The Invisible Man

Mohan Sadashiva: MBA engineer. Crafted WAP at Openwave. Now crowned VP of engineering at Faith West, slick young subsidiary of Japanese mobile content king Faith Inc. “Faith West makes mobile phones rock,” says the tagline.

I'm trying to blend in here. I'm trying to be hip. Faith West is a marketing-driven company. It's very hip. It's targeted to the 18 to 24 segment. My job really is to make the technology totally invisible. Technology's really truly successful when you don't see it.

Behind the scenes, the most challenging thing for me is the plethora of handsets with so many different access protocols, with convergence happening both on the transport side and the device side. They're becoming much more multimedia-capable. Delivering a ubiquitous user experience across all these different handsets is the biggest challenge. If you were to download something to your phone, the mechanism you use to download it, how it appears on your phone, the sequence of steps you take to do this, how the billing mechanism works — all these things, if they vary from phone to phone or the methodology for doing them varies from phone to phone, we have to learn those methodologies and hide those differences from the consumer.

If you look at the success of BREW versus the time it's taken for other technologies like WAP and J2ME to take off, it's a testament to the fact that when you have open standards and a large number of people involved in the development of those standards, there's a great degree of variation and interpretation that results. Unfortunately, that results in a lot more variations to deal with on the content developer side. BREW is much more tightly controlled; a single vendor controls all of it. As a result, there's much more consistency in the way it's developed.

My colleagues in the wireless carriers kind of laugh and say this is probably a punishment or a kind of a reckoning for me because I helped develop a lot of this in Openwave. I led all the WAP product management and the infrastructure product technologies, helping conceptualize them and getting them to market. So now I get to see all the shortcomings firsthand from the other side of the pond.

Hopefully, the more invisible I keep the technology, the better it is for everyone.