Mark Shuttleworth Considering Canonical IPO

http://www.zdnet.com/article/mark-shuttleworth-considering-canonical-ipo/

by testrun • 11 years ago

37 35 11 years ago

hueving• 11 years ago

I wonder if this is the type of IPO where the employees get nothing since it was always pitched as a company with no 'exit plan'.

JupiterMoon• 11 years ago

Why would employees get anything? They should be getting their salaries both before and after.

NateDad2• 11 years ago

I've heard that Mark has money put away in the event of an IPO to reward employees for their loyalty (based on seniority), but I have no way of verifying that.

chimeracoder• 11 years ago

It's somewhat amusing to see this right underneath the Dell headline on the HN frontpage about running Linux on your Dell. Dell recently went private again in an LBO after being public for 25 years, and now they're easily the most Linux-friendly large manufacturer of computers in the US.

IBM may have held that title for the Thinkpad at one point, but that's definitely becoming less and less true as Lenovo runs the Thinkpad line into the ground[0]

[0] Source: Typing this from my Thinkpad running Debian.

SamReidHughes3• 11 years ago

How has Lenovo made Thinkpads less Linux-friendly?

robertfw2• 11 years ago

Purely anecdotal but the driver support for wifi on my T540p has given me no end of problems

WizzleKake• 11 years ago

You can brick certain ThinkPads with BIOS older than 2.08 by installing Linux on them.

Not Linux-related, but the keyboard transition (happened between W520 and W530) was unfortunate and pissed a lot of people off.

I'm sure the new keyboard design has its merits, but the fact that they changed it over the objection of their most loyal users speaks volumes about the direction Lenovo is taking the ThinkPad brand.

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

I observed that as a private company Dell was much more willing to embrace alternate architectures from AMD and Linux as an OS. Which really makes you wonder doesn't it? How does being publicly traded make you so coercible? I get the executive team has compensation tied to share price kind of arguments but Dell seems have done much better post LBO. What can they do now that they couldn't do then? And why? Looking forward to that HBR article if it ever gets written.

tdicola• 11 years ago

Public companies have a fiduciary responsibility to show their shareholders growth every 4 months. Private companies can do absolutely anything as long as they're paying their bills and not breaking any laws.

caminante4• 11 years ago

According to Michael Dell's op-ed in the WSJ [1], two main benefits of going private are 1. longterm-planning => value + innovation and 2. activist shareholder avoidance.

Michael Dell also has a track record for anti-competitive practices. Hell, the accountant and CFO from the days of their "cookie-jar accounting" schemes are still at Dell.[2] My understanding's that the anti-competitive measures weren't even illegal, it's just that Dell, as a public company, broke the law by failing to disclose the payments from Intel in Dell's financials. Going private removes this burden.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-dell-going-private-is-pa...

[2] https://www.sec.gov/news/press/2010/2010-131.htm

gbersac• 11 years ago

He expect Ubuntu phone to be profitable...I don't know how he expects it to have a place between android, Windows phone and iOs. Even blackberry, with far more experience in the field, is struggling.

jkot• 11 years ago

If phone can run full ubuntu stack, it will find couple of million users for sure.

objclxt• 11 years ago

A couple of million users doesn't mean it's profitable by any means.

tajen• 11 years ago

Edit: I've removed my comment because I was criticizing Ubuntu. The truth is, Canonical has done an excellent job at packaging and popularizing Linux, and while that's their core business, it's not their main revenue (OpenStack is). So, overall, thank you Canonical!

bad_user• 11 years ago

You've placed Windows Phone in there in the middle, as if it matters, when Android + iOS have a disturbing 96% or more of the market, with the rest being divided between Windows Phone, Symbian, Blackberry and all the others. that third place is practically non-existent.

davidgerard3• 11 years ago

If only XFCE wasn't so bloody ugly on Debian ...

bittercynic2• 11 years ago

LXDE is very beautiful on Debian, though, and also reasonably fast and light.

davidgerard3• 11 years ago

YMMV. I tried LXDE on Debian a few years ago and found it was simplified just that bit too far. I did appreciate that when I tried to set the clock to show seconds, it (literally) told me to look up "man 3 strftime". It's sorta heartwarming to know that level of curmudgeonly user-hostility can still be found in the wild.

pnt12• 11 years ago

I wasn't too impressed with XFCE on fedora - it was light indeed, but it felt too boring for regular desktop use. Then I tried Manjaro Linux and I loved it - the xfce theme shipped by default looks and feels amazing.

fedora: https://spins.fedoraproject.org/static/images/content/xfce-s... manjaro: https://manjaro.github.io/images/manjaro-xfce-090-pre4.jpg

cmsj2• 11 years ago

This story is from last week and Mark subsequently clarified to say that he's not taking the company public.

NateDad2• 11 years ago

Source?

cmsj2• 11 years ago

hmm, apparently I can't find the thing I thought I'd read about that, so I retract. I guess the IPO is on!

Mark Shuttleworth Considering Canonical IPO

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