The title is sort of a reverse-application of the broken window fallacy. The truth is that seven billion dollars is not being destroyed; it's now available for new innovation by smaller companies, instead of going to major players like Cisco.
Stories like this are kind of an entrepreneurism Rorschach test. To people who are excited about opportunities and want to build new things themselves, things like this look like opportunities. To people who just want to get a good job they don't have to stress over unduly so that they can put a roof over their heads and spend time with their wife and kids, they think of things like this in terms of wiping out existing businesses and in terms of the poor folks that get displaced from their jobs.
I don't want to read too much into what you said, but it sounds a little like you're writing-off the second kind of people.
Actually I've found that some of those people have simply grown up believing certain things about the world. When you suggest things don't work quite the way they believe, I've found they often become excited by the possibilities.
I didn't mean to imply anything bad about the second kind of people. My first cut swung too much the other way, so I revised it -- apparently a bit too far.
I like those folks. Trying to be a really good parent and provide enough for your family are perfectly admirable goals in life.
Trying to be a really good parent and provide enough for your family are perfectly admirable goals in life.
This is equally true for (eg.) the 2 billion people in India and China, many well-educated, many of whom are valiantly striving to match the Western standard of living (seen on Western teevee programs and in movies) by earning enough to provide it for their own families. Would you deny them their opportunity by foreclosing new markets?
Compete, adapt, or be swept aside in due course -- if you really care about your family, you will put a little thought into how best to support them as the world changes. Americans will experience a decline in average real income, but those who provide globally competitive value of interest to the rising middle class in other countries should do quite well.
I'm sure a great many stenographers, buggy-whip makers, and hand-launderers provided well for their families, in their day. But I submit to you that, overall, mankind is better off, even though change may have made their lives worse for a spell.
Someone else put it thus -- competition is a discovery process: discovering better ways to do things. If you do not participate, your value to society may decline as a result of that abstinence. It may not make you a bad person, but it will likely reduce your ability to comfortably support those you care about.
The fact that I like those people and think they shouldn't be written off doesn't mean I think they're right about protecting dying sectors of the economy at the expense of strangling growth. And yes, I believe strongly in free trade and love to see the growth in standard of living in (parts of) India and China.
I do, however, support free-market-compatible ways of softening the blow such as job retraining programs and enterprise zones for the hardest-hit areas. We can't stop the clock for people, but we can try and help those people get back on their feet when they get knocked over.
I think about it, and I realize that Cisco et al. were essentially making money without producing corresponding wealth - a sort of bubble waiting for someone to come along and pop it.
They produced wealth - they turned raw materials, people, and money into telecom. They just charge a price very close to the total value they create, so they capture a large part of the wealth they create. Asterisk creates the wealth, captures none (or very little) of the value, so it's there for the taking.
The impact of what mark spencer has done single handedly ( afaik he hacked the original version in C by himself over a couple of months) is freaking huge. I would rank his to be the second biggest contribution to open source, just after linux.
I have been personally testament to the havoc that this disruptive piece of code has wreaked in the telecommunications business. I worked as an angel member in my previous startup, where we built software used to handle the call dialling and management in call centres. Also known as a 'dailer',the software has a huge market in India as it is central to operating any call centre. Before we got in, the space was dominated by players like Avaya, who used to lug around with their huge expensive pieces of hardware (used to manage the real time routing and call logging). Asterisk changed all of it and made possible for small startups to enter the fray.
Proprietary and expenseive hardware solutions are now all but extinct in the small to medium call centre space and softwares driven by Asterisk rule the roost. Distributed systems running on Astersisk are now slowly challenging the last bastion of expensive hardware telephony systems - the big call centre market.
Unlike the OS business, free and open source is definitely set on winning this game - and it all began by one hacker wanting to test the limits of some lean, mean and pointer-ridden C code..
Mechanical Engineer Destroys Street Sweeping Industry with a single invention, the "trash-can"
Spencer is the inventor of the trash-can, a free receptacle for garbage that establishes locations on the street where pedestrians can dispose of their waste. With trash-cans located on street corners, a decent-size municipality can rip out its traditional collection of brooms, and even some of its newfangled street-sweeping machines, and say good-bye to 80% of its garbage collection costs. Not good news for the Professional Union of Street Sweepers (PUSS - news - people) or Broom Supplier, Inc. (BS - news - people).
Now, we need someone to package Asterisk in a form that democratizes telephony to people without Federal Excise Fees (taxed for the privilege of doing local communications), Transit Taxes (paying for mass transit despite the fact you're not using it because you're using the phone) and many other "Taxes" or "Non-governmental Taxes" (things that are called "taxes" but aren't mandated by any governmental organization. (See http://www.cavtel.com/support/Taxes_and_Fees.shtml for all the shenanigans.)
