In that times the first usecase probably was to displace pagers.
GSM lore says that SMS originated as network debugging/management feature, which I don't think is exactly true. I suspect that the thing was originally an demonstration for GSM's capability of transfering arbitrar-ish user packet data in control channels (of which SMS is to this day only usage I know of), which got implemented in handsets because it was part of specification and then it was used for network management messages and then got commercialized as SMS.
It is not improbable that this guy actually wrote first implementation of the network side of SMS (ie. SMSC) that was actually useful for commercial customers, as the low-level SMS protocol only handles message transfer between network and handsets and does not specify network behavior or even addressing of subscribers.
GSM lore says that SMS originated as network debugging/management feature, which I don't think is exactly true. I suspect that the thing was originally an demonstration for GSM's capability of transfering arbitrar-ish user packet data in control channels (of which SMS is to this day only usage I know of), which got implemented in handsets because it was part of specification and then it was used for network management messages and then got commercialized as SMS.
It is not improbable that this guy actually wrote first implementation of the network side of SMS (ie. SMSC) that was actually useful for commercial customers, as the low-level SMS protocol only handles message transfer between network and handsets and does not specify network behavior or even addressing of subscribers.