REDWOOD|CITY-Sometimes the greatest inventions aren’t inventions at all, but the successful application of an idea common in one industry to a problem faced by another.
Alain Rossman did exactly this when he created an application environment enabling Internet applications to run on wireless networks using a software infrastructure model-something common in the Internet industry but a mystery to wireless players at the time.
His creation evolved to what arguably has become the biggest news maker of 1999-the Wireless Application Protocol. Carriers, vendors and application developers alike have jumped on its bandwagon, betting the ride will lead to prosperity in the coming decade of data.
The protocol’s founders include Motorola Inc., L.M. Ericsson, Nokia Corp. and Rossman’s Phone.com Inc., but the technology behind it mostly belongs to Rossman. And like a parent proud of his child’s past achievements, Rossman believes the real WAP story will begin in 2000.
“WAP is a teen-ager right now-full of energy. Learning fast, growing fast, enjoying its popularity. It’s not an adult yet at all.”
But WAP has not always enjoyed being the Big Man On Campus. It was born a scrawny, geeky little kid nobody understood or even liked.
It all began in 1994, when Rossman attended a wireless convention in Santa Clara, Calif., where carriers were just beginning to discuss their ideas of incorporating data services on voice networks.
“As I listened to their plans, I realized they forgot to have an application strategy,” Rossman said. “They were simply working on the level of base stations-how to make data work, transporting data. But anything above that-how to make data useful, how to make data into an application, something you and I can use-there was no talk, no discussion, no thought, no plan. Nothing.”
Raised in Paris, Rossman was educated in engineering and mathematics before emigrating to the United States in 1981 to get his MBA at Stanford. In 1983, he began working for Apple Computer, during the development of the Macintosh line.
However, with a head full of ideas, Rossman eventually chose to forge his own path. He had just sold his third start-up company, EO Corp., to AT&T for a tidy sum when he began asking carriers annoying questions at that Santa Clara conference almost five years ago.
“They looked at me like I was a troublemaker,” Rossman recounted, his French accent unmistakable. “The fundamental thing I realized is how voice and data are different. Voice doesn’t need applications. Voice is the application. You do voice, you’re done. You do data and you wait, but you make no money. You have to create an infrastructure to make applications possible.”
Realizing carriers weren’t about to lead this effort, Rossman left the conference and began pursuing the matter on his own. He decided a client-server model, much like that of the personal computer industry, was the answer.
“It was very clear that thin-client architecture and the Internet were exactly what they (carriers) needed,” he said. “Phones are the vehicle because there are so many of them … Once you go through it step-by-step, it becomes very logical what had to happen … (But) if you want each and every phone model to have Internet access, you can’t have too much technology in the phone. So you have to have servers on the back end.”
From the beginning, Rossman wasn’t out to create a novelty phone. His goal was to make Internet service via the phone as ubiquitous as on a PC.
“If you make the phone more expensive you make a special phone, and then you lose,” he said. “The phone is the most ubiquitous device. Next year more than 200,000 million phones will be sold. We wanted to make sure that 200,000 million people would have access to the Internet, not 1 million with a special phone model. We want any phone to have Internet access, and we’re close to getting there.”
While the 43-year-old’s voice is soft, his eyes reveal the intensity and drive that led him from that conference hall to embark on his fourth start-up company just two months later.
Phone.com began as Libris, meaning book in Latin, and consisted of Rossman and two engineers. By March of 1995, they created a computer-generated prototype to demonstrate to wireless carriers and investors. By this time, the company had changed its name to Unwired Planet.
Rossman said he found resistance when presenting the idea to carriers because the wireless culture at the time was centered around voice. His software infrastructure idea was too new.
“Most of them looked at me not understanding what I meant,” he said. “The Internet then was hard to understand. It was for students.”
Then, in April, 1995, he presented his idea to GTE and met Chuck Parrish. Following the presentation, Parrish followed Rossman to the carrier’s parking lot, still excited about the possibilities.