Get rid of "phone numbers" and just give everyone as many 160-bit "numbers" as they want for their phone numbers. Allow people to change these numbers whenever they want. If they experience harassment, make it easy to set up whitelists for conditional forwarding (if the originating call isn't on the whitelist, forward it, tell those on the whitelist what the new number is, etc.). These calls could be forwarded to the "Internet enforcers" that are so keen on outing Internet douchbags. Use DHT's for directory services/yellow pages and set up a gigantic overlay "network" on the Internet (using strong encryption where allowed).
Then you can start destroying the $~500B telecom industry with a "software application." $7B is nothing, go for the big fish. Don't attack hardware (in this case, PBXen), attack systems. Here, we're just going to cut out earmarked taxation and faux earmarks from your phone bills and corporate inefficiency (How much of your phone bill is going to all that marketing to convince people to use something they already know they want/need?) It's far more gratifying.
Here is one way to approach the transition, starting today.
If you can leave Asterisk running somewhere and you already have say a domain name that you use for a blog or personal website, then you can point iax.domain.com to your Asterisk and start telling people to contact you at for example: user:pass@iax.domain.com/2000
To make it more readable just use your first name as the user, and your region or some other keyword as the password; its meant to be given out to the public anyway.
Client software to make and receive calls using this approach is called iaxComm. If you wanted your Asterisk installation to forward your calls to your cell phone at certain times of the day, or when your iaxComm wasn't signed in, then you'll have to subscribe for an outgoing voip service.
Eventually most people would be accessible through iax and you wouldn't have to subscribe to any service to reach the prior infrastructure.
* $7B is nothing, go for the big fish*
if 10% of Hacker News readers morphed a $7B industry of a $ 7 B piece of any industry we would be talking about an impact in the trillions. how big is the fish you are pursuing?
Asterisk isn't all that special. I used it extensively a few years back with my last business. Its still a bitch to use and get going right, especially for businesses with crappy IT going for them.
It goes back to that PG quote, that went something like: "Somebody can outhack an oracle database and make something comparable in open source, but can't out sell an oracle sales man..." It was basically that these enterprize software companies (pbx certainly is enterprize software), are used to buying terrible stuff for too much money.
The exciting thing about Asterisk to me is not how well it can replicate traditional PBXs, but that it allows you to deal with voice communications programmatically, with a very low barrier to entry. This allows all kinds of experimentation with voice and touch tone, which was previously inaccessible to hackers in an accessible way. Having a UI option for input/output that works with any touch tone phone is starting to produce interesting projects. I've used Asterisk for a real-world game and an automated booty call system (ahem). And friends of mine are using it as an interface for games on large screens (playmegaphone.com) and an interface for networked objects (botanicalls.com). These are things it was never intended to do, but because it's turned the phone system into software, you can hack it and repurpose it. And that's why it's interesting, not the fact that it may-or-may-not replace corporate PBXs.
Is the part about it being "a bitch to use and get going right" based on your extensive use of it a few years back? Linux was a bitch to use and to get going right when I first started using it back in the 1990's.
Hmmmm, I guess I wasn't posting to news.yc standards. My apologies.
My point was that I didn't see it destroying cisco/avaya any time soon, due to the nature of enterprise software and the sales distribution channel.
Linux is still not the ideal desktop replacement, even today. It has its place on the server rack, thats for sure, but I don't see it replacing windows any time soon for all uses. Something else might.
No standards and don't take it personally. I was simply asking if your opinion was based on recent use of Asterisk or your experience from a few years ago. Software evolves, sometimes in a good way.
I've worked with it too. It's a PBX/ACD/IVR all in one. That's huge. Get these bundled together from a commercial vendor and you are paying through the nose on a per seat basis. Yeah, it's about as user friendly as Linux in the early days. So if that's not going to work for you, just call Avaya and get out the check book.
From what I've seen the problem is that enterprise managers don't to absorb the risk of using an open source phone system (a highly visible piece of infrastructure).
As in my response to the other guy above, "isn't all that special" really was referring to being able to compete as enterprise software against the set in distribution channel.
Yes, asterisk is great. Its probably even better now than it was a few years ago. Their mailing lists were AWESOME, and just like Linux, if I was resourceful enough, I could figure out what I needed to and if I couldn't, help was just an email away. That doesn't mean that most businesses won't just call Avaya and pull out their check book. Enterprise level software has a way of being completely bogus. Go into any medium to large (and all too often, sadly, even small) companies, and look at the garbage they use, then look how much they pay for that garbage. Then look at how they actually believe in that garbage as being the right choice.
Asterisk could certainly improve its lot in the future by changing its ease of use, and making more of an effort at being in the distribution channel.
I have to give a shoutout as this is based out of my home city: Huntsville, Al. Certainly no big deal for all of the valley startups, but it's not too often we get a Forbes-worthy startup here.
