They failed to pre-sell a large amount of expensive smart-phones. This doesn't mean anything concerning Ubuntu's success on phones in general, never mind their place in the computing landscape...
That was them putting forward their best effort, right? I mean, they wouldn't intentionally start out with "Plan B"... All of their market research said that plan was the most likely to succeed, so at the very least they demonstrated their inability to accurately judge what people want.
I think the failure of that campaign says a lot more about the viability of Canonical's dreams than many are willing to admit.
The Ubuntu Edge wasn't their primary phone plan. Ubuntu Touch (developer preview) images were already available, for example for the Nexus 4. Ubuntu were already speaking to carriers (http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/carrier-advisory-group) but the Ubuntu Edge had nothing to do with that side of things.
Had they sourced out a phone they could sell for 400 dollars, and maybe bumped up the delivery time to around Christmas, and used Kickstarter instead of Indiegogo, I think they could have been very successful.
For myself, and I'm sure many others, spending 800 dollars on a product I won't see for nearly a year is a bit too much...
