I don't think it's an accident that this announcement comes far away enough from the next release for there to be time for Google to make them a better offer. Even if that doesn't happen in the next release, this may be Canonical's way of showing their hand.
Interestingly, there was now "Why?" section to this new note. I'm surprised that Ubuntu has enough of an installed base for Google to have made a counter-offer.
Also, isn't Bing powering Yahoo's search these days anyway?
I would concur. I certainly hand out a few CDs of every release to interested friends and colleagues. I happened across an anesthesiologist just yesterday playing tunes in the OR with his Hackintosh. Not Ubuntu, but I'm willing to bet he's tried that too. So I think the people who are starting to look seriously into alternative computing is on the rise and in a variety of sectors, not just male college geeks and their friends.
I wish they'd hurry up, Yahoo's Slurp is the worst crawler I've seen. The other day it had 113 connections open to one of our sites. Jeff Atwood has also blocked them from StackOverflow because they were taking up a disproportionate amount of bandwidth and generally behaving like tools.
A couple of years ago Ubuntu went to Google asking for a revenue sharing deal, Google refused, even though they had done it many times before. Search was going to be Ubuntu's primary income in the netbook space. At the time Google probably thought they owned search. Its amazing what a little competition will do.
I would love to see Firefox and Safari change their default search to Bing (I would still use Google). Who knows, Google might start getting serious about things like privacy.
Gmail's still the only webmail provider which uses SSL by default.
There are numerous similar cases.
Microsoft can't use "Privacy" to market against Google because they do less to protect your privacy that Google do.
(They could argue "we are less competent than Google are at doing things with the information we also collect, so you are less likely to get freaked out when our services appear to read your mind". However, I'm unconvinced that lack-of-competence is a winning marketing strategy. But hey.. it seems to be working for Sarah Palin, so what do I know...)
If I were Microsoft or even better Yahoo! I'd back up a large dump truck full of cash to entice Firefox to switch the default engine. They prob would never take it, but you never know.
This makes a whole lot of sense. You can;t really ask for money from Google to keep them as the default search provider unless you're willing to change search providers.
Maybe it's just the Chicago market, but I can't make a single trip in my car without hearing a Bing radio ad. I'm pretty sure they're laying out a fair amount of marketing cash.
As another statistically irrelevant point, my mom who believes doing anything on the computer is "downloading" has started using Bing.
"I am pursuing this change because Canonical has negotiated a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! and this revenue will help Canonical to provide developers and resources to continue the open development of Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Platform."
Let’s recap why they first changed from Google to Yahoo!: "factors such as user experience, user preferences", really? Since when did Yahoo had better user anything than Google?????
This was a business decision by Canonical. I too would have liked to have seen an explanation as to why the change was made but at the end of the day, it's the code and not the organisation that's open source.
It was ridiculous to ship Ubuntu with a default search engine that basically is or will be powered by windows when the superior alternative is powered by Linux, but I suppose the bluff worked.
I don't think it's an accident that this announcement comes far away enough from the next release for there to be time for Google to make them a better offer. Even if that doesn't happen in the next release, this may be Canonical's way of showing their hand.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1079909