Canonical's cynical abuse of the crowd-funding model.
Tripping at the Edge
No-one in the open source community - unless they have been hiding under a very crowded proverbial rock - can have been unaware of the bluster and hot air that was the Ubuntu Edge campaign on Indiegogo. Of course, this was a campaign which was destined to "fail" from the start. (Actually it was anything but in terms of its underlying benefits. For Canonical it succeeded handsomely, but more of that in a moment.) A target of $32million, with the only tangible reward offered being an Edge for an escalating minimum contribution that started at $630. By the time it had reached $750 pledges had all but dried up. More than 50% of the funding pledges were made in the first 48 hours.
I say the campaign failed, and in the strict sense of Indiegogo's funding purpose, it did. But looking a little deeper than the veneer of what Canonical's loyal army will insist on terming an "ambitious" (which is taking ambition to vaulting heights it has never seen before) project goal, you see a much more cynical agenda. Taking as your premise that simple and obvious observation that the funding target was never going to be met, and from that that the powers behind it were perfectly well aware of this, what is left? What would Canonical, Ubuntu and Mark Shuttleworth gain, if successful funding is discarded as the objective? The answers are simple:
- Publicity.
Canonical got more grass-roots campaigning and press publicity out of this than a paid marketting department could ever achieve. Even Apple fanboi and gadgeteer Stephen Fry - luv 'im - was moved to agitate for them. And what is more they got lots of spinnable numbers and claims to headline-grabbing records out it too. Press release writers will be feeding off that trove of nonsense for years to come. (The most obvious is Shuttleworth's constantly regurgitated claims to have "raised" the largest crowd-funded amount ever are bogus, because the project will never see a bean. The simple truth is it did not reach its target, and all the pledges will eventually be refunded.) - Price point market research.
By slowly escalating the minimum contribution attracting the hypothetical Edge as a reward, Canonical generated a direct and accurate price/demand curve better founded than any a market research agency could ever hope to achieve. And they hit on their price, too - as demonstrated that once the pledge rate had plummeted after a few days, they set the contribution level to $695. - A huge mailing list.
More marketing assets - a huge list of people with a specified interest in an Ubuntu 'phone to follow up on at some later date. Never underestimate the value of simple personal contact data. Even now, they are already using that list for commiseration and self-congratulation.
The one thing that was never going to come out of it was a 'phone. Unfortunately, none of this surprises me. I pitched in my pledge on day 2, although I did so in the full and certain expectation that it was futile. It was a riskless proposition, and I was prepared to eat crow if my judgement and cynicism were proven wrong. They weren't.
I have seen the direction Canonical is heading with things. Ubuntu has gone from being a community driven operating system project built almost entirely on volunteer effort, to a corporate platform product heading for the utility electronics market, with decreasing room for community or technological contributors. The changes in atmosphere surrounding the project over the last two years, and the approach to the community has left a sour taste in the mouths of many of those who contributed to getting Ubuntu to where it was, and were then summarily told not to let the door hit them on the way out. (Shuttleworth's petulant response to criticism distilled to "it's our product, we take it where and how we want, and if you don't like it stop whinging - you are free to leave".) The Ubuntu project continues to welcome "contributors", but only provided they are only expecting to contribute to the mundane - testing, documentation, campaigning - and not have any say over direction or construction. Anyone now expecting to weild any influence is on a hiding to nothing. And anyone who genuinely expected the Edge to see the light of day from the Indiegogo campaign was either supremely naive or simply tripping.
