Is the PC industry finally ready to tackle the growing PBA outbreak?

PBA, (for Pre Boot Anxiety) is the clever name New York Times writer Matt Richtel gave to that all-too-familiar, twiddling-my-thumbs, C’mon, C’MON! state of unease PC users experience every day waiting for their system to boot and Windows to finish loading.

While not really a medical condition, waiting for the PC to load has become a daily ritual of impatience for many who choose to make coffee, hang out at the water cooler or pace the hallway rather than sit and wait minutes for the Windows logo to appear and applications to finally be ready to launch. Ironically, the wait for PC wait time to decrease has taken a lot longer than expected.

Back in 1997, I covered a Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHec) where Microsoft predicted “OnNow” technology it had developed would make the Windows desktop readily available, almost like clicking on your TV.

“OnNow is a very big deal. Waiting a few minutes to boot is an unbelievable barrier,” said Microsoft’s then CEO Bill Gates.

But OnNow languished. For all the talk about the “WinTel” duopoly, the software giant and the chip kingpin (Intel) never quite agreed on how OnNow, or any alternative instant on technology should work or be implemented.

More recently, other companies have jumped to the fore to try and speed things up for PC users by saying “Step aside Windows.” One called Splashtop, from DeviceVM, lets you launch an Internet browser and certain other applications within seconds of turning on your PC. Meanwhile, HP and Lenovo are bringing out systems that let you launch some functions, like email and a Web browswer, in less than about 30 seconds after turning on the PC.

So it looks like the long, long wait for faster startups is almost at hand, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Oh and BTW, is anyone working on OffNow?

Silicon Valley is still reverberating from the doom and gloom slide show making the rounds leaked from a company presentation by uber tech investment firm Sequoia Capital. Sequoia has helped fund such hits as Google, Oracle and Apple,

Among the highlights — or low lights depending on your perspective — of Sequoia’s message was speculation the economic downturn could last as long as 15-years and a warning to its client companies to keep costs low, employ a heavily commissioned sales staff, review salaries and “spend every dollar as if it were your last.”

Not so fast said Sequoia’s Silicon Valley neighbor and sometime investing partner Garage Technology Ventures. In an email to its partners and associates in the venture community titled: “Why Innovation and Entrepreneurship Trump Fear and Uncertainty,” Garage posited a much more upbeat perspective.

“… contrary to what some think, it appears that scrappy, innovative startup companies can do quite well, thank you very much, despite very real macroeconomic challenges. ” the email began.

I recently met with Garage’s CEO Bill Reichert who elaborated a bit on the email.

“Anyone who thinks the good times are gone, clearly has a misunderstanding of what it’s like to be an entrepreneur,” he said. “It’s still a brutally difficult process to build a successful company in good times. The more experienced entrepreneurs have been through these ‘the world’s coming to an end’ times before. But there are always countercyclical opportunities.” .

Reichert concedes there are a lot of unknowns as to what opportunities the current downturn might present. He argues an obvious outgrowth of 9/11 was increased investments in security. But another, more unexpected result, was the boom in clean tech investment. By his reckoning, there would never be as much interest in clean tech had it not been for the energy crisis which was spurred on by the Iraq war, which was largely a response to 9/11.

He argues that today, there’s plenty of money available to invest in the next big thing to come along in response to the financial crisis. “The amount of cash balance in brokerage accounts and corporate balance sheets is unprecedented.”

It’s unclear what that next big thing will be, but as Garage notes in its email:

“Economic change is usually good for innovative technology companies. Latent demand for a better mousetrap sometimes turns into a desperate need to catch mice cheaper and faster.”

If we ever discover there really is a Bizarro World, perhaps the role of Apple CEO will be filled by Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. Kallasvuo, the CEO of phone giant Nokia, visited Silicon Valley this week to headline an event titled, “From Cell Phones to Software & Services.”

The timing was great since it was the night before the launch of Nokia’s touch screen mobile device designed to compete with Apple’s hot-selling iPhone. In the unlikely event Jobs ever spoke publicly at a non-Apple event, you know he’d be hyping the heck out of Apple’s products. But did Kallasvuo even hint at the launch during his onstage interview with Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard? Not a whiff.

Stories about Steve Jobs invariably tag him with words like mercurial, feisty, secretive and charismatic. Kallasvuo is none of those. Two words come to mind after hearing the head of the Finland-based phone giant — humble and soft-spoken. And as long as we’re contrasting him with Steve ‘NDA’ Jobs, it makes sense to add Kallasvuo’s guiding philosophy: openness.

He pulled the trigger on the deal to buy up all of Symbian and make the mobile operating system’s code open source so developers could tinker, customize and improve on it. Under Jobs, Apple controls the development, distribution and approval of applications for the iPhone.

Not that many are complaining; there’s been a virtual stampede of developers working on iPhone apps. Different people, different philosophies.

One similarity, the two are nearly as tenured at their respective companies. Apple has been around a bit more than 30 years. Kallasvuo has been at Nokia almost as long, 28 years. He says he’s nearly the longest tenured employee there. Apple was of course a start up when Jobs and high school friend Steve Wozniak formed it in 1976, though Jobs left the company for several years.

Conversely, Nokia was well established when Kallasvuo joined — I learned this week the company has actually been around since 1865 when it started as a paper mill, branching off later to tires, televisions and other electronics.

A man of many titles

And where Jobs has always been top dog, Kallasvuo joined Nokia as its general council. He was also its chief financial officer among other positions before being appointed CEO in 2006.

Nokia has the lion’s share of the mobile market by far with over a billion customers worldwide. Apple has a sexy high end niche. Jobs touts Apple’s uniqueness and technological prowess; Kallasvuo is banking on partnerships. Jobs is quick to point out why the iPhone is better than any other mobile device before it; Kallasvuo thanked Apple for setting the bar higher.

Different philosophies. Apple continues to pioneer and do things its own way, albeit with rapidly growing developer support; Kallasvuo sounds almost desperate to sign up partners to its cause.

“In a world that’s really a convergence world of many industries, it’s not any one company here that will be able to do this alone,” he said. “That’s why openness is needed. I think a lot of soul searching is going on in many companies of how to partner.”

What would Steve say to that? I’m guessing, “Think different!”