Don Thoma dashed to the secretary’s island, full tilt at the telephone. He didn’t even notice Orbcomm’s two top executives standing in a doorway watching him run. Thoma spun around the corner and lunged for the receiver.

“Hold on a second,” he said calmly into the phone. Then, passing the receiver back to the secretary, he whispered eagerly, “Send it back to my office.”

There was, in fact, nothing particularly special or urgent about the call. For his first few weeks in the job, Thoma would talk to anyone—pilots, long-haul truckers, Midwestern farmers, meter readers, scientists, oil well-head guys, ambulance drivers, merchant marines, car-theft detectives, even a man who needed help with his first Toastmaster’s speech in Kansas City. Anyone who dialed the 800 number spoke to Thoma because, for at least a few weeks, he did more than work for Orbcomm’s marketing department; he was the marketing department.

Thoma, a Harvard MBA, found himself having extraordinary conversations unlike any he had been told to expect at business school.

The 800 line attracted a three-sigma lot of loonies and curiosity seekers, but one out of five landed a legitimate query or tip. So, this latest phone call sent Thoma into his office, where he tossed his coat across a gray armchair and reached for the phone.

“Okay,” he said, “yes, you’re correct, it’s fair to say our service in northern Canada will be less than in the U.S., at least initially....”

If Orbcomm could not immediately provide continuous coverage in certain areas, Thoma would say so. If Orbcomm’s satellites couldn’t handle a particular job, he sometimes simply held on to the phone and started a list of modifications to customize the satellites for the task. But he never dangled carrots. Alan Parker, Orbcomm’s president, had been clear about that.

Thoma told the caller: “Yeah, we’ll put the first two satellites into polar orbit this year—that should give you the best coverage of northern latitudes. And, by the end of next year, you can have intermittent communication with any place on earth. By 1995, we’ll have a full constellation of 34 satellites, and you can go anywhere with it. And you say you’re tracking what?”

“Large animals in Manitoba.”

Thoma managed not to laugh out loud.

People wanted satellites for moving freight, delivering mail, tracking illicit drugs, and irrigating fields. But this was new.

While marketing managers at a half-dozen of the country’s largest defense and electronics companies contemplated expensive, two-way, global, wireless services created from multibillion-dollar satellite constellations, they never saw discrete data markets springing up from a thousand different niches. Yet, Thoma was finding an explosion of businesses that only needed to send a short paragraph of information infrequently around the world. He was also learning that no one wanted to pay more than a quarter per call.

“You did say ‘large animals’?... And how many devices do you have in use out there right now?...No, I’m just trying to get a feel for your market.... Caribou? Okay....You’re paying $3 million to track them right now?...And you already have caribou out there carrying receivers. But certainly... mmmm.... Why would a caribou need two-way communication?”

The swarm of calls energized him. One day he had General Motors on the line; the next day, Ford. Westinghouse invited him to speak to executives in Maryland about a dozen applications. The Department of Defense wanted briefings. Farmers needed measurements of humidity and temperature in potato storage bins. The variety was astonishing.

Could a satellite track a couple of hundred tractor-trailers freighting munitions, hazardous waste, and chickens up highways through the Appalachians? Could it communicate with Sherpa tribesmen in Nepal? Would it work on the Xingu River? How would it do with reindeer?

The phone would ring in the morning and waylay Thoma as the market began to speak. And what it said surprised the hell out of him: Instead of calls for gee-whiz personal global communicators, people wanted a thousand different applications, quite different from what the executives at the big corporations had imagined.

The chief competitor at the time, Motorola’s system, known as Iridium, was going to spend more than $6 billion, compared with Orbcomm’s relatively piddling initial budget of $135 million. Thoma concluded that Iridium’s costs would be so extravagant that the service would reach only a small segment of high-end users—rich men on yachts, globe-trotting executives, celebrities with money running from spigots. Orbcomm’s everyman standard—what the company referred to as its “bongo drum” technology—would operate at least three to five years sooner, cost an order of magnitude less, and capture pedestrian markets that Iridium, for all its spark and glory, would choose to ignore.

