Most of us who have been in the PC business ever since there was such a thing know the Phoenix Technologies brand for having helped catalyze the PC "clone" revolution in the 1980s, as one of the first great independent BIOS producers. It's still in the firmware business, and its programs are still the first ones many PCs run after their users flip the switch. But gradually, the company is assembling a comprehensive software platform and embedding it in its latest firmware: the HyperSpace platform that embeds Linux on motherboards.

HyperSpace premiered last July with a built-in hypervisor that can run operating systems not as native, but as guest environments within a secure envelope. But since then, it's acquired some native applications of its own, including a DVD player from Corel, and just last November, the Opera Web browser. Now Phoenix is preparing to add the piece de resistance: a commercial office suite called ThinkFree Office that's designed to use the OOXML format created for Microsoft Office 2007 and now published as an open standard by Microsoft.

"Mobile PC users are reliant on productivity tools like word processors and spreadsheets, and HyperSpace delivers those applications in an instant-on, always-connected and battery-saving environment," reads a statement from Phoenix President and CEO Woody Hobbs on Tuesday.

ThinkFree Office contains a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation manager that are geared to read files in the format of their Word, Excel, and PowerPoint counterparts, though their front ends are engineered to look and work more like Office 2003 -- with the more familiar menu bars rather than Microsoft's newest "ribbon."

In fact, the physical resemblance of HyperSpace Office Write (rebranded for Phoenix) to Word 2003 is quite uncanny, right down to the inclusion of the drawing toolbar with the selectable "AutoShapes," stationed along the bottom of the workspace by default. Multiple open documents are facilitated by tabs along the top row, since HyperSpace doesn't provide a desktop for "minimizing" open documents -- instead, it uses a simple-to-use Sidebar-like switching panel. But besides that little cosmetic oddity (which I might not have noticed had I not been so familiar with Office 2003 to begin with), there's very little that could make a trained Office suite user uncomfortable at the start.

While originally, the key selling point for applications in PC system firmware was the ability to recover documents and system integrity that had been lost in (or by) the main operating system, suddenly Phoenix' value proposition is shifting. By giving general portable PC users (which certainly includes the finally burgeoning netbook category) some reliable, instantly-on functionality, the question becomes whether they would even need Windows?

HyperSpace is available in two editions and is dependent upon Intel CPUs. The Hybrid version relies on Intel processors with VT virtualization embedded on the hardware, so at least a Core 2 Duo, preferably with vPro. "Hybrid" means the user can switch back and forth between HyperSpace and his native operating system at will, a feature that has been tested with many Lenovo laptops including the X200, X300, and X301. The Dual version is meant for smaller platforms, and is geared for Celeron M-based laptops and Atom-based laptops and netbooks. There's no virtualization with this smaller footprint, though the user can dual-boot to either his native OS or HyperSpace. Though Phoenix explicitly mentions Windows as that other OS in its requirements, technically, HyperSpace does not require it.