I spent some time on the phone Friday with Dr. Gaurav Banga, Senior Vice President, Engineering, and Chief Technology Officer at the legendary Phoenix Technologies, a company whose impact on personal computing goes back 30 years to the early days of the PC BIOS. BIOS is today only a small part of their business; we spoke instead about their very interesting HyperSpace OS, a LINIX-based environment that’s similar to the Dell Latitude ON that I discussed a while ago. It’s an “instant on” environment designed as an adjunct or alternative to Windows, allowing very rapid access to enough computing to do useful work without having to boot up Windows. The idea is a more “cell-phone-like” experience – booting Windows can, as I’m sure everyone knows, take literally minutes, and has always been a key embarrassment in an operating system that is just loaded with ‘em. But, even with that, does HyperSpace make sense, or does it simply further beg the question: why are we still using Windows at all?
Phoenix touts, in addition to instant on, better battery life, improved connectivity management, and better security as the keys features of HyperSpace. All of these are good and valuable. But the implication is that Windows itself still has value, and, given the large number of apps that run only on Windows, I suppose it does. But given that long boot time is a serious productivity sink, the question is indeed begged – shouldn’t we just be moving to LINUX overall, ideally via MIDS or similar PCs? If Windows is such a burden, then why would anyone base their future mobile computing strategy and direction on it in the first place?
But therein lays a larger Phoenix-specific question: why buy an expensive PC running Windows and then in addition pay for an OS like HyperSpace, when one can get Ubuntu for free? Phoenix uses a service-based pricing model that I find distasteful and which over time could be prohibitively expensive. Now, Dr. Banga did point out in our conversation that Phoenix is planning an ecosystem of services, and such might justify such an approach. But renting an OS by itself makes no sense, especially given the added cost on top of what is already a relatively expensive platform.
