Sendit

» see sendit.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Hjalmar Winbladh started a courier company called Pedal straight out of school, and the operational problem of a courier company is that your staff are never where the phone is. The way you reach them is the mobile, and in the early 1990s the mobile could carry a voice call and almost nothing else. Sendit came out of that irritation in 1994, founded in Stockholm by Winbladh and Jonas Lindroth, and its first product was server software that let a message leave an email system and arrive on a handset.

This was not an app and there was no app store to put one in. Sendit sold to operators, and the operator decided whether its subscribers could have the feature at all. Europolitan in Sweden was running the software by 1996. The flagship product was called ICSA, for Internet Cellular Smart Access, a carrier-grade server that ran on Windows NT and handed mobile-shaped internet to GSM networks. By 1999 the customer list ran France Telecom, Bouygues Telecom, Telenor, Singapore Telecom, Hong Kong Telecom. Revenue had gone from 38 million kronor across the whole of 1998 to 29.3 million in the first quarter of 1999 alone, and the company had about a hundred people with offices abroad reaching from London to Hong Kong.

Then Microsoft bid. The offer came on 12 May 1999 at 325 kronor a share, roughly 41 percent over the market price and about 1.1 billion kronor in total, around 127.5 million dollars. Over ninety percent of shareholders accepted and the deal closed on 1 July 1999. Microsoft's press release treated it as a strategic landmark: the first Microsoft product development center in the Nordic region, a complete business unit inside the Server Applications team, with Sendit's chief executive staying on.

Two things happened next. The Sendit name went first. By June 2000 Microsoft's own releases were describing Winbladh as "formerly CEO of Microsoft acquisition Sendit" and the office had become the Mobile Internet Business Unit, then the Stockholm Mobility Solutions Center. Winbladh left management in early 2001. On 20 February 2002 Microsoft shipped Mobile Information Server 2002 and announced in the same breath that there would not be another version, folding the functions into Exchange.

~ the record ~

~ the three-year receipt ~

On 3 June 2002 Ny Teknik ran four hundred words under the headline "Microsoft lägger ned Sendit" and summarized three years of ownership in one sentence: Sendit, now the Mobile Internet Business Unit, is being closed and eighty people are losing their jobs. The company had been bought for 1.1 billion kronor to be a cornerstone of Microsoft's mobile internet push.

Microsoft played it down. Mike Nash said the 1999 problem had been bridging telephony and IT, and that this had since changed, because mobile technology was now built directly into Microsoft's own products. To Dagens Industri he put it more bluntly: the decision was strategic and came because they simply did not need the technology. The Register picked it up two days later and added that the eighty would be offered posts elsewhere in the company.

~ the feature turkey did not get ~

The feature Sendit sold is one Turkey did not get in that window. Email on a handset was something an operator switched on for you, and the Turkish mobile market of the late 1990s was busy selling minutes and text messages rather than data. What arrived instead, a little later, was WAP: a stripped grey version of the web, billed by the second and slow enough that reading one page cost more than the page was worth. The modem was at home and the phone was for calling people.

So the strange part of reading Sendit's story back is how early it is. Operators in France and Singapore were running mobile email off a Stockholm company's NT boxes while most of the world was still deciding whether to get a second phone line for the modem.

~ what the founder kept ~

Winbladh personally cleared about 100 million kronor on the sale, which Ny Teknik noted in its closing line with the faint satisfaction of a trade paper settling a score. He went on to found Rebtel, the cheap international calling service. Lindroth is harder to follow in the record.

Winbladh's own verdict, given in 2007, was that Microsoft had bought a building full of people rather than a piece of technology and had not really known what it was acquiring. He added that the company was good at absorbing products and less good at looking after the people who arrived with them. Three years is a short run for a billion-krona acquisition. On 3 June 2002 the buyer finished working out that it had paid for a capability it turned out not to need.

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