The Twin Bait and Switches of Jolicloud

There has been a lot of buzz around Jolicoud on the Internet for some time now. This west coast based start-up has been promoting a new ‘Social Operating System’ for the rising population of Netbook computers around the world. They’ve been teasing with their screenshots, showing off their social dashboard for application installs and generally rather luscious graphics. My invite to the limited numbers beta came through recently and I set about making a USB key to try it out on my Netbook.

Now a word of warning to anyone trying to get me switching to an alternate Operating System on my Asus EEE 901; I’ve spent a fair amount of time tweaking the machine, putting in the requisite patches, hooks and fixes so that it works for me. As it stands, you’ll need to be something pretty special to get me to consider a switch. Unfortunately Jolicloud didn’t just miss its mark, but missed my personal target.

Every single screenshot on articles talking about Jolicloud over the last few months have shown off the custom launcher, dashboards and installers… When I booted up Jolicloud, I could see that it is built on top of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR), and as I’m using that main distro already, I felt a little cheated. For me Jolicloud was nothing more than a graphical apt-get layer which let everyone else know what you were running on your machine. The main interface, the other applications, the local interaction that I was expecting to be in the same Web 2.0 style wasn’t there. Bait and switch number one… which left me feeling a bit cheated.

I actually think this is smart on the part of Jolicloud. They’ve said that they’ll be looking at deeper changes to the UI and potentially moving away from UNR in the future. I hope they do, because their own software looks great, and their use of Mozilla Prism to create icons for web based applications to run as if they were built in apps makes for a good experience. Now they just need to sort out the local files/apps and the UI look and feel for consistency.

But hold on, bait and switch number two is here, and this is one that leaves me with a smile. Jolicloud isn’t for me. There are lots of competing distros out there for Netbooks, so why would Jolicloud be the ‘winner’? Either they need to find a hardware manufacturer to pick up this distro and be happy to pay them support fees, or they’re relying on a long chain of people (a) buying Netbooks (b) knowing they can put another OS on them and (c) choosing Jolicloud. The latter has a lot of breakable links for any investor, so the former is probably the ultimate goal.

Use a few hundred testers on various hardware, build up the buzz in the Jolicloud cloud, and use this to prove a viable OS distro to hardware vendors. If this is their goal, then I think they’re actually on the right track.