This is the story of Sprint’s pioneering, and failed, effort to become the first telco to turn itself into an open application and business platform. The story starts in 1999 in Dublin, Ireland during a warm and pleasant summer.
Watching the Kansas City Chiefs in action
At the time, I was still a consultant at Oracle Corp., based in Edinburgh, Scotland. I was working on a project for a somewhat fly-by-night supplier to Eircell. We were creating a custom Web-based bill-any-pay solution. Oracle was building the back-end, and as a database expert I was overseeing the custom code that imported all the millions of call detail records every night.
The supplier was building the front-end, but somewhat lacking in in-house management skills had brought in a contractor, David Anderson. David hails from the area southwest of Glasgow in Scotland, and his towering presence and Scottish brogue are unmistakeable. David managed the team building the Web UI.
I have an enduring memory of watching the solar eclipse standing outside the office that summer, and still have the burn-marks on my retina to prove it.
We got to be good friends on the project, having a common interest in software development processes. I was churning out working Pro*C at several times the same rate a team of 2 had previously been churning out nonworking PL/SQL (until they got kicked out).
Soon I’d wrapped up my work and moved on. I unexpectedly got a note from David in the early autumn in 2000. How interested would I be in going to work in Kansas City to change the world? This could only mean one thing.
Time to get the atlas down and find out where the hell Kansas City is.
Ice storm in Kansas City in January of 2002
Since leaving Dublin, David had moved off to Dallas, TX to work (indirectly) for Nokia, soon to move on in the Internet frenzy to Sprint. Sprint was at that time divided fiscally and culturally into Sprint PCS the wireless business as well as Sprint Local and Sprint Long Distance. David had gone to work for a maverick VP, John Yuzdepski, running a classic dotcom era outfit, SprintPCS.com.
This was constituted as its own independent business unit, set up in an overcrowded and uninspiring low-rise in the middle of a so-so neighbourhood just over the state line on the Missouri side of Kansas City.
The business unit had sole responsibility for construction, marketing, finance and operation of all wired and wireless Web offerings and the boss was one of only four people empowered in the company to bring products to market.
That December I took a Friday off work in Scotland to fly out and meet David and John just for the weekend. Travel wise, it was a disaster: the flight from Glasgow to Toronto got diverted to Ottawa because of heavy snow. Our subsequent attempt to land in Toronto took two attempts. My direct connection to KC was long-gone, so I was re-routed via Chicago, only to stand on the taxi-way for 45 minutes to get de-iced. So I missed my connection in Chicago, and ended up arriving the next morning.
Since leaving Dublin, David had moved off to Dallas, TX to work (indirectly) for Nokia, soon to move on in the Internet frenzy to Sprint. Sprint was at that time divided fiscally and culturally into Sprint PCS the wireless business as well as Sprint Local and Sprint Long Distance. David had gone to work for a maverick VP, John Yuzdepski, running a classic dotcom era outfit, SprintPCS.com.
This was constituted as its own independent business unit, set up in an overcrowded and uninspiring low-rise in the middle of a so-so neighbourhood just over the state line on the Missouri side of Kansas City.
The business unit had sole responsibility for construction, marketing, finance and operation of all wired and wireless Web offerings and the boss was one of only four people empowered in the company to bring products to market.
That December I took a Friday off work in Scotland to fly out and meet David and John just for the weekend. Travel wise, it was a disaster: the flight from Glasgow to Toronto got diverted to Ottawa because of heavy snow. Our subsequent attempt to land in Toronto took two attempts. My direct connection to KC was long-gone, so I was re-routed via Chicago, only to stand on the taxi-way for 45 minutes to get de-iced. So I missed my connection in Chicago, and ended up arriving the next morning.
The old SprintPCS.com offices before the new campus was built
Perhaps I should have taken the signals from the gods more seriously, but after a few good meals in an equally freezing KC, I’d been talked into it. By the end of April 2001, H1B visa in hand, we were resident in deepest suburban Overland Park, KS.
The release of an upgraded data network was prompting some hard questions from Johns boss, the SVP of Marketing, Scott Relf. Sprints main data revenue was from 40¢/minute overage from casual use of the 2G wireless web product. Scott’s challenge was this: as minute buckets got bigger, and as data pricing went from minutes to bytes (or flat-rate), where does the money come from?
This is probably a question you want answered before you commit to a billion-dollar network upgrade, not after. But never mind!
Kansas City has a rich industrial and transport heritage
The result was an effort to create a crack skunkworks inside SprintPCS.com to map out a vision for data services at Sprint. This is where the fun and fireworks start, because you’ve already got network, IT and marketing teams who believe this is their dominion.
The core staff team comprised four people: David as leader, myself, Dan Vacanti a rare MBA who can write Enterprise Java Beans, and Wenqi Shen a usability PhD. We had the support of a few developers to help build demos.
