.