It's a question of focus ...

“The iPad is the replacement of the home desktop computer.
Why? Because it simplifies the user experience to what they actually want to do, removing all the complexity as to how it is actually done “

Far from taking a plunge into the still hot dispute around the brand new Apple iPad, the quoting comes from a CNet News article of Matt Asay, COO of Canonical. Canonical is a private company founded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth for the promotion of Ubuntu and other free software projects.
This piece on information will come in handy in a few moments…

In Matt’s article, the pivotal argument is that we’re basically in a post-PC and – above all – a post-OS world: we should stop thinking in terms of “operating system” and use “network” instead.

The user experience (and the iPad’s stands out clearly in that facet) gets simplified so that the user will focus on what she actually want to do, no matter how it is done. “Transparent to the user” seems to be the new pass-phrase – up to the point that:

“[…] the device transforms itself in the object it becomes. It is a non-object. It is what you want it to be. One touch on an icon, it is a calculator. No folders, no files, just numbers as if you were holding a calculator. One touch and it is a notepad. One touch and it is a picture frame. It is the future of computing.”

Under this respect, Asay maintains that “open source is more Apple than Microsoft [...]. We don't need to monetize the OS. Linux is free. Now we just need to focus on innovation”.

And now, ladies and gentlemen :-) we go pop: what is innovation for Canonical and for the open-source community in general?

“[…] it's a question of focus. Focus on the user. […] the most successful commercial open-source projects will be those that remember who their customers are, not just who their development community is”.

Hey, with that kind of roadmap those guys at Canonical have in front of them do you think there can be anything to convince me to switch my Ubuntu-powered laptop to anything else...? ;-)