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The Barriers To Shuttleworth's 'MacBuntu'

I can't fault Mark Shuttleworth for being ambitious. He wants to make Ubuntu into an operating system of choice -- one not only as good as the Mac, but better, and he wants to do it in 24 months, give or take. Dream big or die, right?

While this particular ambition isn't entirely new, what's newest are the specific steps he's taking: hire people whose job it will be to make Ubuntu (and by extension, Linux itself) into something that people will actively covet. Not just opt for as an escape hatch from Windows, but lust after. Back when I talked with Mr. Shuttleworth at OSCON, he gave me the basic version of this scenario. It's been expanded a bit since, but the core remains the same: make Ubuntu into something people want.

I've thought about this at length, and come up with a few reasons why this is going to be enormously tough. Not impossible, but tough enough that if Mark pulls it off, I'll buy him his favorite cigars.

1. The ecosystem. Macs have a closed hardware ecosystem that minimizes the amount of work needed on the OS itself to insure maximum hardware compatibility. Linux has been dealing with the Wild West of PC hardware for a long time, under the assumption that people will try to install it most anywhere. But there's little question that having a limited, standardized hardware base makes things far simpler.

I'd venture that the up-and-coming netbook-plus-Linux market goes some distance toward this end, but I doubt that's what Mark wants. It's only one piece of the whole puzzle, which includes the ability to run Linux on most any commodity PC. If the Ubuntu experience is tied exclusively to a given piece of hardware, it's that much less appealing.

2. The fanbase. Macs have decades of populist enthusiasm behind them, starting with the original 1984 Macintosh, and the Mac fanbase does a great job of spreading enthusiasm about the Mac. Linux's fanbase comes from an entirely different direction, who talk up the appeal of the system from the POV of cost (free) and politics (freedom). The former's something more people respond to than the latter, but the Linux community leans more toward talking about the latter than the former. End result: a lot of people who find themselves befuddled or alienated by talk of "free as in speech/beer".

If Mark's ambitions for Ubuntu create a fanbase that is that much more adept at making Ubuntu appealing -- by dint of Ubuntu itself being appealing -- that would in itself be a huge boost. But it has to happen organically; you can't Astroturf your way into it.

3. The software. Macs have an established ecosystem of dependable commercial software. Quark Xpress and Photoshop alone -- two applications heavily synonymous with the Mac for years -- keep Apple's reputation strong.

I doubt that Mark's ambition is to supplant the Mac in the environments where it's found the strongest toehold -- design, graphics, publishing, audio/video production, etc. But at some point, the software situation on Linux has to at least reach the level of the Mac in terms of what you can walk into the store and buy. As great as FOSS is, most people still want to be able to pay for some degree of assurance that what they get works.

In all fairness, I suspect the software egg won't hatch without the OS chicken there for it first. In my mind, though, it makes sense to tackle this problem as early on as possible. If Mark rounded up several major software vendors to get them to produce top-tier third-party products for Ubuntu, for instance, that would be a big step in the right direction as well.

4. The "me-too" problem. How do you leapfrog over something without at some point explicitly imitating it? There's an old showbiz joke about the guy who goes into a movie producer's office and says he wants to make a Woody Allen movie. You don't make Woody Allen movies; Woody Allen makes Woody Allen movies. (Probably a good thing, depending on your taste for his films.)

Likewise, nobody makes something like the Mac except, well, Apple -- and anyone who makes anything remotely like it is going to invoke a brutal level of criticism for their work, whether they want it or not. If people look at future iterations of Ubuntu and see nothing but a cheap knockoff of something they can pay for and get a better experience from, they'll have a harder time justifying the switch.

Those are four of the biggest that come to mind, but I'm sure there are others. Sound off below and let me know what you think.

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