With an eye on markets for global telephony, the Iridiums of the world cared nothing about passing small bits of data from place to place. While the big guys slugged it out in front of the FCC for different frequencies and hungered for vast sums of money to put their systems into operation, the little guys were left to exploit data markets for a relative pittance.

Orbcomm also had several natural advantages over cellular and paging services. The cellular telephone industry, growing fivefold since 1985, was generally expected to capture mobile communications for every significant metropolitan area, but it depended on the creation of small “cells”—served by low-powered radio transmitters at every one- to ten-mile radius—meaning the industry covered only a small fraction of the total land area in the U.S. By comparison, Orbcomm’s web of satellites would serve virtually every spot of ground across the entire planet. Paging companies, even if they used satellites for passing data—beeping a particular pager and sending a phone number—had the problem of being one-way communication. Neither service could provide geographic location data, either, as Orbcomm proposed.

As the market splintered into a bewildering array of wireless consumer services with a dizzying variety of roaming codes, pricing arrangements, and multiple phone numbers, the heart of the problem for any service remained how to offer reliable, low-cost, two-way communications anytime, anywhere. As a small data service initially, Orbcomm couldn’t do anything perfectly, but it did have distinct advantages over existing wireless technologies.

In 1992, when he had returned to northern Virginia with his newly minted MBA, wearing fine dark suits and spiffy cordovans, Thoma had bought into Orbcomm’s idea that its technology was all about saving lives. He was 31, enthusiastic and focused, eager to spread Orbcomm’s tentacles across tundra, into deserts, around oceans, through distant mountain ranges.

To his surprise, the market was more mysterious and elusive than he ever imagined. After a few months, his bookshelf looked like the industrial arts section of a local library, groaning under the weight of stony tomes about pipeline routes, oil rigs, and refrigerated railcars. One day he sat there, leaning back at his desk, engrossed in a book called How to Succeed in Big-Time Trucking.

Instead of making its first big splash with an Orby personal communicator, the satellite system was sending taproots into huge, lucrative industrial markets made up of hundreds of thousands of massive oil pipelines, heavy-duty field meters, lost cargo, and refrigerated trains. Blueprints for Orbcomm’s skyland industry shifted from the Star Trek communicators that had been originally envisioned to applications that would trace and monitor the circulation of almost anything—animal, vegetable, mineral—practically anywhere in the world.

Ideas for killer apps came from a most unusual assortment of clients—farmers, petroleum companies, army troops, truckers, environmentalists, Boy Scouts, biologists, airplane pilots—each of whom had an immediate use and many of whom wanted a customized application all their own.

By February 1993, a fractured market of industrial applications appeared likely to support the business most quickly, from the moment the first two satellites were launched. No one quite knew how to break the news to co-founders David Thompson and Bruce Ferguson that, for the first year at least, a mass market for Orbcomm’s personal communicator—the real barnburner—would have to wait. Orbcomm’s initial barnburner amounted to linking trucks and railcars and any kind of traveling cargo with their home bases or outfitting large farms with satellite communicators so a farmer could monitor the humidity of his potato bins or time his irrigation systems and check his sprinklers for leaks and breakdowns. It wasn’t as sexy as saving lives, but the tracking applications would bring profits with only the first two satellites in orbit.

As Thoma finished with the caribou caller, he noticed Ferguson taping another article to his door. The chief operating officer regularly went to his door to paste news of camping accidents, mountaineers lost on remote mountain expeditions, and ordinary people freezing in their cars on isolated roads during winter. Ferguson, the company’s co-founder, stood at his door, taping tragic tales to inspire a humanitarian spirit, a sense of mission about the project. In the middle of the stories, he posted a sign in black marker: The World Before Orbcomm.

Too bad, given the satellites’ potential for saving lives. But at the moment, tracking caribou and monitoring potato bins made a better business.

Thoma didn’t have the guts to tell Ferguson that the world he imagined after Orbcomm would certainly be different, but not quite as the chief operating officer expected.

From the book Silicon Sky. Copyright ©1999 by Gary Dorsey. Reprinted by permission of Perseus Books. All rights reserved.