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Canonical ends development of its phone to focus on cloud and IoT

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, long had aspirations to become a player in the mobile phone and tablet world, too. You can’t easily buy an Ubuntu-powered phone today (at least not in the U.S.), but over the years, a few have come and gone. As Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth announced today, however, the company will end its investment in the phone business.

In addition, it’s also going back to the GNOME desktop and dropping the development of its own Unity8 desktop environment, starting with the Ubuntu 18.04 release.

Instead, Canonical is going to focus on the cloud and IoT. “I’d like to emphasise our ongoing passion for, investment in, and commitment to, the Ubuntu desktop that millions rely on,” Shuttleworth writes. “We will continue to produce the most usable open source desktop in the world, to maintain the existing LTS releases, to work with our commercial partners to distribute that desktop, to support our corporate customers who rely on it, and to delight the millions of IoT and cloud developers who innovate on top of it.”

The majority of public and private clouds run on Linux, and many of them use Ubuntu (though there is also competes with RedHat and others, of course). Indeed, I don’t think I’ve been to a recent cloud-related conference that didn’t feature some kind of Canonical presence. While the company is best-known for its distribution, it makes its money from supporting large enterprise customers that want to run Ubuntu, OpenStack or containers (most often with the help of Kubernetes) in their data centers. That, to a very large degree, is where Canonical makes its money and while it doesn’t release any numbers, this is clearly a fast-growing and profitable business for it. Read more…