Somewhat bizarrely, David was not fully relieved of his day job of running a team of 20-odd developers building critical software to support the 3G (i.e. CDMA 1xRTT, i.e. not really 3G) launch. (This service was later to be called PCS Vision itself a brilliant marketing conflation of connectivity and service.) The only way this ever functioned was (i) David putting in an inhuman amount of work, (ii) having some kick-ass developers on the team, and (iii) establishing a development process that allowed him to leave most of the management of the group on auto-pilot.
This left him with a semi-formal reporting structure to the Senior Director in charge of software development, and a semi-dotted (or is that dashed?) line to John, the VP&GM. Being the same pay grade, I couldn’t report to David, so had a non-functioning report to the same director; we barely spoke in the time I was there. Even more bizarrely, the wife of the Senior Director was employed as a Director of Architecture.
This, to say the very least, was against HR rules.
And since David’s team were outperforming other teams under our Director, and outgunning the over-confident and under-experienced architects, this created an atmosphere of intense rivalry and tension. We had no support base inside our own business unit as we were all too often making our formal boss look incapable, and his wife look incompetent.
It all added up to a serious HR mess.
Nonetheless, we approached our challenge with gusto. I’ve never worked so hard in my life, and Oracle and previous employers haven’t exactly gone lightly with the whip. But it was fun. Our remit was only to design a unique wireless web experience. We were moderately familiar with DoCoMo’s iMode remember, this was before iMode really hit its stride. The lesson we had already taken on board was that it was better to take a small slice of a big pie than a big slice of a small pie.
Corporate contraband! Key lesson: never laminate your project plan…
Yet our approach differed dramatically from DoCoMo in several ways.
Firstly, we had put the whole user experience front and centre. Not only a portal and a payment mechanism, but also addressing the usability barriers. Smart systems for automatically selecting the portal content most likely to be of interest; personal data and profile sharing, to eliminate triple-tapping; a central address book, with an API into it; APIs into our messaging functionality; and so on to calendars, preferences, events, etc. In other words, a broad-based set services application platform that opened up both network elements and business processes.
We had also put a lot of effort into privacy and anonymity. We planned to insert a unique token into the HTTP request header of every page. The application could interact with our platform to request data on the user, or send a message. The token could be used as an identifier for the API call. This means users compromise as little of their privacy as possible. They couldn’t easily be tracked or identified without their consent.
Technically, our approach was very different to iMode, too. We had to face the tyranny of the installed base on day 1, 100% of the users were legacy 2G phones. Java in the handset was unproven, and any other software burdens on the handset unimplementable. So the only way out was to make the smarts sit in the network edge.
This means that if you tried to access a premium content site, and hadn’t paid, or your subscription or access rights had expired, then you would instead be presented by a network-generated payment authorisation page instead. All the content provider had to do was create an ordinary web site, and tell us what URL patterns to intercept, and what payment to associate them with. They then restricted access to only requests coming from our proxy. No need to install any special code or comply with complex protocols.
This wasn’t a unique approach, as we later learned Firstgate were doing the same thing in Europe, unbeknownst to us. None of the suppliers we issued an RFP to knew of any ready-made solution.
Our vision was broader than this, though. Need some profile data on the user? Tell us what you want, using a URL pattern. Well pop up the authorisation screen if the data is already in the user profile; or a data entry screen if not. The result is then posted into the HTTP header of the request to the web site provider. In this way, we would have cracked the silos between different application providers.
The large amounts of stateful profile and preference data accumulated by Sprint don’t exactly do you any harm either when it comes to retaining customers. Indeed, by making the portal experience an adaptive, learning one we intended making this idea of leaving Sprint about as painful as getting a divorce. You’d have to train a new partner in all your quirks and dislikes.
Tornado? What Tornado? It’s only Kansas!
The barrier to entry to the two-guys-in-a-garage type developer would have been very, very low. Rather than just gun for big-name content, wed have opened up the field. iMode was partly propelled by simply putting the most popular sites to the top, and letting the system auto-discover what was compelling. We wanted to go one step further and use cutting-edge collaborative filtering to suggest the most relevant content to you personally. If this came from Gus and Dawn in Lincoln, NE rather than Disney Corp, so be it.
A long-term hope had been to engineer every Sprint handset to have an illuminated Sprint logo, not just a printed one. Then any interstitial screens shown by Sprint would be reinforcing Sprint as a trust-mark. Sprint is what protects your privacy, security and anonymity.
This effort was not synchronised in any way with the parallel and better supported effort to deploy Java in the handsets in Sprint. The conflicting and uncoordinated efforts of the network, handset and .com groups showed that Sprint had no effective CTO leader, even if one (inside the network group) formally bore that title.
