I think Canonical are going to die if they keep on the crack pipe as much as recently. This is a fine example of it. Customers and users are dropping like flies already. I don't know anyone now who hasn't bailed on then and gone with mint, Debian or centos.
I don't know what Ubuntu's numbers are doing, but you need to consider the rate of growth as well.
Take the following hypothetical situation:
* Say, every month, a small percentage of the userbase stop
using Ubuntu (and switch to Mint or OS X, for example).
* Say the rate of growth is shrinking.
You've already hit the inflection point: if that trend continues, your userbase will start shrinking, you'll wonder why everyone's leaving all of a sudden, and you're suddenly in a position of trying to pull the project out of a nosedive you didn't realise you were in.
Ubuntu's user base is growing faster than mint's is. And I don't even want to mention how ridiculous the concept of using hypothetical statistics to defend your point is.
Canonical has explicitly stated that they're going after the casual user market, filling that niche because there's already plenty of power desktop distros out there... and no distro that focuses on casual use. If you want a power distro, you should be using Debian anyway. Canonical is right in choosing to help linux into this unfilled niche.
> I don't know anyone now who hasn't bailed on then and gone with mint, Debian or centos.
Are these people paying customers, purchasers of support? Canonical has to become profitable soonish in order to secure long term future. Future looks like mobile/embedded devices with some corporate desktop use/ Linux Thin Client stuff.
