Canonical Has Been Weathering The Pandemic Well: Turned A Profit, Back Above 500 Employees

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Canonical Has Been Weathering The Pandemic Well: Turned A Profit, Back Above 500 Employees

Thanks to Canonical's distributed workforce with most of their employees working from home even pre-pandemic and the booming Linux ecosystem, the Ubuntu maker performed very well over 2020 and even grew its headcount back above 500 employees and managed to swing from a loss in 2019 to a profit in 2020...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Canonical-2020-Filing

[JellyBrain]

Excellent to hear them having profits again.

[michaelo2]

Great news, if they play they cards correctly, they've lot of market to gain.

And by market I mean compare to Red Hat: Red Hat is ~18K employees, hired +500 people ("a full Canonical") during the worst COVID period and revenue is +4B (30x times what Canonical does).

[ElectricPrism]

I'm not sure how it is in the UK, but in the US -- Smart Companies purposely ensure their profits are close to $0 or negative to avoid paying taxes.

Take for example Starbucks in their earlier years consistently paid $0 is in taxes, the money they would have paid their made sure to reinvest into the company opening new locations to ensure a defecit.

Then take for example infamous Donald Trump, It would be embarrassing as a business person if he paid more than $0 in taxes to whatever wealth circles he's connected to.

The politicians make the laws and the rich make the politicians. Most people will attack the scapegoat and ignore the cause of the problem - the politicians.

I think expansion and contraction of human resources is a part of any healthy company.

I also think Canonical not having a California satellite is a mistake, there are a lot of human industry connections they've missed out on.

Also, being a software company and not also advocating specific hardware sales IMO may potentially be a mistake too.

[ElectricPrism]

Michael

• [ Can not send message. User Michael has exceeded their private message quota. ]

It feels like the auto-pilot spam filters hold back half my posts. (Some of my posts month old+ are still unapproved) Also the DM system is broken. Is there some kind of setting you can add where say 1 month old accounts or accounts with 50 posts are not harassed by the spam filter.

I feel like there are certain keywords you can't use, even if they are part of current cultural discussion. And that's a damn shame.

My account is 8 years old and my post count is 1k+ it's annoying the robot is destroying discourse.

Edit: Thanks Michael , I know it's hard being a admin software ninja -- I feel like if vBulletin had a [ "Are you human?" ] captcha it would basically perform the same function as the spam filter and get less false-positives -- I'm not sure if that kind of thing exists.

[skeevy420]

It feels like the auto-pilot spam filters hold back half my posts. (Some of my posts month old+ are still unapproved) Also the DM system is broken. Is there some kind of setting you can add where say 1 month old accounts or accounts with 50 posts are not harassed by the spam filter.

I feel like there are certain keywords you can't use, even if they are part of current cultural discussion. And that's a damn shame.

My account is 8 years old and my post count is 1k+ it's annoying the robot is destroying discourse.

I feel ya.

There are a couple of post flagging words I've noticed. L.O.V.E & L.I.K.E seem to get me a lot. What gets me is when I'm being flagged with respectful and nice posts about what I'm into while trying to be helpful to others with no cuss words or anything edgy at all while some post talking about conspiracy theories and using racist terms slips on by.

[ElectricPrism]

I feel ya.

There are a couple of post flagging words I've noticed. L.O.V.E & L.I.K.E seem to get me a lot. What gets me is when I'm being flagged with respectful and nice posts about what I'm into while trying to be helpful to others with no cuss words or anything edgy at all while some post talking about conspiracy theories and using racist terms slips on by.

I think this highlights a failing in our communication technology.

I think the ability to filter out information needs to be implemented on a per-user basis the same was as you subscribe to RSS Feeds, Reddit Subs, etc... you should be able to discriminate / unsubscribe for specific keywords. (at the very least it would make the font smaller or make the post text a tone of grey instead of black)

This kind of discrimination already exists in the social world. If someone is yelling full volume in your home, you may ask them to leave and avoid them in the future.

Maybe a user wants to whiteout all swear words in their news feed.

Or maybe they just are sick of hearing any news about [XYZ politican]

These are strange times we live in when virtue is signaled and yet swearing & is rampant.

I may be one of the last few who believe that people should be free to say what they want to say but not take up a captive audience, and any gate-keeper is really turning adults into children by providing "interpretation of doctrine" as if a website were "playing priest" by acting as intermediary and guiding readers to specific conclusions in line with their own thinking. Very Dangerous.

That said, having hundreds of different emoticons could achieve this -- content could be voted as a (false or true) conspiracy (or theory), swearing, etc... by the hive which could lead to better filtering of information for those who would want to opt-in to such a filter.

People already have invoked "Monastery of the Mind" in the real world -- the number of people that tell me "I don't read/watch/listen to the news" is mind-blowing because they have opted-in to filtering out that fear-pr0nz in its entirety.

[AHOY]

When will Microsoft finally buy Canonical so we can have some good drama. They have so much in common already like Snap.

[andre30correia]

When will Microsoft finally buy Canonical so we can have some good drama. They have so much in common already like Snap.

the only linux company with a evil company is redhat right?

[calc]

Does that headcount number include all global employees or just their UK employees? They have a number of separate companies around the world.

Canonical companies

The older forms appear to have employee numbers well below what they should be for global.

Particularly in ~ 2009-2010 they had closer to 300 employees globally if I remember correctly.

(can't find data from 2004-2008)

-- Canonical UK
2008 - 43
-- Canonical Group
2009 - 62
2010 - 130
2011 - 161
2012 - 301
2013 - 348
2014 - 337
2015 - 391
2016 - 496
2017 - 566
2018 - 443
-- EOY change
2018 - 437
2019 - 473
2020 - 505