Openwave

» see openwave.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

WAP reached turkey the way most mobile things did, as a menu item on a handset that cost money by the minute to open. I opened it. Almost everyone i knew opened it once and then went back to sms. What none of us had any reason to wonder about was who wrote the software drawing those grey stacked menus, because the whole design of the thing was that the operator's name went on the screen and nobody else's did.

The answer, for most of the world and most of a decade, was this company. Alain Rossmann founded it in december 1994 as Libris, renamed it Unwired Planet in 1996, and built a markup language called HDML for putting text on a screen the size of a matchbook over a connection measured in single-digit kilobits. HDML fed directly into WML and into the WAP standard, and Unwired Planet was a founding member of the WAP Forum that wrote it.

The name changed twice more. Apiion of Belfast was acquired in 1999 and the company became Phone.com in time for a nasdaq listing under the ticker PHCM. In august 2000 Phone.com announced a merger with Software.com valued at around $6.4 billion, and the combined company started calling itself Openwave Systems. Three names in six years, all of them for the same idea, which was that a phone should be able to fetch a page.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

The architecture is worth remembering because it explains both the success and the death. A WAP phone did not talk to a web server. It talked to a gateway sitting inside the carrier's network, which fetched the page, compiled it into a binary blob small enough to be worth sending, and pushed it down. Openwave sold the browser to the handset makers and the gateway to the operators, which meant it collected on both ends of every transaction.

It worked at a scale that is easy to underestimate now. By the time the client business was sold, Openwave's browser and messaging software had shipped in more than 1.5 billion mobile phones, and at peak the browser accounted for roughly half of all browser-capable handsets sold worldwide. Nobody bought it, nobody chose it, nobody knew its name. It was simply what was under the menu.

~ the fall ~

The gateway model required the mobile web to stay small and separate, and it did not. Once handsets could render actual HTML over a connection fast enough to carry it, the compiling middleman had no reason to exist, and the carrier's walled deck of approved links stopped being the only place a phone could go. Openwave spent the late 2000s buying its way sideways, taking Musiwave for $120 million in january 2006 and selling it to Microsoft for $46 million in november 2007, which is a $74 million answer to the question of whether the sideways move worked.

On 30 june 2008 the mobile phone software business went to Purple Labs for $30 million in cash plus warrants. Purple Labs merged with Esmertec the following year to form Myriad Group, and the browser that had shipped on a billion handsets became one line item inside a swiss company most people have never heard of.

~ what it became ~

On 1 may 2012 Openwave completed the sale of its mediation and messaging businesses to Marlin Equity Partners and renamed itself Unwired Planet, which is what it had been called sixteen years earlier. The new company had no products. It had patents, and it existed to license and enforce them, which is a legitimate business and also the thing companies do when there is nothing else to do.

The carved-out product line kept the name. It traded as Openwave Mobility, Enea bought it in february 2018 for $90 million, and traffic management software still ships under the Enea Openwave label today. So this is a brand grave rather than a company grave, in the same way Navteq is. The word survives on an enterprise product page. The thing it named, the browser inside your phone before your phone had a real one, is entirely gone.

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