"YOU DON'T GET a whole heck of a lot of press because you put your software into switches and routers," says Ron Abelmann, CEO of Wind River Systems, a firm that has enjoyed stock market success but is hardly a household word. So when Abelmann, MBA '62, saw the chance to change all that by bidding on a relatively small NASA contract, he jumped.
Throughout July, the world watched in awe as a little robot named the Sojourner rover trundled about Mars analyzing rocks and picking up samples of the Red Planet's surface. Wind River's Tornado operating system functioned as the brains of the rover's microprocessors, reacting to commands to fire thrusters or drill rock samples.
When not powering research vehicles in outer space (the firm also was involved in NASA projects to map the moon and the Galileo project to Jupiter), Wind River Systems operates everyday controlling microprocessors in products such as automobiles and computer printers. The firm has about one-third of the market for operating software in devices other than personal computers.
"This area has taken off only in the last four or five years," Abelmann told For-tune. "It's still only about a $250 million market, but it's vital and growing."

Smart Phones,Dumb Stores

MORE COMPETITION would be very good for InteliData Technologies, a developer of smart telephones that allow users to get and send electronic messages, says John Backus, MBA '84. "We're not trying to create market share right now. We're just trying to create a market," Backus, who took over as CEO of the firm in May, told the Washington Post. Industry projections anticipate that more than 2 million American homes will have smart phones in the future, but for now Backus is facing a challenge--most retail outlets that sell his product don't have power connections to floor models, so customers can't see how the product works.

An Infrequent Flier Program

FIVE-HUNDRED E-MAILS a week, 25 million customers, and 12,000 software development companies were just too much, Heidi Roizen, MBA '83, told Business Week after stepping down from a top position at Apple Computer. "The scale was overwhelming. I couldn't develop the expertise."
So for the first time, Roizen, who cofounded the software firm T/Maker in her 20s, is trying to find fulfilling life that doesn't include millions of frequent flier miles and thousands of voicemail messages. She's currently consulting from her home about 30 hours a week.
"As my father, who was a consultant in the video field, once told me, you can put a premium on things you don't want to do. I tell my clients if there's something that abso-lutely requires me to travel, they will have to pay me a $1,000-a-day premium."

Free the Cell Phone

TODAY, AN ESTIMATED 40 percent of AT&T long-distance noncellular calls are toll free. Mark Lazar, MBA '86, is CEO of Seattle-based Toll Free Cellular, a young firm that hopes to bring the same ease of dialing to wireless networks. Fortune says the wireless market could eventually bring the firm $2 billion a year in revenue.

Fair Weather Report

WHEN THEY EARNED THEIR MBAs in 1969, Bob Selig and Jim Acquistapace wanted to start a business, but they discovered "we didn't have an idea as much as we had ambition." So the pair got together $50,000 to purchase Davis Instruments, a California firm that specialized in navigational products for amateur sailors. It had six employees and $165,000 in sales.
The partnership has been a happy one. Over the past three decades the firm has acquired more than 10 other companies and expanded its line of products. Probably their best acquisition, Acquistapace told the San Francisco Business Times, was a company that made computerized weather monitoring stations. Davis today has more than 100,000 stations in place and revenues of about $11 million.

Shift in Economics

REFERRING TO THE GSB'S David Kreps, the Boston Globe declared: "Kreps is a microeconomist, one of those who in the 1970s built game theory into the heart of his field. Hardly anybody is better qualified to pronounce on where the field is headed." The Globe story, which surveyed the current academic analyses of economics, quoted Kreps' writing in the winter 1997 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in which he announced that "a somewhat revolutionary shift in the economic paradigm has begun." In the article, "Economics--The Current Position," Kreps, the Paul E. Holden Professor of Economics, foresees economists partially abandoning the traditional postulates of rationality, purposefulness, and equilibrium. Instead, he says, they are building a new array of tools: "formal concepts of bounded rationality, adaptive learning, and evolutionary processes."

Great Rookie Year

STANFORD PHD GRADUATE Ming Huang was the country's most sought-after junior finance professor in 1996, according to Business Week. This spring, after his first year of teaching at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Huang lived up to his billing when he received the Emory Williams Award for teaching excellence. It was the first time a professor in a first year of teaching had received the award, which is determined by students. Huang had taught the MBA class Financial Instruments, which examines pricing and use of derivatives, noted Business Week.

California Dreamin'

WHAT'S THE SECRET of Silicon Valley? It operates on a "Field of Dreams business plan," Garth Saloner told the Economist. "If you build something, customers will come," he said. As an example, he told the magazine, most corporate customers of database management tools have a few practical priorities such as distinguishing between current and potential customers and sharing internal data. "But Silicon Valley is bewitched by moving those databases (with full sound and video) onto the Internet." Dean Michael Spence sounded a note of warning. Companies may cluster in places like Cupertino or Austin, he said, but the most successful firms will be those that learn to function globally, taking advantage of masses of information and resources wherever they locate in the world.
Fortune continued the conversation, calling Stanford the "intellectual incubator of the digital age" and crediting the schools of business and engineering for feeding the entrepreneurial flame that created Silicon Valley. The magazine described Charles Holloway's High-Tech Entrepreneurship and Irv Grousbeck's Seminar in Selected Entrepreneurial Issues as classes where students argue their views in a case discussion and then continue the debate with the founders of the companies they are studying. Jeff Yang, MBA '85; Vinod Khosla, MBA '80; and Wes Sterman, MBA '87, are some of the Business School alums who have appeared in their classes.
"A principal force driving Stanford's unending production of startups is this:" wrote Fortune's James Aley, "So many people have started companies that it just seems normal to take what you've learned and make a company out of it."
The San Jose Mercury News also explored the trend toward entrepreneurial careers, interviewing Holloway and MBA '97 classmates Dan Frank, Michael Luther, and Melinda Tuan. Frank comes from a fam-ily of entrepreneurs; Luther licensed his first entrepreneurial venture--an upscale juice bar--to Fresh Choice restaurants before coming to the GSB; and Tuan hopes to go into a career that will join her interests in entrepreneurship and nonprofits. The Mercury News noted that the GSB has taught entrepreneurship courses since the 1950s and that 17 percent of the Class of 1995 launched their own firms or went to firms with fewer than 100 employees.

Associate Dean Margaret Neale
Everybody Wins

NEGOTIATING SHOULDN'T focus on flattening your opponent to get what you want. Successful negotiation, Associate Dean Margaret Neale told the magazine Hospitals & Health Networks, means having a clear idea of how important multiple issues are to you. Then, in the course of negotiation, you can create value for both sides by trading off your interests against your opponent's. "That gives me an idea of how I can create a proposal that makes both of us better off and makes it more likely that you will accept it," said Neale, professor of organizational behavior.

Every Penny Counts

PEOPLE CONSIDERING making charitable donations can be stymied by the feeling that their donation is too small to make a difference, Claude Rosenberg, MBA '52, told the NBC Saturday Today show. You need to set priorities about what causes are important to you, said the author of the book Wealthy and Wise. "A small amount can make a difference, and you know what? [Making donations] is one of the great family things in this country. We all talk about family values; this is it." *

Ron Abelmann, MBA '62