Ubuntu Edge will miss $32M crowdfunding target

anyways:

i'd phrase it as "i can buy an $800 computer that doubles as a phone." ever since smartphones appeared, having a really portable computer has been more appealing to me than having a phone that is a computer. indeed, i continue to use a dumbphone, a cheapo mp3 player, and sometimes (gasp!) pen & paper to duplicate all the functionality i ever really used my smartphone for. of course, phrased that way, it might make more sense to shapeways-up a really stylish case for a raspberry pi than buy a $800 phone, but the point is that i don't really agree with the way that you've framed the decision to begin with.

but even phrased that way, i /still/ disagree, because android strikes me as more of art of the state than state of the art: i think the vm (dalvik, i think?) is wedged in at way too low a level. large parts of the window system and other core components are written in java rather than C, which, coming from GNU-land (clean-shaven, thank you) strikes me as rather strange.

i mean, i like intents, content providers, and all these other high-level parts of the system design, i just wish more of the implementation were in C so that it would be more portable. i'd like to be able to bind whatever language i choose to the code that's flinging surfaces, at least, even if not to the window toolkit. although there is this scripting layer, which might be a good start, but i haven't used it as it advertises itself as "alpha quality."

1) lack of tiers - t shirts came way too late. They should have added phone docks and exclusive first preview to their convergence.

2) pricing - the sweet spot for the pricing was about 650. they priced the product way too high

Price versus demand is not the only constraint here.

It is an incredibly ambitious piece of hardware, so obviously more expensive to produce than say the iphone 5. The iPhone 5 costs $849 for the 64GB model. That's half the memory, and more expensive than the Ubuntu edge even at these higher price tiers. Unfortunately most people will probably compare the subsidised price from a carrier instead, or cheaper hardware.

Just because they could sell more doesn't mean it would initially be cheaper for them - there might be constraints imposed by their choice of supplier, who can only handle a certain volume of a new experimental device for the deadline. There are a lot of setup costs involved, and the greater the volume they sell, the greater the risk - many kickstarter projects have run into this issue - what is easy to do for a run of 10,000 just won't work for a run of 1,000,000, and if they had problems in their first batch, it could lead to serious damage to their brand if they have a huge userbase angry and waiting for hardware. So plenty of reasons for wanting to constrain supply.

So from Ubuntu's point of view, perhaps keeping the production run small was a requirement - that would explain the higher price tiers, because that imposes a higher average cost on them per device. They're probably making a loss on a $600 sale given this is a new device and the specs. Without knowing the demand curve in advance it must be quite hard to judge, but if nothing else I guess this campaign will give them a very good idea of the demand curve for a phone like this, so they will at least get that out of it if it fails.