That article clearly omits one of the primary failures of Ubuntu's upstart, which was Canonical's insistence on copyright assignment. This more or less doomed it from being accepted by the other distributions, just as Canonical's control-freak nature over being able to re-license free software under a proprietary license doomed many of their other initiatives.
(Some Ubuntu partisans would claim this was only a perception issue, but the legal framework they insisted on using gave them the right to do it, and given that they were a commercial company, and given that people saw what happened with Sun after it was taken over by Oracle, it was extremely unlikely more than a handful would have ever given Canonical the benefit of the doubt.)
"When Ubuntu failed to convince other distributions to adopt upstart, it launched new questionable initiatives such as the Unity desktop (the classic "microvax" mistake that Microsoft also made with Metro) "
What is the 'microvax' mistake? I'm guessing naming your product too similarly to something else?
(Some Ubuntu partisans would claim this was only a perception issue, but the legal framework they insisted on using gave them the right to do it, and given that they were a commercial company, and given that people saw what happened with Sun after it was taken over by Oracle, it was extremely unlikely more than a handful would have ever given Canonical the benefit of the doubt.)