Programmer Destroys Seven Billion Dollar Industry With A Single Software Application

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0410/063.html

by iamelgringo • 18 years ago

82 39 18 years ago

phaedrus• 18 years ago

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.

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

Destroying industries is a good thing for society. We don't need to spend our resources on producing those goods and services anymore.

90% of Americans used to be farmers. Think of where we'd be if agricultural machinery hadn't destroyed the farming industry.

ivankirigin• 18 years ago

A better description of this might be "destroys a $7B market"

wanorris3• 18 years ago

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.

abstractbill• 18 years ago

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.

pg• 18 years ago

Damn, more artificially low prices.

Tichy2• 18 years ago

no comprendre

kirubakaran• 18 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=155286

yters• 18 years ago

That's what I tell music stores when they catch me shoplifting.

acrylicist• 18 years ago

[rant-on!]

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.

[/rant-off]

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

* $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?

lvecsey• 18 years ago

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.

dws• 18 years ago

Kind of puzzling that BadCyclopedia doesn't cite the original source (a Forbes article), or the original author (Quentin Hardy).

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0410/063.html

davidw2• 18 years ago

I knew I'd seen that a long time ago.

nickb• 18 years ago

From the cursory look, BadCyclopedia doesn't cite anything. Looks like a spam site.

redorb• 18 years ago

good not great article, horrible title

clay• 18 years ago

and he's wearing a fantastic t-shirt

parbo• 18 years ago

Yeah, where do you suppose I can find it?

sonink• 18 years ago

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..

antiismist• 18 years ago

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).

michaelneale• 18 years ago

I like that version of it.

zkinion3• 18 years ago

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.

jmzachary2• 18 years ago

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.

zkinion3• 18 years ago

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.

bsaunder• 18 years ago

I disagree with "isn't all that special".

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).

zkinion3• 18 years ago

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.

rebelprince• 18 years ago

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.

bootload• 18 years ago

From the Asterisk website found a link to the oreilly book, "Asterisk - The Future of Telephony" in pdf format [14Mb] ~ http://downloads.oreilly.com/books/9780596510480.pdf

brandong• 18 years ago

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.

anupamkapoor• 18 years ago

in another news, adblock destroys online advertising business.

Programmer Destroys Seven Billion Dollar Industry With A Single Software Application

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