“Chuck liked it so much he said, `Hey, if you want, I’ll quit and I’ll work for you.’ ” Rossman said. “Seeing him excited gave us confidence.” Parrish became Phone.com’s executive vice president.
Convincing investors to bet on an invention was as challenging as explaining the concept to telecom carriers.
“The early investors we had told me, `We don’t like to invest in inventions. That’s too dangerous,’ ” Rossman said. “I said `You’re right, but there are going to be 1 billion cell phones by 2003. How can we not try?’ That kept them coming back.”
To reach that number, though, Rossman had to get wireless phone manufacturers to play ball. With only 10 employees at the time, Rossman’s venture eventually convinced the big three phone manufacturers-Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia-to drop their proprietary plans and agree on a standard based on Rossman’s idea. Quite a feat.
“We had a very good technology and we had luck,” Rossman said. “It was just the right time for this idea, and I think they understood that if we didn’t work together, it would be a disaster, possibly everybody fighting with a different idea and the market never happens.”
Rossman is quick to point out that Parrish’s role in this effort was as pivotal to the success of WAP as his own.
“He was so instrumental in the diplomacy of making it happen with the big guys,” he said. “I had to run the company. I do the technology vision, the business vision. He is the person who dealt with the intricacies of working with very large companies to really make it happen.”
Open or close?
Rossman said Ericsson was the first to sign on, and in fact was the entity that suggested opening up Rossman’s technology to all as a common standard. This presented Rossman and Parrish with a difficult choice-either retain full control of their technology and risk limited adoption, or open it up and risk losing all control.
“You keep thinking, `This is my baby.’ You’re feeling in some way like you’re sending your kid to school, you’re losing control,” Rossman said. “It was a very hard decision, but you’re not going to pass up that chance, it’d be crazy. You have to say yes.”
Ultimately, adoption won out.
“If you invent something and you own it and everything, but nobody’s using it, that’s not too exciting. You have no impact on society,” Rossman said. “Forget your business. Millions-and I think in our case hundreds of millions- of people will use your invention and derive value in their daily life. Forget the money. Forget the carrier. The users are going to like it. Then I think it is a very big deal because you invented something that touches people you don’t even know from around the world. That, I think, is a very big deal. That’s what kept me coming back, saying `O.K., O.K. We’re going to do this.’ “
Phone.com had another ally in AT&T Wireless Services Inc. The carrier had asked vendors to come up with a standard and even hosted the first meeting between Phone.com, Nok
ia, Motorola and Ericsson in Seattle.
Soon, Motorola joined the effort and-after much debate-Nokia finally relented as well. The WA
P Forum was born.
Early doubts
When the group went public in the summer of 1997, criticism and doubt followed almost immediately. WAP’s concept required developers to create Internet content specifically to the WAP standard. Detractors said anything requiring the Internet community to rewrite content would fail.
“We found that no matter what, you have to rewrite your applications anyway,” defended Rossman. “What you want on a phone is different than what you want on a PC. The phone is a new medium. A new medium means new applications. It’s not a PC. I don’t want my PC applications filtered. It doesn’t work for me because I’m mobile. So we found that to do a good application, you have to adapt the application to this new medium. The only way to do that right is to create a new language optimized for the needs of a phone.”
This issue led to another challenge for Phone.com and WAP-attracting application developers willing to write to the new standard and thereby making it valuable to carriers. That challenge faced its darkest hour in the fall of 1998, when Microsoft told attendees at Wireless I.T. in Las Vegas it planned to create its own, non-WAP microbrowser.
Some predicted that if faced with the possibility of a standards war against the mighty Microsoft, the vendors behind WAP might abandon Phone.com and side with the software giant instead, destroying Phone.com in the process.
But Rossman had one last card to play. Microsoft’s main beef regarding WAP was that it was not standards-based, meaning it did not comply with existing Internet standards.
