Management shakeup at Canonical

Although I've been a committed Ubuntu user for several years now, I haven't been paying as much attention to Canonical the company, so I totally missed Mark Shuttleworth's announcement last December that he is substantially changing his role at Canonical. It certainly sounds like this is one of those cases where Canonical the company had grown enough that Shuttleworth wasn't the right person to lead it anymore, and hence the re-arrangement.

Now, this week, comes a variety of news stories talking about the impact of that change, and of the follow-on change in which Matt Asay joins Canonical as the new COO, taking over the role that Jane Silber held before she moved up to take Shuttleworth's CEO spot.

As I said, I haven't paid a lot of attention to Canonical-the-company, but have been a thoroughly happy Ubuntu user, so hopefully this is all good news for Canonical as they attempt to expand their success in providing Linux-for-the-masses.

Sounds like it's a bit of a change for Asay, though:

I will remain living in Utah but will commute regularly to London, where most of the Canonical executives are based. (I will be starting my days at 4 a.m. Mountain Time to try to overlap as much as possible with U.K. working hours. Ouch.)

In the modern world, all software companies are global, and we are all learning to work together across the planet. Good luck, Matt!