A sit-down with Ubuntu founder Mark 'SABDFL' Shuttleworth
Quoting: Half an hour with Mark 'SABDFL' Shuttleworth —
What do you consider the mistakes? So for me, the mistakes were first hesitating. In my mind, that kind of interaction was the way to go. I was 30-something – 30-low-something. As it was taking off, there were some other very large silicon companies who said, come partner with us. Don't worry about it. We're going to do something great. And I thought, well, surely they know what they're doing. And so I hesitated before saying, look, we have a vision of that converged compute experience. I think that hesitation was problematic.
Then the second mistake, I think, was that, at the time, we were very small, and to tackle that problem, in addition to the other things that we were trying to do, I needed to essentially set a vision and then allow a very rapid pace of hiring to try and tackle the problem. And I focused a lot on the design, the user experience story. Looking back, if I think about the UX story that we were trying to tell, of how you get this elastic fluid set of experiences, from the phone through other touch form factors, through to the PC – well, if I look now, many years later, at how iOS has continued to evolve, to me it's pretty clear that set of ideas is very interesting. But, because I couldn't impose as much rigor and discipline on the engineering as well as that UX story, I didn't think we did a great job of the quality of the engineering.