Every cloud has its lining, but not Ubuntu One – Canonical has announced its axing its cloud storage and music store because it can’t compete with rival companies.
From July 31, 2014, any files you have saved to Ubuntu One’s cloud service will be deleted, and core features are being shut off from June 1.
As of today, April 2, it is no longer possible to purchase music through the web-based Ubuntu One Music Store, or buy additional storage space.
Those who pay a subscription for extra storage will, Canonical say, have the remainder of their fees refunded in the coming weeks.
Axing its cloud service now does mean that the upcoming release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will not ship with Ubuntu One features available on the desktop – no web apps, sync indicator or Ubuntu One client will preinstalled or available.
Why is Canonical axing Ubuntu One?
Ubuntu One launched back in 2009 to much promise.
As one of the first desktop operating systems to include free cloud storage to its users, with cross-platform apps to access and sync files on other systems too, it shouldn’t been a runaway hit.
Ubuntu One was the first cloud storage service built into an OS
Instead, blighted by issues early on, Ubuntu’s first-party cloud service gained a reputation for being slow and unreliable. It never managed to overcome the buggy perception, no matter how much progress was made on the back-end.
Understandable; accessing files (even in a cloud) can be time-sensitive.
But misty eyed though we might be over its untapped potential, the axe is falling for one reason, and one reason alone: it doesn’t make enough money.
Canonical isn’t going to put it quite so bluntly of course.
But think about it: to justify the maintenance, infrastructure and ongoing support costs, especially against a huge increase in cross-platform competition from the likes of DropBox, Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive, it has to be worth doing.
It’s being axed… so it clearly isn’t.
Against rival cloud providers, most decoupled from the notion of being ‘tied’ to one OS, Canonical has not been able to compete in price, presence or in popularity. Canonical’s CEO Jane Silber notes this, saying the ‘free storage wars’ is a battle not ‘sustainable’:
With other services now regularly offering 25GB-50GB free storage …If we offer a service, we want it to compete on a global scale, and for Ubuntu One to continue to do that would require more investment than we are willing to make.
Jane SIlber, Canonical CEO
Ubuntu One Cloud Storage was Static
Interest in Ubuntu One has waned since its launch, not helped by a slow development cadence.
Ubuntu One’s official Android and iOS applications haven’t changed in years and the desktop app was re-written in Qt to make the Windows and Mac ports easier to develop. That led to the Ubuntu version looking less than stellar.
And weird offshoots like the ‘Save to Ubuntu One’ button may have sounded innovative on paper, but were greeted by chin scratching given….
February saw an extended period of outage. It says everything that the service dropout went largely unnoticed by users for the first week.
Market viability and performance volatility notwithstanding, a lack of focus and push for the service has helped contributed to its closure.
Silber does explain that Ubuntu’s converged future will place more emphasis on third-party apps, content and products. As such, having an own-brand competitor stepping on the toes of companies it hopes to win round contradicts its open approach:
Our user experience, developer tools for apps and scopes, and commercial relationships have been constructed specifically to highlight third party content and services (as opposed to our own)
Ubuntu One isn’t done
Ubuntu One Single Sign-on Service (the thing you use to login to the Ubuntu Software Center, Ubuntu Forums, etc), and the Ubuntu One Payment Services (used for buying apps) are not affected by the change, Silber reassures.
Furthermore, the source code of Ubuntu One is being open-sourced to “give others an opportunity to build on this code to create an open source file syncing platform”.
Do you use Ubuntu One? Will you miss it? What alternative will you switch to?