Jolicloud is one of the most promising OSes for netbooks and it certainly tops any other netbook Linux based distros in terms of hardware support, ease of installation, and ease of use and design. I’ve been using it ever since it came out last year, in between bouts of using other Linux distros and I keep coming back to Jolicloud. When I saw this interview with Jolicloud founder Tariq Krim at ZDNet UK I was interested to see if there was anything interesting said that we haven’t heard previously. There are a few points that caught my interest.
Chrome OS is a big upcoming threat however Jolicloud has the advantage of offering more choice of apps including non-Google apps (Skype for example) and support for non-cloud activities. Chrome OS is 100% cloud based and without a Wi-Fi or 3G connection you’ve got a paperweight worth a few hundred bucks. Chrome OS will be installed only on new netbooks. You can put Jolicloud on any netbook (or nettop, or desktop even). Tariq is counting on the brand power of Google to draw people into this new cloud-based OS era that both Chrome OS and Jolicloud embrace.
Wondering why you can’t install your own apps? Jolicloud doesn’t allow you to install your own apps because they don’t want to get bogged down with support for such apps. On the other hand apps in the store have been carefully hand picked and are guaranteed to work without issues out of the box. Most support is dealing with hardware issues, and they do an excellent job of providing support, directly.
Social networking? Right now Jolicloud is using some proprietary social network just for Jolicloud-ers and you can’t even communicate to anyone yet apart from see what others have installed or what apps they have rated. Luckily there are plans to add popular social netbooks. Facebook is definitely coming. Twitter looks likely. There will be more integration with these services including Google.
Business model? Nothing right right now but they sure have the funding. Jolicloud has backing from large companies – Skype is one of them. As we’ve heard previously Tariq hopes to introduce paid services / apps in the future.
Tariq is not sharing numbers but the Jolicloud userbase has gone from around 100,000 pre 1.0 to a much larger amount – hard to say what the exact amount is but as of early August over 1 million apps have been installed.
Have you used Jolicloud yet? If not, grab it here.
Source: ZDNet UK
