Instant On - Giving Booting the Boot

This is actually a truly sad story. You'll see why shortly. But, for the moment, have a look at Dell's new Latitude ON feature. One might be tempted to call this (and I've seen a few other similar approaches) clever; after all, this capbility allows "near-instant access" to e-mail, the Internet, and other commonly-accessed stuff without actually booting up Windows Vista on a Latitude notebook. That's wonderful, because Vista, like most Microsoft operating systems (including many versions of Windows Mobile) takes forever to boot. But it's also sad, because it begs the question - why do we continue to use bloatware in the first place? And given, if Microsoft has it way, that the future of mobility is in bloatware, why not just dump the bloat and go with "near-instant access" for everything?

That is one reason why I bought my original Asus Eee 701 - it boots up a real LINUX OS in about ten seconds, and I'm ready to go. Who has time to sit around while their computer boots? How much time is wasted, every day, on every corner of the planet, while PCs boot? And, as I noted, some handsets take quite a long time to come up as well. What's the point of anytime, anywhere computing and communications if there's multiple minutes of latency involved?

I know what you're going to say - leave the device on, or use suspend/standby/whatever. The former is not always an option (think airplanes, meetings, etc.), and wastes battery power. The latter doesn't always work, although Vista does seem to offer some additional degree of reliability here, at least over XP. But a restore can take more time than booting LINUX, and rebooting now and then to clean up memory is required regardless.

And perhaps even the new quick-boot stuff is too slow as well. Dell also notes in the above article that they have a "Latitude ON Reader" app that's available in advance of Latitude ON. But the functionality here is so restrictive that it's hard to imagine why anyone would want to use it. Regardless, let's dump the bloatware and insist that vendors - this means you, Microsoft - start selling products that are more considerate of a user's time and that actually boost productivity.