I think there's a few things here to mention. Red Hat didn't "suddenly obsess over Openstack in the last 12 months", they were one of the first Linux vendors to embrace the "cloud", and as others have mentioned, they are now deeply entrenched. Red Hat posted revenue exceeding $1 billion for fy 2013. Canonical posted only $65.7 million. Red Hat could buy Canonical and throw it away, and it wouldn't even show up as a significant blip on their books. Canonical is not competing on the same level as the heavy-weight enterprise vendors (I know they want to be).

Straying into my opinion. I want Canonical to do very well. As I mentioned, they are the closest anyone has ever been to becoming a household name with their Linux desktop (they are sooo freaking close!). But the problem I see with Canonical is the company seems to have a very bad case of ADHD. Canonical tries to do everything. Phone, tablet, desktop, server, windowing manager, init system, cloud, SaaS, enterprise support, package manager, weird-NUC-box-things, app-store, etc etc etc. This is far too much for a company that is barely staying afloat (they posted an almost $22 million loss for the same fy; about 1/3 of their total revenue lost). In most of the markets they dabble in, they show up late (sometimes very late), can't get a strong foothold, and will or have been shoved out. Shuttleworth told theguardian in August of 2013 that Canonical wanted to capture 25% of the mobile market in the US and Asia... an absurdly unrealistic goal (to this day Apple has only managed 21% market share according to idc.com) Mobile may be "hot" right now, but they are a no-name brand in that market and they are attempting to go up against companies that can throw 10's of billions of dollars at products, and even take 10's of billions of dollars of losses just to ensure they remain dominant. The ship on mobile has sailed.

I applaud their engineering efforts, and I'm sure Canonical employees do very good, and very hard work. But they need to reel it back in and focus. The company can't do everything Mark thinks might be cool when he wakes up in the morning. It needs focus. If Canonical were a startup, and Mark didn't have deep pockets, it would have failed many times over (Mark has acknowledged this several times citing his commitment to Canonical and willingness to re-invest personal capital as necessary).

Back to Desktop... there is money to be made there. Several OEM's are struggling, consumers don't like the current options (Windows 8 or OSX). There is a void to be filled, even if it's only 10% of the market, that could result in a huge revenue increase for Canonical. Yes, it's difficult to get into the hardware game, but it could be done. To make revenue, sell support licenses/contracts to OEM's... use the Microsoft model for desktop support. Why is System76 supporting Ubuntu themselves? Canonical isn't getting anything out of that... and supporting the OS costs System76 money no doubt, why not help take it off their hands? The Dell Sputnik? Dell is supporting it directly, and charging consumers more for the privilege of having a "free os" over a Windows license. Over the next 2-5 years Ubuntu could become a common household name, and be no less-normal than installing Windows on your pc. There supporting software is there, the desktop is mature. It just needs someone to guide it in.

If Canonical does not want to do Desktop, well I think that's a mistake, but fine. So they should pick one market and do it very well. Don't split-up your resources; there is only a finite amount.