Continuum from Microsoft is not even real convergence

Jan 19, 2016 18:32 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has recently published an article in which they explain how they’ve come to the idea for Continuum and how they pretty much “invented” it.

Canonical is pretty close to delivering what they started to call convergence all the way back in 2013, although, internally, they played with this idea for longer than that. They presented the Ubuntu phone in January 2013, at CES, and tried to raise funds for the Ubuntu Edge in July 2013. This is also when they officially proposed the Ubuntu convergence idea, although they didn’t use that term.

The concept of turning a phone into a desktop is actually younger than that. Ubuntu for Android was announced in February 2012, although it was never released to the public. The fact is that they have proof Canonical was working on this stuff long before it was even an idea at Microsoft.

I know there are some voices in the Linux community saying convergence was pioneered by KDE, but that’s not exactly correct. They are talking about Plasma for notebooks, and these users would have been correct two of three years ago. Today’s convergence is much more than that. It’s the same code running on multiple platforms, even if it’s the OS itself or apps made by third-party developers.

I made this

Microsoft published an article on their website detailing the Continuum idea and shared a few notes about how it was born.

"The road to Continuum began three years ago with a simple observation: we take our phones everywhere, we depend on them, and we feel lost without them. Yet, when the time comes to do 'real work,' we reach for a laptop or desktop PC. So we end up carrying our phones plus our laptops, or we wait until we are at our desks to do the heavy lifting," said Keri Moran, the principal program manager Lead.

That’s right about when Canonical was showing its Ubuntu Edge idea, only that they had more than just that.

Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, said on numerous occasions that it doesn’t matter that Microsoft is doing the same thing. They didn’t patent the idea, so now anyone can do it. That wasn't the point and it’s only slightly annoying when Microsoft says “I made this,” with no regard to all the others that have proposed this ahead of them.

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