From the start, Rossman said it was his intention to approach the Internet industry with the idea of integrating WAP with the next generation of Internet standards-eXtensible Markup Language. He said WAP needed to gain popularity before it could approach the World Wide Web Consortium-the standard-setting body of the Internet-to make this possible.
“I thought we were too little. Nobody would be interested,” Rossman said. “First we had to go through infancy and grow up to become important to W3C. If I had gone to see them in ’95 or ’94, they would not have paid attention.”
Rossman’s response to Microsoft’s announcement was to launch a massive campaign persuading Microsoft to join the WAP Forum by making it clear WAP would be XML compliant after all.
“I thought we had to work as hard as we could to see that they join, if they wanted to,” he said. “That there was a lot of anticipation would be the right thing to say.”
Success
In May, Microsoft joined WAP. Today, the technology is 100 percent XML-complaint. Most recently, the WAP Forum and W3C have begun a formal liaison relationship to develop a common process of creating the next-generation of XML-based Internet specifications.
As a result of these various efforts, what began with a handful of engineers working on folding tables in an 800-square-foot office in Menlo Park, Calif., has grown to almost 500 employees, taking up one, then two buildings in a business park in Redwood City, Calif. Phone.com’s IPO this spring was widely successful, closing at more than $40 its first day and climbing steadily to $300 before the initiation of a two-for-one stock split last month.
Vision
According to the company’s employees, Rossman’s vision and personality remain very much central to Phone.com’s culture, despite its growth.
“Alain’s personality has really shaped this company, the company’s products and the company’s image in that he has always been very analytical, very logical,” said Ben Linder, Phone.com vice president of marketing, who became the company’s 10th employee in 1996. “Some companies are started by technical people who bring in a CEO down the line to run it. This was one of the few companies that was building a technology to fulfill a business model, rather than a technology looking for a vision and a business model.”
After building the technology, Rossman then built a company. He looked for the best and brightest needed to create this new category of wireless product. He outfitted employees with computers and dedicated DSL lines at home, where they are encouraged to work three days out of the week. Most of the employees can be considered Silicon Valley veterans.
“This is not a bunch of 20-year-olds who stay up all night and eat pizza and play Nerf games,” Linder said. “Most are in their mid- to late-thirties and about half of them have kids under 10. So unlike many of these crazy, funky Silicon Valley companies, Alain hired people in a very measured way.”
Still, the workplace is casual. Clad in jeans, employees who must travel between buildings in the business park sometimes do so on in-line skates or manually propelled scooters.
Perhaps Rossman’s greatest legacy to his employees is his passion for the technology he hopes will help build a new communications paradigm for the future. Putting in up to 80-hours a week, Rossman said his free time is spent with his wife and two sons. Clearly, though, he sees WAP as his third child.
“You get excited, because you see the achievement of your child as its growing up and it’s now something everybody recognizes,” he said. “Just seeing people using it blows me away. That remains very rewarding to me. So that piece is taking a lot of my time.”
For a man who spent much of his professional life building and selling start-up companies, Rossman finally seems to have found a lasting corporate relationship.
“I’m not short of ideas,” he admits. “But I am so excited about this one. This one is something the other didn’t have. It’s the scope. It’s how many people we can touch. We can truly change things. I feel we’re very lucky we have such an opportunity, so it’s something you want to stick with for a long, long time, because it can grow so big.”
Looking to the future, Rossman said WAP now is in the hands of the application developers. Like a parent who’s done the best job he can raising his child, Rossman now looks for his offspring to succeed in the world alone, to achieve levels of success even he cannot predict.
“It’s very important to be surprised,” he said. “It will be a very rich environment, where the number of things you can do and the value you derive from it will be increased. We know when things get to the adult stage, you’ll have thousands and thousands of WAP applications. There will never be a thing you want that you can’t do. That’s adult age. That’s when things are going to get very interesting.”
