Meet Google's secret weapon for fighting Apple, MS

Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha pulled off one of the most difficult things to do in the technology industry: He surprised people at a press conference. When Jha took the stage at the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 and revealed the Motorola Atrix smartphone and the "Lapdock" that made it act like a laptop computer, it sent reporters scrambling. They expected the unveiling of the Motorola Xoom, the highly anticipated and already-leaked first official Android tablet to take on the Apple iPad. But, it was the Atrix and the Lapdock that stole the show. Was this a hybrid smartphone/PC, the veritable missing link of computing? If so, how did it work? The key was Motorola's homegrown software called "Webtop" that made the Atrix act like a computer once it was docked. When Webtop launched with the Atrix two months later, the obvious question was how Motorola beat platform giants Microsoft and Apple to the converged smartphone-PC device? The answer is complicated but fascinating, and on the eve of Motorola Mobility's merger with Google, it leaves the combined companies in an enviable position. The success of Android has established Google as a key player in mobile computing devices, and once consumers and business users start looking to consolidate their many devices, Webtop could make Google the company that's best positioned to make that consolidation possible. CNET and its sister site TechRepublic interviewed current and former Motorola and Google employees as well as industry experts to explain how Webtop emerged from a brainstorming session to become, potentially, a major weapon in the fight for dominance in the next generation of computing platforms. What emerged from our reporting is a clear picture of a technology that disappointed initially but may be about to spring into the mainstream. The idea of using a phone as a fully functional computer has been around for more than a decade, of course. In the late 1990s, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates often said a phone would eventually replace the big PC towers. More recently, Apple CEO Steve Jobs declared the arrival of the "Post-PC" era in 2010, as the iPad's surprising popularity began to erode overall PC sales. Still, neither Microsoft nor Apple have made the leap to using their smartphones as PC replacements. That gives Motorola/Google a lot of running room as it waits for final regulatory approval from China. Webtop started in mid-2009 with a handful of engineers in Motorola's Sunnyvale, Calif., lab thinking about how they could get past the frustration of the mobile Web browsing experience. "There are Web sites that simply don't work without a mouse," said Seang Chau, Motorola's chief software engineer. He and his engineers wanted to make that exasperating mobile experience a thing of the past. "It was just a few folks getting together and saying, 'What can we do?'" Once they settled on a rough concept of a dockable phone with a desktop environment and a full Web browser embedded inside, Chau's team quickly "hacked something together." Great idea. But the fate of the project hung on whether Chau could sell it to their CEO, Jha. First, Chau sent Jha video clips that showed the user experience for Webtop on very early prototypes. Then he explained in phone conversations that Webtop was meant to give a docked smartphone the "full Firefox browser including download and upload support, full Adobe Flash for desktop, and multi-window multitasking," said Chau. "At a high level, the key positioning was maximizing the user experience of your cell phone with a keyboard, mouse, and large screen." Finally, Chau met with Jha and presented him with working prototypes. He showed how right-click, copy-and-paste, the scroll wheel, and window resizing all worked in Webtop just like they did on a PC. Jha connected with the concept. "The moment he saw those demos, he wanted to go for it," Chau said. Webtop would later be tied to the Atrix smartphone since the two products arrived in the market at the same time. But at that point, "We were working on Webtop before an Atrix ever existed," Chau said. Just as Webtop was starting to take shape at Motorola at the end of 2009, AT&T sent out a confidential RFP to its smartphone hardware partners asking them to submit their best concepts for a "game-changing" Android device. It was a proverbial "pivot" moment for AT&T. It wasn't offering any Android phones and its exclusive agreement with Apple for the iPhone was going to end in December 2010. What's more, AT&T's Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices were running out of steam and it needed something it could put a lot of promotion behind. On Motorola's side, it had just launched the original Droid in partnership with Verizon. The Droid was the first Android 2.0 device and it was already a hot seller. The rest of the wireless industry suddenly wanted in on Android. The match made sense. Motorola and AT&T execs had a private meeting in Las Vegas at CES 2010, where Motorola showed off its idea for a new device codenamed "Evora." AT&T liked what it saw and