

Programmer Destroys Seven Billion Dollar Industry With A Single Software Application - iamelgringo
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0410/063.html

======
phaedrus
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.

~~~
wanorris
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
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.

~~~
wanorris
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.

~~~
apathy
_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.

Do the right thing. ;-)

~~~
wanorris
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.

------
sonink
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..

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antiismist
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
I like that version of it.

------
acrylicist
[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]

~~~
lvecsey
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.

------
bootload
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>

------
dws
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>

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

------
pg
Damn, more artificially low prices.

~~~
Tichy
no comprendre

~~~
kirubakaran
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=155286>

~~~
Tichy
thx ;-)

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zkinion
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.

~~~
jmzachary
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.

~~~
zkinion
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.

~~~
jmzachary
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.

------
brandong
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
in another news, adblock destroys online advertising business.

------
redorb
good not great article, horrible title

~~~
clay
and he's wearing a fantastic t-shirt

~~~
parbo
Yeah, where do you suppose I can find it?

