Starfish Software

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

~ the eulogy ~

Philippe Kahn built Borland into one of the loudest software companies of the eighties and left it under pressure from its own board. The dates do not quite line up: Starfish Software's record says it was founded in 1994, while Kahn's says the board forced his resignation in January 1995 and that he started Starfish afterward. Either way it came out of that exit, put together in Santa Cruz with Sonia Lee from Borland's Simplify business unit and Kahn's severance. It took the Sidekick personal information manager with it, which is how a DOS popup utility ended up in a wireless company.

The thing Starfish actually worked on was duller and more important. If you own a phone and a computer, each has an address book, and the moment you edit one of them the two disagree. Resolving that automatically, over the air, without a cable and without a human deciding which copy wins, is a genuinely hard problem, full of edit conflicts and devices that are switched off at the wrong moment. TrueSync was Starfish's answer, and the record gives it as the first over-the-air synchronization system anyone shipped.

Motorola bought the company in 1998 for 325 million dollars, an enormous price for a four-year-old firm whose output was middleware. Kahn joined as president of Starfish, which kept running as an independent subsidiary out of Scotts Valley. He and Lee started LightSurf the same year to work on sending photographs from phones, and left the sync business to its new owner.

In 2000 Starfish helped found the SyncML Initiative, which set out to make a single open protocol for this so that every handset maker and every desktop application would stop inventing their own. That was the high point of its influence.

~ the dossier ~

~ the quiet chain of owners ~

Motorola held it until March 2003, then sold it to Pumatech of San Jose, a sync company under turnaround chief executive Woodson Hobbs. Pumatech bought Synchrologic late that year and renamed itself Intellisync Corporation on 17 February 2004, after its own IntelliSync product line. Nokia announced its acquisition of Intellisync in 2005 and completed it the following year.

Wikipedia's own record of Starfish is a list of parents rather than a history: Motorola from 1998, then Pumatech from 2003, then Nokia until 2008. No source gives a shutdown announcement or a final release, so the 2008 on this grave is where that ownership chain stops rather than a dated event.

~ before the cloud had a name ~

Here is the part I did touch, without knowing whose code it was. Nokia dominated Turkey for years and Nokia PC Suite was how you moved your contacts off a phone before you lost or broke it, and that lineage runs back through Intellisync to this company. Today the same job happens continuously and invisibly, and the fact that two devices ever disagreed about a phone number reads like an artifact of a slower era. Starfish was bought for 325 million dollars to solve a problem that is now a checkbox nobody looks at, which is roughly what winning looks like from the inside.

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