One of the biggest strengths of Unison and DSPnano is their ease of use created through the QuickStart Guide and augmented with open standards and a scalable and modular architecture. 

DSPnano and Unison really do work in 10 minutes right out of the box on standard hardware - this is not an exaggeration. The QuickStart Guide makes sure that you can setup and run over 32 demo programs in seconds using the various IDEs for the processors. This includes both hardware and software setup as well as any special considerations or limitations that the hardware presents.

The open systems approach makes things much easier too. Most engineers today have used Linux and/or Windows to write host based programs. By using POSIX standards and Linux compatibility, both Unison and DSPnano have a well known, well defined API. This eliminates significant learning for the team and improves your quickstart capabilities.

The use of open standards also opens the door to tens of thousands of applications which can be quickly and easily ported. Software reuse is the most important approach to increase OEM productivity and reduce cost and Unison and DSPnano offer open APIs to support this. This can slash the cost of development substantially (5% of the development effort to port an application) and is a huge quickstart advantage.

Using a microkernel architecture (some might call this a nano-kernel architecture or pico-kernel architecture), substantially aids the modularity of the system and the system's ability to eliminate features that are not in use. By only including what is needed the flash requirements and the RAM requirements are significantly reduced, saving substantial amounts.

The second advantage of the microkernel approach is that I/O is easily configured and only those I/O modules which are required are included. If serial I/O is not required, even if the chip supports it, don't include it because it just takes more space. It does mean that users must start up the I/O in the first user thread, however, this is far preferable to having a large monolithic structure like Linux. The other advantage is that there is much less to understand – a big quickstart advantage.

By eliminating the monolithic architecture and complexity of full Linux, the entire system is much easier to understand. This is also a big quickstart advantage.