7 seconds to the internet, IM, Facebook, Twitter…..Our Meercat is a fast one 
The thing that I am excited about is Ubuntu installed along side Windows as a fast and light desktop solution. Of course regular Ubuntu is fast enough but me personally I thought that it was either Windows or Ubuntu. The truth is we can expose PC buyers to Ubuntu without knocking Windows from being pre-installed. So bravo to Canonical for surprising me with such a great idea.
I have to say though it reeks of Google Chrome OS but with some native apps and not just a browser alone. I just love that its made to be more touch/net book oriented. You can find more info here.
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This reeks of splashtop. ChromeOS is still essential vapor. DeviceVM’s splashtop is other ther right now.. on pretty much every single major OEM vendor’s offerings. Canonical’s instant-on offering is going to be competing directly with existing branded Splashtop solutions… like Dell’s Latitude On. Like HP’s quickweb. Like Lenovo’s quickstart. These things exist right now. Have you used any of them personally? If you haven’t use should try them. Canonical is a little late to the party. Take a really good look at HP’s quickweb for example…. or Dell’s Latitude On. If Canonical want to win instant-on OEM contracts away from DeviceVM they’ll need to provide OEMs something above and beyond what Splashtop is offering.
I havent seen any of them but thats mainly because I dont have any money for that kind of device. After looking at their website I understand what your saying. It seems like Canonical are going to ship a nice custom search for the dash with zeitgeist at the heart of it so that would set it apart IMO.
My point is… if you are surprised by this, then you are out of touch with what OEMs are doing and looking for in an instant-on solution. I understand that Zeitgeist is cool and everything..but is really a differentiating technology for the instant-on operating system market?
Now..without commenting on the inherent utility of Zeitgeist in a traditional desktop situation where there are many applications and a harddrive on which to save state…does what Zeitgeist does make sense in an instant-on usage scenario..where the number of applications are small? I’m not sure that Zeitgeist has proven itself as a differentiating technology of merit. If you were making a sales pitch to OEMs for a tag-along instant-on operating system for a system that boots primarily into windows… what exactly would you show them?
Sony, Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo, LG… splashtop is on all of them in some form and they cover pretty much all price points. It’s not just high end laptops like for Dell and Sony. AT&T is selling multiple nettops with a splashtop variant from different vendors at a reduced priced with a data plan… HP and Lenovo for example. The Acer Revo nettop is only $200 and it comes with a splashtop variant.
If Canonical is getting into the instant-on market, and you want to support them, that’s great. But make sure you have a good picture of what the marketplace looks like. Linux is already there, its already established, and OEMs are paying for it. Canonical is going to find tough competition with DeviceVM.
-jef
You see zeitgeist with telepathy and the browser is a compelling use case. It gives you a complete timeline of your IM conversations and browsing history. Thats good enough for me to say its perfect for the instant on solution. Zeitgeist also is very easy on the battery so it adds a lot IMO.
Is it a complete timeline? The instant-on market…is a dual-boot market. If the system is primarily used as a Windows system.. and the tag-a-long instant boot OS is there as a special purpose feature (as is the traditional case)… you wouldn’t get a _complete_ timeline. My understanding of Zeitgeist is that its a really nice piece of functionality for a non-dual boot scenario…its timeline history functionality is sort of blunted by the state information doesn’t cross over across the boot boundary into the primary operating system or vice-versa.
As soon as you get into a usage pattern that is explicitly dual boot..this sort of functionality may not be as compelling..especially if only one of those operating system has support for it…and even more so when the light duty operating system is the one with zeitgeist support. If you spent all your time in the instant-on OS or even a majority of your time..sure. But that’s not the usage pattern that instant-on targets. What if you only spent 10% of the time in the instant-on operating system and 90% of the time in windows. Would the timeline features still shine through as a useful feature or would it just be sort of ‘meh’ in a dual boot scenario?
I know your a fan of the technology, but just doesn’t seem its going to be a selling point that Canonical can use when winning over OEM dollars from DeviceVM for the instant-on scenario. Good luck to them. I’m sure giving DeviceVM some solid competition in the space won’t be a bad thing.
-jef
Of course you dont get anything from your windows activity but it does have some use in a search and recent activity use case just for internet and IM. You wont be using it in a Gnome activity journal use case it would be more like, most viewed websites or recent contacts..etc. Zeitgeist is useful outside of the timeline use case because it gives good convenience info.
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