Not helping matters was our VP’s tendency to make big promises of innovation while the basics of running the web site and developing the PCS Vision support infrastructure needed urgent management attention.
The view from 123rd St towards the Sprint campus as an employee gets terminated
By October of 2001 we were ready to announce our platform plans to the world. Sprint laid on a developer conference at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. In anticipation, we got the marketing communications people to pick a name for our baby. Dumbstruck by inspiration, they chose WAM Wireless Application Manager.
We got a good turnout, despite the telecom meltdown being well underway. David did the heavy lifting announcement work; I just blathered about some of the background and speculated about where this might run to. It was exhilarating up until 2am preparing, back up at 5am for rehearsals. But it all came together.
In the background, things were unravelling. The network division hated us with a passion. They had a group devoted to SIP and IP technology that would have been happy to see the earth open and swallow us up. They were also over budget in the 3G rollout, starving us of potential funds. The mainstream marketing folks only cared about getting content deals for ring tones and Java games. The IT groups were having a meltdown under a failing zillion-dollar program to in-source billing. Big plans for application platforms didn’t count for much even if the SVP of Marketing was in theory the sponsor.
The SVP of strategy got some external consultants in to review our activities. Their recommendation was an Innovators Dilemma type approach, and that our platform should be spun out as a technology start-up. However, divorced from a guaranteed network to distribute its services, it had no chance of survival. Another round lost.
Flint Hills, Kansas
Personal relationships between the team and management were under a lot of pressure. We had been working our guts out, and our partners were tired of the politics and stress. The urgency of getting a working PCS Vision launch completed was erasing all other activity in the division. We found ourselves sucked into it, David chairing task forces, me writing the 3G download requirements spec, our developers reabsorbed into delivery tasks.
In the end, even basic stuff like an instant messaging app failed to make the launch; the new wireless web outside our control was slow and bloated. The back-end was broken in a dozen ways, creating huge customer service issues and dissatisfaction. WAM never had a chance of making it as part of the 3G PCS Vision launch.
The company’s appetite for doing an iMode was wilting.
By the spring, it was all over. Our VP left the company. So did his secretary. (Martin, be quiet.) So did his boss. David quit the company to become a director of development at 4thpass [later acquired by Motorola] making content download solutions.
David subsequently has written a groundbreaking book on applying lean manufacturing principles to software development [and his current 2017 Lean Kanban business is here, along with many subsequent publications].
The SprintPCS.com business unit was handed over to an interim VP who carefully guided it through to the launch of PCS Vision. The business unit was then dissolved, the team dispersed. It was all over.
There were some executives who really saw how important our platform could be, and saw the option value of it the negotiating power it gave them with suppliers like Sun, IBM and Microsoft. Some were curious, and at least gave encouragement even if overt political support wasnt forthcoming. But the overall feeling was one of battle weariness and short-termism in the fallout from the failed WorldCom merger, ION network decommissioning and difficult PCS Vision birth.
That August in 2002 I shamefully had to pretend at the second and final Sprint developer conference that the plans for an application platform were still in place. Formally, the RFPs were still alive. I didn’t enjoy telling 600 people WAM was still alive when in my heart I knew this not to be true. Sprint is lucky the vendors bidding all still wanted a functioning relationship; otherwise they’d be looking to sue Sprint to recover their bid costs.
I hung around for another 2 years through the slump in a succession of non-jobs until it was time to strike out on my own. The grim job reaper failed to call as tens of thousands of Sprint staff went through separation therapy. It was a great time to travel cheaply in the USA, and I and my wife made the most of it at weekends and vacations. Although dispiriting not having anything real to do from 9.30 to 4.30, we found other ways of making up for it.
The stereotype of Kansas is flat and full of fields. I have no idea why.
In retrospect [as of 2005, I remind you!], we were naive in many ways. From a purely technical viewpoint, I was only dimly aware of the stupid network principles. We failed to start with a business case, and get some real facts on how much a 1% reduction of churn might be worth, and to demonstrate how we might really deliver that. The Japanese culture could accept a strategic initiative on the basis of hunch and logic; an American business culture was too conservative for that.
Critically, we failed to make the right internal alliances and get the broad political support we needed. CEO sponsorship would have been a big plus. I’d now choose a few small things most people could agree on, and just get those done to establish credibility. Build on small successes, no big vision; companies like Sprint can’t execute on projects with high technical and market risk, as the culture isn’t there to support it.
I’d now also put voice calling at the front. Can we up-sell people from a wireless web page to a voice call? How much is that worth? Can we revenue share with the content partner? What’s the effect of automatically building address books, and making sync really easy?
Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
But it was a great ride, I dont regret it for a minute despite the personal stress, and learnt a lot. For a boring old centenarian phone company from Kansas, Sprint is quite a storybook, and WAM is a fascinating page in it.
What will be the industrial relics of the future left by the cellular networking industry?
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