over the next two months the two companies went back and forth on details. In time, Motorola introduced the idea of adding something new to Evora called "Virgil" (the codename for Webtop). The Motorola team was excited about Virgil, but AT&T executives? Not so much. It was time for another Chau demo. This time he had to convince AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega. Chau flew to AT&T headquarters in Atlanta and went through his Webtop dog-and-pony show. The AT&T chief was hooked. "We've got to have this," Chau recounted de la Vega saying. "Webtop is something best experienced," Chau added. "It's hard to describe over the phone or even in slides. We did much better in person showing working prototypes." Once AT&T was on board with the "Virgil" concept, the stage was set for the Atrix to become a spotlight-grabber. By March 2010, Sprint and HTC were hogging the Android headlines at CTIA Wireless 2010 with the new HTC EVO phone and AT&T and Motorola needed an awnser. The Atrix was fast-tracked. A top phone launch usually has a lead time of 12-18 months in order to line up marketing and finish product development. The Atrix was shortened to about six months to get it ready for the holiday season. For the Webtop team, that meant dropping everything on their long-term development of the OS and focusing on getting the software to work on this one phone. There were snags. One of the biggest was RAM. It turned out the phone was going to need way more RAM than even the most high-end smartphones in order to load Webtop alongside Android. Chau's team had to appeal to CEO Jha to get it. "Without Sanjay's push, we wouldn't have gotten the RAM we needed," said Chau. "It's not cheap. We needed that kind of financial and organizational support." Jha also had to provide the funding and executive backing for the special laptop docking device that the team was developing. It was going to be slim and slick, but it was going to be expensive to produce and it would have to be priced fairly high. But, the Motorola team thought that it would generate far more buzz than just a glorified desktop dock that attached to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard. There were already phones that were starting to connect to HDTVs (including the EVO). Jha agreed. "Sanjay really pushed on the Lapdock," Chau said. All the pushing worked. By the fall, the device moved into the testing stage and AT&T invited 10 CIOs from Fortune 500 companies to get a demo of the Atrix and Webtop. The consensus: You've got a winner if you integrate Citrix, an enterprise technology that allows companies to host desktop apps like Microsoft Office on servers and users simply connect to those servers and then run the apps from there. Around the same time Citrix came up at the CIO pow-wow, AT&T told Motorola that it wanted to change the new device to add chips for HSPA+, its speed-boosting 3G service (AT&T would later spin it as 4G). This was a response to Verizon, which was about to launch LTE, a true 4G service. The thinking was that if AT&T's flagship Android device went to market without the fastest wireless chips, customers wouldn't think it as a high-end device. AT&T and Motorola had a decision to make: Launch in time for the holiday season or delay the product to add Citrix and HSPA+? They bet on the two big additions and pushed the launch back to CES 2011 in January. The launch was a success. Webtop caught the entire tech industry by surprise. Competitors didn't have anything like it. Both CNET and Engadget named the Atrix the "Best of CES" in smartphones. There was a hitch: The first version of Webtop was awful. But, it was awful in the same way that Android 1.0 was awful. It was awful in the way the original MacBook Air was awful. You didn't want to use it right away, but once you tried it, you had a feeling that it was bursting with promise, and a sense of inevitability. Unfortunately, Webtop could be so slow that it was practically unusable if you wanted to work with it for more than about an hour. It could lag at doing simple tasks like launching the Web browser or opening the Android app window that allowed you to use your mobile apps from within Webtop. Even though the Atrix was the first major smartphone to sport 1GB of RAM, it still felt unbearably sluggish in Webtop mode. Ultimately, Webtop was 1.0 software and it felt like 1.0 software. Still, plenty of corporate customers decided to run trials. A year later, Motorola reports the number of companies testing Webtop devices has grown significantly, but none of these companies are willing to talk about it. (That's never a good sign.) While neither AT&T nor Motorola will release numbers on the sales of the original Atrix, it's safe to call it a disappointment. It generated tremendous buzz and got a lot of positive reviews from the tech press. But that was a grade on a curve, based more on potential than the device itself. Nonetheless, as Google nears finalizing its acquisition of Motorola, the tide may be turning on sales of Webtop devices, and that could set up a huge opportunity for Google and Android to use Webtop to launch a full frontal attack on Apple and Microsoft.