Ubuntu creator Mark Shuttleworth will once again be the CEO of Canonical as the company reduces its staff and narrows its focus to profitable projects.

Canonical CEO Jane Silber announced her departure yesterday, seven years after then-CEO Shuttleworth asked her to take over the company's top spot. She previously served as Canonical's chief operating officer.

"I originally agreed to be CEO for five years and we’ve extended my tenure as CEO by a couple of years already," Silber wrote. "We’ve been preparing for a transition for some time by strengthening the executive leadership team and maturing every aspect of the company, and earlier this year Mark and I decided that now is the time to effect this transition. Over the next three months I will remain CEO but begin to formally transfer knowledge and responsibility to others in the executive team. In July, Mark will retake the CEO role and I will move to the Canonical Board of Directors."

During Silber's years as CEO, Shuttleworth still played a key role in company strategy and product design and continued to invest his personal fortune in the company so that it could expand into new areas such as smartphones. But last week, Shuttleworth announced that Canonical will stop working on Unity 8, the user interface that was supposed to act as a bridge between the phone and desktop. Canonical is halting its phone and tablet development and next year will switch back to GNOME on the desktop.

Canonical says it is still committed to the desktop, but the company's financial success is coming from cloud computing, servers, and Internet of Things workloads.

The company "axed more than half the team who worked on Unity," reassigning some employees to other parts of the company and laying off others, The Register reported last week. Shuttleworth spoke to The Register about his plans for Canonical, saying the company might eventually go public.

"If we are going to take outside money and go public, how efficient do we need to be?" Shuttleworth said. "In a very cold commercial sense, we have to bring those numbers into line and that leads to headcount changes. One of those pieces I could not bring into line was Unity. We can't go through that market process and ask for outside investor money when there's something that big that doesn't have a revenue story. That's the pinch we got into."

The recent cuts came after Shuttleworth decided to seek outside funding. Potential investors "determined that Canonical was overstaffed and some projects lacked focus," The Register article said.