The only thing I can guess is they thought that to succeed in convergence, they would have to win the phone market, and that was the harder market to design for and react to. So, they built for that and tried to win the hardware developers/companies.
I suspect they thought if they got that, they could converge things back on the desktop
That's exactly what Unity 8 in Ubuntu release N.NN was going to do. The converged apps, the latest version of Unity, the new Mir display server, all running on the desktop as well as the Ubuntu Phone builds. The problem was, N.NN kept shifting from 14.04 to 16.04 to 17.04, and now never.00
With each Ubuntu release Canonical made fewer changes to Unity 7 on the desktop (the one I remember is moving from a global menu to a menu in a program's title bar), because the new awesome was around the corner...
skierpage|9 years ago
With each Ubuntu release Canonical made fewer changes to Unity 7 on the desktop (the one I remember is moving from a global menu to a menu in a program's title bar), because the new awesome was around the corner...