Comment by tealeg

If you go look at what companies are running in the cloud, and what companies are hosting their clouds on, Canonical and Ubuntu are the 800lb gorilla in the cloud market. If you were talking naively about where Canonical should focus to make money you'd have to favour cloud tech over the desktop. It's not a simple as that though, those two facts aren't separate - Ubuntu got to be the platform of choice for the cloud not just by being their early and investing in it, but also by being a great choice for the people developing cloud tech in over companies. Ubuntu in the cloud is a success story already and both the Ubuntu Desktop and Server are integral to that.