The big news at Motorola this week is layoffs. Some 2,500 people in Harvard are losing their jobs because cell phone profits are falling and manufacturing costs are too high.
Motorola is pinning its hopes for reviving its phone business partly on a group of employees who are dreaming up new reasons for people to use Internet-enabled phones and wireless gadgets.
Which brings us to a development that didn’t make the headlines.
People who have followed the local software scene for the last decade know Tim Krauskopf.
He’s a brainy 37-year-old with a taste for pizza and button-down collars, a geek who travels with equal ease in dot-com spheres and the circles frequented by the likes of Motorola CEO Chris Galvin.
Krauskopf is best known as co-founder of a company called Spyglass, which introduced one of the first commercial Web browsers, igniting the Internet’s mass appeal.
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Lots of folklore surrounds the browser wars. But first, the news.
Krauskopf is taking his well-worn entrepreneurial spurs and 15 years of Internet software experience to Motorola.
It’s a startling move for a guy whose last two jobs were at companies with fewer than 50 people. He has landed top spots at two start-ups since 1999–PCQuote.com and Parlano, a Divine Interventures company.
But PCQuote merged with its parent, HyperFeed Technologies. And Divine’s honchos decided Krauskopf wasn’t the right guy to run Parlano.
So now he’s joining Galvin & Co. His title: VP and general manager of a 200-member unit inside Motorola’s 1,000-member Internet Software and Content Group.
His mission: to spot promising wireless Internet technologies and help Motorola exploit them. In short, to accomplish at Motorola what he couldn’t at Spyglass: not only introduce a groundbreaking technology, but reap billion-dollar benefits.
If he can find his way around Motorola’s corporate thicket and lead a team that’s bigger than any of the companies in which he played star roles, it’s a job for which he’s uniquely suited.
Motorola can use some big wins. And Krauskopf, after all, needs a job.
The son of two college professors, he distinguished himself early in a group of young software designers working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in the late 1980s. He co-authored a widely used program called NCSA Telnet that lets people using desktop computers access information at university libraries.
He and several cohorts quit NCSA in 1990 to found Spyglass. Their business: developing enhanced versions of NCSA software to sell to scientists. But the software that ignited broad interest was NCSA’s Mosaic–software that made it easier to surf the Web.
Spyglass won the rights to be Mosaic’s exclusive licensing agent in 1994, but there were competitors. Among them: Netscape’s Navigator, developed by another NCSA alum and Mosaic developer, Marc Andreesson, in California.
The rest is history. Microsoft paid $13 million to license Spyglass Mosaic, then killed the browser market by developing Internet Explorer and giving it away free.
Netscape, now part of AOL, became bigger and better known than Spyglass, which sold last year for $2.5 billion to OpenTV. But Mosaic remains the heart of Explorer–one of the most widely used Internet tools on the planet.
At Motorola, Krauskopf is starting the game all over again.
“I’m entering this as a start-up,” he says. “If we get the kernel of a success, I know it will be leveraged big.”
The group he joined is testing some products. One is PizzaCast (www.pizzacast.com), which will let people instantly place orders for their favorite pie using a browser on their cell phones.
At Motorola, at least Krauskopf never will go hungry.
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